WordPress 1.5 – first impressions

I’ve been watching the progress on the latest version of the WordPress blogging software, which is based on the old b2 code which has spawned a few other derivatives, notably b2evolution. The new release is out now, and I’ve set up a side blog based on it, Malden Life, for which I had previously used TypePad, but I’m not willing to pay extra money for their hosting when I’m already paying a general web hosting company for this site. I will probably incorporate it into IJB at some point (or rather, incorporate IJB into Malden Life and then rename Malden Life IJB). The average WordPress blog does not actually look much different from the average MT blog, but they are very different under the bonnet (the hood, to you Americans). MT is written in Perl (and uses CGI), while WP uses PHP. MT offers a choice of databases (MySQL, Postgres, SQLite, Berkeley DB), while WP requires MySQL. MT offers static or dynamic publishing (although their dynamic publishing seems much more difficult to set up), while WP only offers dynamic. To some, this makes WP a much less versatile publishing platform, but it has the advantage of making publishing a lot quicker. It just stores the entry in the database, and when someone next loads the blog, the index script fetches the last few entries from the database.

Most WP functions are handled by the database, including links - WP has a very useful link manager, which MT doesn’t - and comments. This means deleting comments is a much quicker task than it is in MT, and it eliminates the rebuilding you have to do with MT, with the errors which almost invariably result if your blog gets big, and your host has a CGI time-out to stop one process hogging the server. (On this blog, it’s resulted in some left-over spam trackbacks and comments showing up on the entries but not in the database.)

New features include a “dashboard”, which by default shows the latest news from the WP team’s blog, general WordPress news from blogs and news sites, and the latest activity on yours. I’ve not found any way of customising the Dashboard short of actually hacking WordPress itself.

One of the big draws of WordPress is its spam protection facility. Unlike MT, it offers (internally, not as a plug-in) a facility to ban certain words, or to set certain words to require moderation, even if moderation is normally off. Most spam advertises three types of products or services - drugs, indecent material and gambling (the three P’s, which rhyme with bills, corn and smoker). You can set a limit on the number of links in a comment, and also check past comments against the criteria you’ve set. You can also require people to register before they comment, without using an external authentication system like TypeKey.

There are really only two small things I’d like to see fixed. One is that the “admin” user appears to be unchangeable. This seems to reflect the Unix model of there being a “root” user and also common users, and the owner of the system is encouraged to function as a common user, using “su” or “sudo” to take root privileges when necessary. But if there is only one person on a blog, it’s more convenient for him or her to do blogging and admin from the same account. After all, working with root is dangerous - it’s how viruses get let loose onto a system, and how you can wreck your whole system with a couple of letters out of place. (The KDE desktop has a special backdrop for when you log in as root, consisting of a red background with bombs and warning signs on it.) You can’t really say this about a blogging system. I’ve run into this problem myself within 12 hours of installing the system - I wanted to change the pre-installed links, and was logged in as myself, while the links belonged to “admin”.

The other is not confined to WordPress, but I’ll say it anyway. The CSS code specifying the Sans Serif font needs to include Luxi. Using Mozilla or Konqueror on any Linux box, text normally displayed in a “tall” font like Trebuchet is displayed in Bitstream Vera, the standard Linux sans font, which is square (or wide, if it’s bold). Luxi, in my opinion, is a much better-looking font than Vera anyway.

Unlike MT, you can’t use the same installation of WP for more than one blog. You can, however, install it in several different directories and use the same database. This is because it stores the data in “tables” in the database, and each blog has its own table prefix identifying it. This is fine for anyone running their own blogs; anyone wanting to use this software to host other people’s blogs will have to wait a while, or do quite a bit of hacking (or pay through the nose for a commercial MT licence).

All in all, I’d encourage anyone with reservations about MT (particularly those connected to spam) to try this out. I think this release may encourage web hosts to provide specialist blog accounts, with a generous database and less webspace, and this is an arrangement I haven’t seen much (and not explicitly at all). My own account offers 1 gigabyte of web storage, and I’ve purchased a 150 megabyte MySQL database. Obviously, I’m not going to need much webspace to store WP’s program files, although you could do with a bit to store things like photo albums. I think that this release will see a lot of people switching from MT. I expect to switch pretty soon.

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