I really have enjoyed using FeedForAll as a nice, customizable way to insert ANY RSS feed into a web page. I use it with some of my wordpress sites to get relevant news (relevant to the page in question) published without the toil of multiple daily updates. It’s a nice “set it and forget it” style tool.
Recently though I wanted to make some tweaks to the layout of some of my feeds:
I’ve just updated my WordPress install on 2 sites up to the new release version 2.7 which is now two days old or so. I quickly took a look at the sites and saw that the global translator plugin wasn’t working. (It was giving 404 errors, or…. “nothing found for es” for example.) After a quick look at the FAQ, I just navigated to the settings page for the plugin and scrolled to update options (without really making any other changes) and all is back to normal.
I expect to ripple the new version of wordpress around to my other sites over the next week or two. Right now there is not a pressing need to upgrade (2.7 is a new feature release, not necessarily security update.)
I spent the better part of a Friday night sorting this out. I had just launched 4 new wordpress blogs that were secondary installs on each server. (I use a VPS and /home/domain/www/ was the primary wordpress install – the secondary installs existed at /home/domain/www/secondsite ) . The problem was that I switched on the fancy permalinks in the control panel of wordpress and after that nothing worked but the main page. Setting things back to the default I could see posts, but not the feed or anything else that relied on mod_rewrite.
I’ve started using a “universal translator” plugin for wordpress across most of my sites lately. In the past I’ve seen many people using google or bablefish translation to view pages (according to the logs.) I thought it would be a great convenience and perhaps open up my posts to be searched by viewers who read other languages. I’ve studied Spanish for quite some time and previously have studied German and French. Since, the universal translator plugin is based on google’s translation engine I know it’s not going to be perfect. But, I did a bit of proofreading in the languages I could and from what I could see it was more or less intelligible (obviously there were some problems, but I’ve seen (MUCH) worse translations of Japanese news-stories to English..)
I vaguely remember hearing about Google Gears when it was announced and it wasn’t the kind of thing that grabbed a lot of peoples imagination or a lot of attention. Here’s the description from the Google Gears site (gears.google.com..
Gears is an open source project that enables more powerful web applications, by adding new features to your web browser:
Let web applications interact naturally with your desktop
Store data locally in a fully-searchable database
Run JavaScript in the background to improve performance
But… the next version of WordPress (2.6) is supposed to support Google Gears and here’s what exciting things this can mean…
As you know I’ve used wordpress as a platform for many of my sites. It makes updating and adding information so quick and easy (as well as great extensions available for it and good theme possibilities.) Anyway, I’ve wanted forum functionality on a few sites as well and so I installed bbpress v. 0.8 some time back. I was able to integrate the installs with their respective WordPress installs and share users. At one point though,l I upgraded WordPress to 2.5.1 and a few weeks later when I tried to log into the forum…. my password was rejected. At first, I suspected a security breach, but tested the login with wordpress… it worked there, but not bbpress….
I’ve started adding the Share This plugin to several of my sites and was frustrated on one site to see on the front page “SHARETHIS.addEntry(” and a lot more ugly text. Upon investigation the < script tag enclosing the SHARETHIS javascript. So, I went on an investigation. I looked in the share this forums and found some people reporting the same problem with no real solutions.
There are a lot of good things to like about the newer versions of wordpress. It seems to keep getting better. One of the really cool plugins is the WordPress.com stats plugin. This lets you have a nice simple stats interface accessible from your Dashboard on your wordpress blog. (It uses wordpress.com to track stats, so you’ll need a wordpress.com account to be able to use it. I set up a wordpress.com account some time back to be able to use the akismet plugin and the same key that you have for akismet can be used for the stats plugin.) You essentially upload the stats.php file into your wp-content/plugins folder, enable it in the plugins list, then enter your API key in the configuration page for stats. That’s all that should be to it, but I’ve noticed sometimes that’s not all it takes to get things going.
I’ve started the process of upgrading several websites to the newest release of WordPress and one of the things that became possible was installing bbpress. If you don’t know what I’m talking about, wordpress is the “blogging” software that I use for this and several other sites. It makes adding content to a website very easy and has a great ability to be extended with plugins. bbpress is forum software by the makers of wordpress and with a similar look and feel. It also has the capability to share the user list with wordpress.
There are a couple new software packages in wordpress’ family: MuPress which is a multiuser (and multi-site) wordpress archicture… is available. IF that had been available a year ago, I might have based my sites on it, because it sounds as though you could have one backend for several sites. I may yet play around with it, but…. let’s see.. the other entry is bbpress which is a bulletin board backend that integrates with the wordpress user management system (shared user name/passwords/single login kind of stuff..) Good to see these releases and continuing development.