Bb's RealTech

Shelley, can you please make sure you post your XHTMLations somewhere (as plugins or preferably as patches to WP bugs) before you desert us?

I think the reason they haven't released upgrade instructions yet is because the new version hasn't been released yet.

In the meantime, try this: WordPress Upgrade Preparation Checklist.

Jeff, I still plan on releasing everything I've done for WP. Depending on what happens with WP, I still might use it for _a_ weblog, just to keep my coding hands in. What stopped my forward momentum is the XHTML validation library I was using is broken. Now I have to either fix it, or replace it.

Peter, the resources that checklist references are all for Wordpress 2.3. Seriously, the WP developers knew what changes were happening a month ago. There's no reason they couldn't have put out some notes about what to expect. This "Tada!" delivery technique may make good press, but it's lousy from a user perspective.

I've long thought the problem with the Computer Science degree programs in college is that there are Computer Science degree programs in college.

I have to remember to dig out a card I got at the higher ed meetup; somebody in (relatively) your neck of the woods is doing something interesting with a (certificate? minor?) in computer something or another for liberal arts majors. It sounded very cool, and he was insanely enthusiastic.

Looks like there is a more official blog post about Version 2.5 available now. Hopefully WordPress will continue to get bigger and better.

I use a XHTML valid template called Cutline and a plugin called X-Valid. This combination makes things valid for me. But, I hope you still release your XHTMLate WordPress tool though.

You will be warmly welcomed in Drupal-land =)

Drupal is a nightmare to customize at a core level! If you don't like they way it handles, say, tags (which does absolutely suck, as the URLs, if you can believe it, use tag ID instead of tag name), then you're out of luck.

I think we can count on there being a beta/release candidate before a tada moment.

Like last year we are trying for 3 major releases again this year. I agree that there was a missed opportunity to communicate the status of WordPress 2.5, but Anil Dash is probably not the best person to get your WP news from

My impression with open source projects like Wordpress has been that it's by and for its developers. Communication with users is done only as an after thought. Having said that, Drupal is different. The whole project seems to be built around communicating with its community.

For me though, Drupal is too complicated. But it should suit you quite well.

There's a lot of excitement building for the release of the next version of ExpressionEngine. They're building it completely on their open source PHP framework, CodeIgniter.

I think it's good that there's some more news on WP 2.5. People do like to prepare. I thought Anil's post was rather funny, and tongue in cheek. Remember that WP got its big break years ago, when there was a license change at MT and a lot of people jumped to WP.

Alan, boy, I have no interest in hacking the core. I did this for WP, and it's a nightmare. If you're not ready to fork, than you're forgetting and overwriting your hacks.

As for ExpressionEngine, I'm just not interested in a commercial product, even one based on an open source engine.

It's nice, though, that we all have so many options now.

I knew you weren't interested in EE. Nonetheless, it's exciting seeing what people are doing–including your SVG experiments.

BTW, for those reading, I'm a different Alan than the Drupal core hacker.

In my impression, you seem happiest with new technology, if you have a chance to explore and play with it, make new things (a major reason why I read you); less happier if there is a lot of architectural choices premade for you, which take away your freedom to tinker and modify. Perhaps a possibility could be to build BurningBlog, maybe from scratch, maybe with a Framework - Django or something WSGI-based would be my choice, RoR or something out of PHP-Land. Obviously it'd be a time investment on your side, but for this selfish reader it'd be something interesting to read.

Shelley, have you checked out Symphony (not symfony)? It's in beta for version 2 at the moment, but it's an XML/XSLT-based platform. Although it can be used as a blog, it's more of a framework for developing complex sites (and web applications…see http://www.jikan21.com for a proof of concept time-tracking app built with Symphony 2.) It caused some controversy when it was first released as a commercial product (because it was commercial, plus the whole 'XSLT is too hard' argument), but has been free since v1.5 and v2 will be open sourced.

Check out the screencasts at http://sneakpeek.symphony21.com/?video=interface

Shelley, since you're considering changing your infrastucture, would you be interested in some Python-based options?

Anne Zelenka is getting Drupalized. Must be a cool direction to go for those astute enough to work through it. I've stuck my toes in that water a couple of times and fled in the face of my own ignorance. (I have a lullabot tab open right now, in fact.) I like WP just fine, although Drupal has loads of benefits for community and commercial sites. I've inferred that from some nice Drupal sites I've visited, but again… seems like a lot of work to me.

I do like to try new things, but what interested me in Drupal was the early work with SVG, as well as the new work with RDF. Otherwise, I would probably just stay with Wordpress, or perhaps try something with Python, which has better XML/XHTML libraries.

As for creating my own, if I created anything it would probably be more along the lines of a static publication tool, from the Mac to my server, for longer writings. I'd like a tool that would publish to the server, and can also be used to create PDF or even Kindle format for online reading. There are some nice frameworks, including Django and the like that might be amenable to this.

