But today I feel like I’m learning new things that are really easily a part of my everyday life. It’s amazing how much my WordPress ‘free’ work has helped me in class, or my old MUSHing ‘free’ work with switches has helped me. Or … well, basically, all that fun stuff I do in my spare time? Really has made me smarter.

Playing games made me want to learn new things. Like ‘Well it’s great that I can use this command to shoot someone, but what I really want is…’ And with everything I’ve played (save my Wii), they’ve been Open Source code, so I was able to crack it open, study it, learn it, and run with it.

Not everyone can, but I did, and now, the college dropout no longer feels like she’s an idiot for not taking more computer classes, or finishing school. I feel like I just found a new way of learning which works for me. I feel very smart and very accomplished, even if a lot of this class is below my learned skills level. Mostly I’m using the class to learn how to use Visual Basic and Visual Studio. The latter is more important, as I’m supposed to be using it!

No, really. As far as the basic ‘This is a blog’ software goes, I was able to make a new WordPress site, find a design I liked, spin a child-theme to tweak a couple things, teach someone how to upload images, and basically filled out Artistic Showcase in all of five hours. That’s five. Like ‘I have five fingers.’

But that doesn’t mean there aren’t some ‘things’ I’d like to see from the Automattic kids. Like what about those ‘other’ products getting priority?

Automattic ‘owns’, in so far as anyone can own Open Source products, the official WordPress suite. WordPress, BuddyPress, bbPress, GlotPress … Those guys. And WordPress is the grand poobah of them all.

What I love about WordPress is it’s extendibility. Everything I want to do, while it may not be built into WordPress, can (generally) find or write a plugin to do it. That new site I made isn’t running a single plugin to do what it does, however. Everything in Artistic Showcase is bog-standard WordPress. Oh, the domain has some tweaks, but that site doesn’t have a single extra plugin. Isn’t that cool? That’s what I mean when I say WordPress is complete for me.

But then I look at JFO and there’s a hell of a lot more going on. 33 plugins, a ton of .htaccess tweaks, some server hacks and a whole lot more. Which isn’t to say there’s something lacking from the other site, but it’s a whole question of ‘What is my site’s goal.’ For the Showcase, I just wanted a simple photoblog sort of gallery, where we could type up explanations of the gallery, upload the pictures, and have it look really pretty. The design I picked, not my own, was both rustic and similar to our other, somewhat related, site about the SCA (Meals on Camels).

And in many respects, there are ‘things’ that need ‘fixing’, but they’re not inherently WordPress. It’s the other Automattic products that need some fire under them. The problem is that WordPress is so big and so known and so used that it takes priority to just about every other product right now, or so it seems. That’s not a bad thing, mind you, but it causes problems.

All of the WordPress sites use bbPress for the forums. bbPress, while I love it, is sort of the red-headed step-child of the lot. It’s fallen aside, it’ll likely become a plugin instead of a stand-alone app, and the best I can say about it is that it’s usable. This means the forums for WordPress.org are usable, and they have great RSS feeds. They’re easy for me to read, but they can be difficult to follow. They really just need a bit of organizational cleanup.

Before you read much into that, I should point out that I’ve used at least a dozen forum softwares over the last 15 years. In order of how I picked them up, I think it was YABB, YABBSE, phpBB, SimpleMachines, Invision PowerBoard, bbpress to name the ones I remember best. There was one before YABB, and a few that I didn’t host on my own server, and some I made for other people, and some I tried and wanted to burn with fire. And of them all? I cannot, in good conscience, recommend any of them. They all have massive issues, they all have massive problems, and they all annoy me.

There is no forum software I look at, like I do WordPress, and go ‘Yes, daddy, buy me that one.’

Sad, isn’t it? It’s the inherent problem of forum software, I think. The concept is not flawed. Anyone can make a post, anyone can reply, anyone can converse. But somehow in the execution, there end up being bells and whistles and extras and methods that just stop working. You want to track read and un-read posts, you want alerts to specific posts you ‘follow’, you want to mark everything as read. And every forum has it’s own way of doing that.

I will say, the BuddyPress forums annoy me right now because their RSS feeds per topic are broken, and the ‘washed out’ colors are too pale. They need darker text and link colors. But the rest of my issues with their forums are just that … they’re forums. And I have issues with forums.

