Author: Michael Muzzie

Categories
Community

A Chat About Open Source with the Founders of Drupal and WordPress

On October 7 at SchipulCon 2011 in Houston, Matt Mullenweg, founder of WordPress, and Dries Buytaert, founder of Drupal, shared the stage for a fascinating question and answer session about their CMS platforms, their ecosystems, and open source in general.

Both founders are passionate about their software, passionate about their communities, and passionate about open source — not just as a way to write software, but as a way of life. In this honest exchange, Matt and Dries reveal the different origins and philosophies behind Drupal and WordPress that influence their strengths and weaknesses, and the two innovators explain how the platforms complement each other.

Problems with microphones mar the first four minutes of audio; the other fifty minutes are fine. Transcripts of a few of their answers are on the Schipul blog.

Categories
Service News

Outstanding Issues 9/30

We are working hard to have everything working smoothly, and while WordPress may have infinite possibilities, the time and personnel to implement them is finite. Below are some of the more bothersome issues we are tracking:

  • Guest Account Provisioning accounts are not able to authenticate on any of the blogs in the network. The problem has to do with the @ signs in the usernames. Currently, only normal Princeton netIDs can log in.
  • We do not yet have a simple solution for adding videos that use the PUVOD Flash streaming server.
  • We have some documentation, but not nearly as much as we would like.
  • Https works just fine, but forcing https by redirecting from http to https causes our load balancer to infinitely loop the redirect.
  • Our Movable Type users will have to suffer with that aging platform just a little while longer as we migrate dozens of sites.
  • There is not a separate server for staging content or a multistage workflow as with Roxen CMS. Posts and pages are either unpublished (draft) or published, and you can revert to any previously saved version.
  • The Sharing buttons at the end of posts and pages do not have a Google Plus option.
Categories
Tutorials

Custom CSS

Edit CSS menu optionAlthough there are thousands of WordPress themes out in the wild, we will be initially making available only a small collection of "curated" themes. These themes will have a small amount of Princeton University branding. Most will be minimalist, with neutral colors, and some will have configurable options. As the service grows, so will our theme offerings.

However, site owners sometimes want to deviate from the default appearance of the themes, or they might (for some inexplicable reason) want to eliminate all traces of orange and black. Sites in our Roxen CMS environment have the custom.css file, and we wanted to offer a similar option with WordPress.

Fortunately, Automattic, the commercial entity behind WordPress.com, created a plugin that provides this feature. Site admins will find an "Edit CSS" menu under the Appearance section in the left navigation of wp-admin.

Continue reading "Custom CSS"
Categories
Presentations

WordPress.tv: Top 12 Features You Aren’t Using

In this WordCamp San Francisco 2011 presentation, Sheri Bigelow talks about the "Top 10 12 Features You Aren’t Using – But Should Be!" (27:24).

This is an excellent presentation for new WordPress users, but it includes a few things that WordPress veterans may not know about, like the Post Revisions Easter egg at 18:30.

Categories
Presentations

WordPress.tv: 5 Ways to Break your Blog

The travel funds aren't always available to go to conferences, but at least most of the sessions from the regional and national WordPress conferences (aka WordCamps) are posted online. I will occasionally repost some of the germane ones here. Presentation slides are after the break.

The first four minutes do not apply to a multisite blog, so you can skip ahead.

In this first one, Hanni Ross from Automattic talks about the "Top 5 Ways to Break Your Blog – and Fix It" (21:32)

Continue reading "WordPress.tv: 5 Ways to Break your Blog"
Categories
Service News

Code without community

Code without community is like a car without roads. It might hum beautifully, but it can't go anywhere.

-Tom Geller
  Drupal 7 New Features