It's interesting but I was reading about Symphony elsewhere based on all the discussion today. One nice thing about discussions like this is really gives lesser known tools a chance to become better known. That has potential for the larger writings.

Frank, yeah, I think Anne is much further along in her efforts than I am. I've just started to dabble.

Hi Shelley, I am so pleased to see that you are looking at Drupal too. I'm not all that far along, have created a few sites and am upgrading a theme as a way of getting to know the basics. But so far, I like what I see.

A few things I like: that its architecture is designed for multiple sites on the same code base, that it makes it really easy to do forums which to me seem required for a social site, and that it has a friendly community.

As far as the complexity goes — I haven't found that but maybe in another month or so I will be tearing my hair out. It may depend on where someone's coming from. A web designer who has learned a bit of PHP would find it hard to wrangle. A software developer who has moved to web development won't find anything terribly difficult there. WordPress would be an easier way for a nonprogrammer or beginning programmer to start learning how to do web development, I think.

Drupal is certainly a great tool. I use it for work as our go-to CMS for new projects. In my spare time though, I contribute to the open source project Habari, which has acquired - perhaps by osmosis - many of the characteristics of Drupal, but has the familiar community feeling of the early days of WordPress.

Our community is one of the best I've been involved in, and we have many advocates for making XHTML work "right", although if you hear the arguments, nobody is doing a perfect job of it yet.

Being at the Drupalcon keynote myself, I heard Dries speak on the future of Drupal and RDF, and I think those ideas are interesting and wide-sweeping. I'd love to have advocates for these types of new technologies (not meaning to characterize RDF as new, but its applied use as a datasource) in Habari, where one of our long-standing goals is to push the blogging and web-publishing technology envelope.

I humbly ask you to review our software, see what you think, and contact our vibrant community if you have any questions or want to be involved.

I'm just glad that after all these years you and I can still give each other a chuckle.

Drupal can be used for a personal blog, and it includes some pretty nice functionality for the same, without too much effort. In particular, Drupal boasts a substantially superior permission system, allowing one to easily create multiple classes of content, and groups of users who can or cannot access said content. The same functionality has been sorely lacking from WordPress for some time, and the WordPress plugins for this functionality definitely play second fiddle to Drupal.

Similarly, Drupal is much more sophisticated for multiple user scenarios, and modules exist to create rich editorial workflows. I use such a system for my kids' blogs, such that they can save content, but nothing gets published for public consumption without review by my wife or me. This is automated, and "just works", whereas similar functionality in WordPress is a real burden to achieve.

All that being said, though, consider also Habari: http://habariproject.org/. It's yet-another-blog-tool, and sits somewhere between WordPress and Drupal in terms of features. (Sorry, I can't compare it to other tools because I don't have first-hand experience with anything else.) It's not as feature-complete as either WordPress or Drupal, as it's still very much under active development as we push toward a 0.5 beta release, but in many ways that's a real benefit to end users: you still have ample opportunity to influence development! We hope we're more accommodating than other development communities, and work hard to integrate as many folks as are willing to participate in meaningful, productive ways (note: this does _not_ require code-writing ability!).

A robust ecosystem of blog software is ultimately a good thing: it provides greater choice for the end users, and it providers greater impetus for the developers of those tools to innovate and support the needs of their users.

It sounds, from your post, like you are looking for something that has an active development and support network, is easy to use, and to dig into, and remembers that, in the end, it's the user that matters most. It amazes me how many good apps there are that have users passionate about them. It's this passion that drives open source software forward. With all due respect to the apps that have been mentioned by others, I'd like to suggest that you check out Habari. Others can better fill you in on the advantages of thing like object oriented programming and PDO, but as someone who is not a coder, I can say the community is Habari's greatest strength. We value the input of everyone who has constructive input to provide.
After a year and a half, we have nearly 20 people with full commit access, several of whom are not coders, but rather are focused on the user experience. Additionally, we've given commit access to branches for developers who we feel have demonstrated that they have contribution to make that can be streamlined with that access. If you're interested in reading more about why the developers of Habari are involved, I'd suggest checking out Why Habari on the Habari wiki. (hmm… used "Habari" 3 times in that sentence.)
Although still in an alpha state, several people are using Habari to power their public sites. If you're interested in trying it out we'd love to hear your opinion (even especially if you decide to go with another app). Thanks for a well thought out commentary in any case.

I have been using WordPress on my site for about a year and I think I would have to agree about upgrading to Drupal. For the most part, I am happy with WordPress, but there are some things I would love for it to do out of the box which just are not happening — not even in this new release.

And you are correct that this is definitely a major release despite the minor version number change. There was a write up comparing it to WordPress 2.3, which outlines a number of the changes with plenty of screenshots. If you want to test it out for yourself without having to install it, there is a demo available.

Good luck with your own upgrade. I hope it goes smoothly. And please, if you have the time, would you consider writing a guide for other WordPress users making the switch?