Speaking of BuddyPress… It’s the baby of the WordPress related sites! Okay, maybe bbPress is the baby, but BuddyPress was adopted. If you know Ning, then BuddyPress is pretty much like that, but as an add on to WordPress, which makes it really cool, in my mind. But BuddyPress is growing and having the requisite growth issues. Right now they need more people helping out, and people worry that what’s happening to bbPress (a slow, agonizing death) will happen to BuddyPress.

bbPress’ peculiar fate is far more complicated. See, one day the WordPress people decided they needed a forum for wordpress.org and they whipped up bbPress. Then a few lonely developers ended up ‘in charge’ of it, in the wild, and they carried on. As far as WordPress was concerned, the forums did what ‘they’ wanted, they were happy. But Open Source is what it is, and things grew and changed and developed. Then the most well known of those devs got pulled into the WordPress fold and suddenly … bbPress looked abandoned. Abruptly, Matt Mullenweg, the ‘main man’ behind WordPress and it’s parent company, Automattic (get it?) said ‘Ah! You are not lost! We’re coming back!’ And that was a year or so ago and there wasn’t a whole lot of traction.

On the other side is BuddyPress, which was a plugin some people developed that was then picked up by Automattic (who ‘owns’ all these things) in 2008. Now the main brains behind BuddyPress are working a lot on WordPress, with less time for BuddyPress, and people are afraid that BuddyPress will be dropped.

Everyone needs to chill out and breath. They seem to think that because Automattic is a company, that is should run like the Fortune 500, monolithic companies. Or maybe, because it’s hip and cool, it should run like Google. Automattic is neither. It’s Open Source development and Open Source work. That means it’s kind of like getting a bunch of cats in a room and giving them toys and leaving. You come in once in a while to feed them and scoop the litter, but mostly they’ll get things done as they do.

The traditional business model isn’t going to work for them. They don’t all sit in an office, most of the people who help out (like me) don’t get paid a red cent. That doesn’t mean I don’t think a dose of corporate America might not be a bad idea (nail things down a little, organize a little, tighten a little), but it means I think all that should be implemented carefully. Automattic works best the way it is because of freedom. At the same time, projects other than WordPress work less well because of the freedom to roll between projects. WordPress takes more work, but BuddyPress and bbPress need more work.

For me, today, everything works well. There are a few annoyances (like user management) but most everything I want can be done easily enough, and I’m happy. I can see that Automattic needs to change a little, adapt to be able to support WordPress as well as the children projects, but they’re growing, they’re learning, and with Ning charging people, I suspect BuddyPress will be picking up even more steam soon.

Now if they’d only fix the damn forums.

But right now, and every time I need to update it, I hate it.

I don’t mind using command line to wget the latest version and unzip it, overlaying the new files atop the old ones. What I mind is having to manually visit the pages for all my extensions, and determine if I need to upgrade or not. It makes me wish for WordPress with the happy ‘Hey, that plugin needs updating!’

See, there’s no admin ‘side’ to MediaWiki, like there is for WordPress, or ZenGallery, or anything else I run on my sites. MediaWiki is for the hardcore people who don’t mind getting their hands dirty. And as a user, I think this is the real problem with the whole thing. Until they make a user friendly admin side of the whole thing, MediaWiki will remain used by the nerdy, the geeky and the techie, rather than the whole world. Part of why WordPress became so popular is they made it not easy, but easier to run your own blog. It’s still got problems, sure, but they made it so you could easily learn how to manage your own site.

And then there’s MediaWiki.

MediaWiki sucks to admin. Like today I found out I could turn on File Caching. That’s great new, I think! I use it for my gallery and my blogs (runs faster among other things). Except that, unlike WordPress (where Donncha’s freakin’ amazing WP Super Cache can clear out files on a scheduled basis) or ZenPhoto (where it runs once a day, or whenever I press ‘clear!’), MediaWiki has no cache expiry. That blew my mind, but seeing as MediaWikis are ‘mostly’ static content, it makes a little sense.

So I turned it on and ran $php maintenance/rebuildFileCache.php which force caches everything. All at once. This is awesome to get your site ‘started’ and all told, it took up about a moderate, but not huge, bit of space.

Also, I was told ‘When you edit a page, the cache is refreshed’ except I did, and it didn’t. Then I was told ‘Add this to your page URL and it will prompt you to recache.’ (this being ?action=purge) except that didn’t either. If I was logged in, it did nothing. If I was logged out, it did, but then I went back and it was still the old page. Finally I sorted out that the cache pages had to be owned by ‘nobody:nobody’ (this isn’t too weird, BTW). The problem NOW is that if they were owned by that, then the script rebuildFileCache.php didn’t work!

