Fully Independent

As mentioned on previous posts, I’m using Wordpress as the backend to this site. The perennial lack of posts on this site may mean that this site may not be instantly identifiable as a weblog but I can’t fault WP in any ways for that. This weekend, I decided to make the decision to try out the latest Wordpress release, version 1.5. Though not officially released yet, the improvements to the application is already enough for me to fully migrate both this site and If…Else.

What are my favourite improvements?

Themes

Probably the single most significant improvement. Before WP 1.5, I’d used my own approach for segregating the components of a page into header, body and footer elements via include_once directives. However, the new system provides a unified and standardised approach to what I had been doing adhoc. Finally, we have a mechanism for developing, bundling and deploying the presentational view of sites. I’ve liked this feature so much that I spent 30 minutes rewriting my site design as a theme.

Pages

This is another major change and one that has been eagerly awaited. Whilst WP is pitched as a blogging app (a role that it fulfills very well), there are often instances in which we need to publish content that does not fit neatly in the month/day/topic hierachy. For example, colophons , archives , code libraries, faqs are all types of content that would now be accommodated by WP Pages.

What Pages (plural) provide is the functionality to publish single entry content. What makes this feature particularly useful is that you can tie it in with the themes support and provide a maintainable, uniform look and feel. Even better, you are not constrained by this and should you wish, you can override this implicit linking to the themes and provide a custom per-page look. An example of this is my about page, in which I’ve chosen to retain the header and footer but remove the google ads/comments area that is usually found on the blog posts. A small note about this feature: The front-end for the custom pages isn’t entirely finished (which is understandable considering that this is still in testing). To use a custom template for a page, you need to add a custom tag called _wp_page_template and provide the name of the template that you wish to use.

User-Interface

The UI to Wordpress is generally a lot more polished than before. The main entry point is now the dashboard, which provides amongst other things, recent posts and comments. The categories are generally clearer with Manage and Presentation providing the entry points to the areas to manage posts & comments and the look & feel areas respectively. It’s not perfect and work still needs to be done but it’s getting there.

The upgrade process

As always, couldn’t be easier. <5 minute including the upload time. There is one thing that you should do when you make the decision to upgrade. Upload WP to a new directory, configure and then rename the old & new WP directories.

Generally, I’m hugely impressed with Wordpress. Matt and the rest of the WP team should be congratulated for their work in bringing what is a premier publishing application to the public.