WordPress

Lost an hour today to trying to debug Ecto posting to this weblog (if you’re not using Ecto, you should consider it).

I was constantly getting this error:

XML-RPC server accepts POST requests only

Finally I wrote up a nice little support ticket for Dreamhost with all the details. Surprisingly I got the fix back in relatively short order.

I was wondering what the problem with WordPress was. It turned out to be a PHP 5.2.2 bug. The file xmlrpc.php is broken under PHP 5.2.2. As WordPress is the weblog system in widest use in the entire world, it would be nice if the PHP team would get with the real world and debug their releases before rolling them out.

Keep reading XML-RPC server accepts POST requests only - WordPress Error

Just discovered a very nice shopping cart for WordPress. Fits in well with the upcoming FolioPress release. We will take WordPress from weblog software to CMS, bypassing bloat.

The WP e-Commerce shopping cart plugin for WordPress is an elegant easy to use fully featured shopping cart application suitable for selling your products, services, and or fees online.

WP e-Commerce is a Web 2.0 application designed with usability, aesthetics, and presentation in mind. Perfect for

• Bands & Record Labels
• Clothing Companies
• Crafters & Artists
• Books, DVDs & MP3 files

All is not rosy however with WP e-Commerce lite. The URLs for shopping cart pages are atrocious, something like:

yourdomain.com/products-page/?category=11

That takes us back to the bad old Mambo days. At some point John and I should do a rewrite of the plugin to incorporate search engine and people friendly URLs so that the above would read:

yourdomain.com/products/non-latex

or even

yourdomain.com/condoms/non-latex

Keep reading Shopping Cart for WordPress: WP e-Commerce

There is a raging debate right now about the sponsored themes at themes.WordPress.org.

Given the garbage currently being submitted with up to five credits including anchor text like web directory (x 3), Make Money Online and bid for links (a real single example), this is no surprise.

Matt Mullenweg has come out hard against all theme sponsorship.

Guidelines (strict ones) are what we need here, not an absolute ban.

Keep reading Sponsored Themes at WordPress.org

When WordPress was a small weblog CMS for PHP insiders, including the developers blogroll did no harm. Right now it's a tool to sell text links. Enough is enough. Time to revamp the WordPress Blogroll.

As most of you know by now we are big users of Ecto for editing our weblogs, across all platforms including WordPress and Typepad. Lack of Ecto support for WordPress is one of the main reasons I stuck with Typepad so long. Ecto just makes things so much faster and more convenient.

One very large irritation when using Ecto with WordPress is the inability to get a hold of the Pages section via XML-RPC. Developer Adriaan Tijsseling is tired of questions about why doesn’t this work, pointing out quite curtly in his Ecto 3 progress notes that it’s not in his power to fix:

Pages isn’t in the API for editing blogs, so if you want to edit pages, you have to ask WP to allow editing pages via the API. It’s nothing any blog client can implement.

There are two solutions out there. One is to modify the core WordPress files, specifically wp-includes/functions-post.php.

John prefers that we not modify any core files for the sake of future compatibility (we got burned on this on what is now a very difficult upgrade on another CMS platform).

Andrew Grant has come up with a WordPress plugin to allow all sorts of games with keywords and to improve compatibility with Windows Live Writer (whatever WLW is).

His plugin has some side benefits:

Static WordPress pages (e.g. ‘About’) can be edited via Ecto / Windows Live Writer.

I suspect we’ll go this route. Unfortunately I want to edit my pages now (and need Ecto to do so efficiently).

We’ll get there.

Time for some forums for client sites.Second I wanted to introduce an old friend you are all probably familiar with from our support forums, bbPress.... It has some pretty cool features, such as tagging, RSS feeds, Akismet spam protection, AJAX interaction, but the team focused the most on creating something fast and light.

If you need to get some images up on your website in a hurry, here’s a bit of code which is extremely straightforward: Lussumo Filebrowser.

The filebrowser is a lightweight PHP application that allows you to thumbnail images and view them in a web browser. That’s it. Short and sweet.

While it’s too lightweight for what we are doing, some of this might show up in our future foliovision applications.

Keep reading Immediate help with images

We are working hard on some gallery stuff of our own, but there are a couple of simple and powerful plugins over at InternetVibes.net for galleries in WordPress.

Keep reading Interesting PhotoPlugins For WordPress