So, great, it now works, it now flushs when I edit and save a page. If I run the rebuild command, I’ll have to manually go in and chown the files to nobody, which annoys me, but I have godlike access to the server and I can always fix it. But what if I want to delete everything in the cache? Basically I have to dump the entire folder. Which is annoying, but at least it’s working now.

Why would I have to flush the whole cache? Because I make a formatting change, let’s say. Also, I have advertising on my sites. How does this get affected?

In the end, I’m going to keep the cache running for a month, see how it goes. But it still annoys me how much of this is lacking because of no admin ‘dashboard.’

Then again, that’s MediaWiki. Function over form. All powerful, all annoying.

Or: How I learned to Stop Worrying And Love Open Source

I actually deleted this entire post on Tuesday because I am an idiot and spent a lot of time recovering it, only to realize it needed to be totally re-done anyway. And in the end, they did what I needed!

WordPress 3.0 is the big merge with WPMU (WordPress Multi User) and regular old WordPress. What this means is that new blogs will have the chance, from day one, to make a blog with ‘sub blogs’. Kind of.

With a traditional WordPress install, you get one blog. Sure, you can customize it, but it remains one blog. WordPressMU takes that to the next level, with the idea that sometimes you want to give yourself, your spouse and your kids a blog, but not with multiple installs of WordPress. It’s actually a great idea, and I’m very happy that the codebases are being merged so you don’t have to feel like the proverbial red-headed stepchild when you need support.

But I have needs and I’m sure I’m not the only one who’s worried that the merge won’t help me. See, I have a site with two blogs and, had I been thinking about it at the time, I would have started with MU. The problem was that it grew organically.

Blog #1 – The Main Blog

The main blog, as it were, is where I post news updates, discussion topics, etc. It’s the hub of the site, though not the ‘meat’. The wiki and gallery (both locked down to admin editors only) are the big parts of the site, containing 12+ years of documentation, data and images. Those aspects of the site I’m happy with as is. Oh, sure, MediaWiki is insane, and updating plugins is a crime (you have to go check manually, and by the way, not every plugin correctly lists it’s version), but it does it’s job and with over 700 pages, all cross-linked and organized, it’s something that’s just a little too big and hairy to consider moving to a WordPress run CMS. I firmly believe in using the right tool for the right job. MediaWiki is correct for an encyclopedia. Zenphoto’s right for a gallery. WordPress is right for a blog.

I did not get derailed. This is all part of the process of how I ended up with WordPress. When I started, I wanted a place where I could do the following:

1. Post news
2. Allow for discussion on said news

See? It’s really simple. I needed a blog! What I do with it is, most of the time, link back to the gallery (ZenPhotoPress! for easy integration) or wiki (just link like I’ve been doing to all these other sites – why reinvent the wheel?). Happy.

Then I thought ‘You know, a blog is great where I control the topics etc. But what if my visitors want to make their OWN topics?’ So I added a forum (back) on, using bbPress, because of it’s so-called easy integration with WordPress. I must admit, the integration was not easy, but once I got it working, it was simple. Currently they’re discussing making bbPress a WordPress plugin, which, seeing as a lot of the bbPress code is lifted from WordPress, I’m not opposed to. That will probably happen after WordPress makes 3.0, however.

Blog #2 – Video Blog

The short story is that I wanted to make a video site, and all the ones out there were so hard to theme, I thought ‘Damn it, people make Video Blogs all the ding dang time. Why not co-opt that?’ So I make a no-comment ‘blog’ for my videos. Done.

How I want my MU to Work

Here’s where I get hinky.

Blog #1 is the main blog. This will be the wp_1 blog site, where all new users are signed up. The users here will be ‘integrated’ with bbPress and 99.999% of them will be ‘subscribers’ who can only read and comment. The hardest part is that the user base must be ported over with their extant passwords, and bbPress integration must remain intact. Otherwise what’s the point? While WordPress has an export/import feature, I can’t use it becuase it will only bring over posts. Also, I’ve been storing my

Blog #2 remains read only, no one is a ‘user’ but me and my admin accounts, and no one can sign up for it. This one can be best done as an export/import.

The nice thing about WordPress is that they use subversion, and so do I. So my server has a nice spare folder where I have a wp 3.0 trunk build (trunk means it’s the latest and greatest version) which I update by running this command:

svn co http://core.svn.wordpress.org/trunk/ .

I run it once every few days, rough-test an import and an upgrade, and back out my changes. Over and over again. I’ll probably end up writing a how-to for myself in the end (and sharing here, of course!).

