New and Slightly Improved

I finally had some time this weekend to work on a bunch of things that I have been wanting to do with my blog. The short status is:

  • WordPress 2.5 / K2 Upgrades = Success
  • Administration Improvements = Success
  • hCard = Success
  • OpenID delegation = Success
  • OpenID plugin for comments = Fail

WordPress 2.5

The biggest task was the upgrade to WordPress 2.5 (2.5.1 really). I’ve been putting this off partly because it is a lot of work for me and partly because I had to wait for K2 official support for WordPress 2.5, which was released a couple of weeks ago. I played around with some nightly builds before that, but none of them seemed as stable as I would have liked, so I decided to wait for official support.

The reason it takes so much time for the upgrade is that I’ve done a bit of hacking on the php files for K2 without doing much documentation, so it took me a while to sort out what I had changed. I also took the time in this version to carefully comment begin / end statements using a consistent search string. Now, for the next big upgrade, I can easily search the files for that string to find all of my tweaks.

I also had to do a bit of work on my custom css overrides in a few places where K2 made new changes.

Luckily, I have a pretty good setup on my MacBook with a local php/mysql/wordpress install where I can do most of the testing, breaking, and fixing without disrupting the blog, so the blog should have been up most of the morning despite my working on it for 6+ hours.

Administration Improvements

I installed the WordPress Database Backup (wp-db-backup), and scheduled weekly backups. My hosting provider does nightly backups, but I thought it would be a good idea to have my own backups. It will also make it easier for me to do backups prior to installing plugins / upgrades / etc., which I have been doing manually prior to installing the plugin.

I also used the WordPress Automatic Upgrade plugin to perform the upgrades. I love this plugin!

hCard

I really needed to get some proper contact information on my blog, and I decided that hCard would be a good way to do it, and it gave me an excuse to play with microformats. Now, people can see my contact info, machines can read it, and you can add it to your address book with a simple click.

OpenID delegation

I finally got around to setting up Fast Wonder Blog as a delegate for my OpenID account at ClaimID. Not having this earlier was sheer laziness on my part.

OpenID plugin for comments

Grrrrr. OK, this one was a big fail for me. I tried a bunch of stuff, but I kept running into one pesky error that was not occurring in my local environment. I installed wp-openid, and it worked great in my local environment, but on my hosted production copy of the blog, I kept getting this:

Fatal error: Call to undefined function: error() in /home/content/f/a/s/fastwonderblog/html/wp-content/plugins/openid/store.php on line 134

I tried commenting out the error to rule out an issue with the error message itself, I re-built database tables, uninstalled / reinstalled, activated / deactivated all with no luck. I’m hoping I can get Chris or Will to take a look at the error report and suggest a fix. I’d love to have OpenID support, but it looks like it isn’t in the cards for me today.