Category: Technology

Thanks to some folks I’ve been able to identify out of synch stuff with the installation of Wordform, and a few other issues. I hadn’t even noticed bug reports at the SourceForge site, as I had thought it was configure to email me automatically with bug reports. No such luck, but better late than never.

I won’t be doing a second alpha release, though. I’m finishing up the functionality for this release, adding in the reported bug fixes, and then releasing the program as beta. At that time I’ll then be going through the WordPress bug lists to see which of the bugs and fixes also apply to Wordform–they do still share a significant code base. Once this happens, though, I think this will be the last of the shared effort between the two products, as they are diverging too much.

The beta test should have the install kinks worked out, so this is open to non-techs. However, I do not recommend this for production use. My plan is to have the first release of Wordform at SourceForge by month end.

One major change I will most likely need to make is to change the license. Currently much of the software I’m using is licensed GPL, and I wanted to license LGPL. The main difference is that I would allow those parts of Wordform I created to be used with closed source applications as well as open source. To be honest, I didn’t really care who used the software, as long as they found it helpful.

However, my license contradicts the other software holder’s license, and while normally this shouldn’t be an issue — each individual still maintains their licensing control over their specific pieces of software, and I had planned on detailing this in the license to accompany the beta software–the mix of code is diffuse enough to generate problems and conflicts. So as soon as I figure out how to change this in SourceForge, I will be switching Wordform to the GPL license.

Anyone have an idea how I change this in SourceForge?

I am in the process of establishing flags and options for several hard coded references in the code. For instance, right now the code automatically closes all comments older than ten days, and I need to make this into a user controlled option.

I’m also making use of the /tmp space, for some of the metadata work as well as creating the static copies of the pages (the ’static’ mode in WordPress doesn’t create truly static pages; Wordform does). I need to make this configurable, and allow a person to designate a write directory…or /tmp if they prefer. Gallery does this, as well as most other tools that support writes of this nature.

For the metadata, I’ll have finished the API interface layer to RAP (RDF API for PHP), which can then be coded to a different RDF backend.

A last major job is to finish the data isolation layer. Working on this gets tedious at times so I only clean a block of code at a time. I’m working on my last block now.

Clean-up and metadata, and the release probably won’t be out until towards the end of this weekend.

In the meantime, if you have installed Wordform alpha-01 and have played with it, I would appreciate hearing from you. Especially if you have any feedback other than what I’ve received already. For those who have been kind enough to provide feedback, my appreciations.

I just modified comment moderation to put a placeholder comment into the thread for a moderated comment, but the placeholder only shows if:

The IP address of the original author matches the current user’s IP address.

The current author’s name and email (from cookie) matches the comment author’s name and email.

-or-

The current author’s name and url (from cookie) matches the comment author’s name and email.

The placeholder won’t show for others, or be included in displayed comment count. This should let the person know that their comment is being moderated.

I also added a test on the overall state of the weblog moderation, and a note is posted just before the comment form if the entire weblog is under moderation. Between these two modifications, there shouldn’t be any confusion about why a comment isn’t showing.

There was also a hard coded weblog table reference, which I’ve fixed. I had also moved fullcomments around before the distribution and have now fixed the URLs accordingly. These are in addition to patches sent, and other corrections I’m making, and several new metadata functions added.

Friday I’ll package these items up individually for those who have downloaded the alpha-01, in addition to providing a alpha-02 release. This should make it easier for early downloaders to apply fixes.

I really appreciate the feedback, fixes, suggestions I’m receiving–makes the process so much more fun. I have a question, though: should I drop the dynamic background image from the admin and/or floating-clouds theme? Perhaps go with one image, and then provide a package of additional images for those who want them?

(And if someone knows of a good, free JPEG compression utility online or downloadable to a Mac, please let me know.)

Following the open source mantra of “release early, release often”, I’ve uploaded the first alpha release of Wordform. You can access it from SourceForge.

You’ll want to backup before using this, and install the application in a database separate from your production environment.

You’ll need to edit config.php to match your database information and also add in the siteurl for the URL of the weblog. If you move the installation, you’ll need to change this value.

The install files are in /admin/install and are pretty simple. If you’re making a copy of your existing WordPress database (not using your production one, of course), it should upgrade fine. But this is early alpha, so anything goes.

For creating static files, set the static subdirectory to world writable. To have the system manage your .htaccess file, make it writable by the world.

I recommend this release only for developers and those experienced with early releases. You can add bug reports at SourceForge, but if you have installation problems, you might want to add a comment here or send me an email.

A more stable release will go out at end of week, and I hope to make new releases weekly, as well as use the CVS facilities. When I release at the end of the week, I’ll release a separate package with just those files that have changed between alpha-01 and alpha-02.