So at the end of this, where am I? A little worried. While I know I’m capable of sorting out the move from Regular WordPress to the MultiSite, I think that it’s important that WordPress build in a conversion tool. I’m not the only person who’s going to look at this and want a one-click solution to turn a WP one-blog-site into a multi-blog-site. I waffle back and forth about being nervous and confident about it. As of today, they claim it’s ‘easy’ to switch from solo to multi. There’s a Mormon joke in there somewhere.

From the last Developer Chat:

Ryan updated on the status of the merge which is now complete in its first form. The upgrade from single to multi works well switching back and forth is easily done by copying wp-config files. A large amount of the code cleanup is but there are still outstanding areas. It will be ready for people to start testing an early preview release in a week or two.

Now the only thing I have left to worry about is my custom locations for uploaded files! Instead of storing my uploads in the ‘normal’ place (~/blog/wp-content/uploads/YYYY/MM/DD/file.foo) I have them ‘offloaded’ to another server. Kind of. They’re on ~/content/blog and ~/content/video/wp-uploads (long story, I may re-do that later). But I can work around that I’m sure.

This week I was chatting with a fellow about CPU usage and his site. He runs a rather large WordPress blog and the database is about 500 megs. As a comparison, this site, with about 500 posts, is under 5 megs, and my big site, with thousands of posts, comments, and a forum, is 10 megs. The biggest site I run on my server is 850 megs (just down from 910 after some clean up). The difference between his site and mine is that his is slow and he knows it. As we discussed ways to speed it up, I had some thoughts on WordPress and how, at a certain point, you’re going to need to dig into the guts of your server and learn TOP.

The ‘problem’ with most ‘How do I make my WordPress site run faster?’ tutorials, as I’ve seen it, is they address surviving the digg effect. That is, they talk about how to deal with having a high volume of traffic on your site and, for the most part, you can make it with just adding caching plugins.

Once your site gets ‘big’ or ‘popular’ you’re going to have to move off shared/cloud hosting and over to your own server. For most of us, the first step is a VPS (Virtual Private Server). Shared Hosting means ‘You have an account on a server with a hundred other people.’ It’s great for small sites, inexpensive and easy to use. The problem is you could have terrible neighbors, who use up all the CPU. Think of it like those old New York apartments where someone’s a jerk at 5am and uses up the hot water so you, at 7am, have none. Yeah, it’s kind of like that. That’s the day you think ‘I want a house!’

Only, well, we’re not all up for houses just yet. A house would be a dedicated server, where it’s just you. Cloud hosting, which I touched on earlier, would be the college dorms of webhosting. It has a lot of benefits for the really small sites, and actually some for large sites, but I’m not sold of their overall usefullness yet, so I’ll talk about them some other time. What I want to talk about are Virtual Private Servers, the condo-sub-leasing (or rent-to-own maybe) of website hosting, and how the new VPS user should really get on TOP of things (sorry, bad pun) to make their lives easier.

TOP. Well ‘top’ really. Unix commands are generally all lower case like that.

The top command is a system monitor tool that outputs a list of processes. Have you ever seen Task Manager in Windows? It’s kind of like that tab for ‘Processes’ that you look at and run away from. The default view of top is by percentage of CPU usage and the “top” CPU users are listed. See? The name made sense. You can also see how much processing power is being used, memory hogs and other cool things. Most modern Unix-systems let you sort the list, colorize it, etc, though you have to be command line savvy.

Here’s what top looked like for me about an hour ago.

top - 12:44:44 up 126 days, 23:13,  1 user,  load average: 0.12, 0.17, 0.17
Tasks:  91 total,   1 running,  90 sleeping,   0 stopped,   0 zombie
Cpu(s):  0.0% us,  0.0% sy,  0.0% ni, 100.0% id,  0.0% wa,  0.0% hi,  0.0% si
Mem:    524288k total,   358248k used,   166040k free,        0k buffers
Swap:        0k total,        0k used,        0k free,        0k cached

  PID USER      PR  NI  VIRT  RES  SHR S %CPU %MEM    TIME+  COMMAND
15616 nobody    15   0 94540  65m  20m S  1.0 12.8   0:00.27 httpd
12261 ipstenu   16   0  1908 1012  780 R  0.4  0.2   0:00.30 top
[...]
28630 root      16   0  107m  86m 1096 S  0.0 16.8   1:06.30 /usr/sbin/clamd

I wanted to point out clamd, which has been the bane of my existance. Thing won’t DIE. I ended up going in to

/etc/exim.conf

and manually commended out the clamd line (and restarted the service) to finally get it gone.

But top, as you can see, has a freakishly large amount of information. My server is doing fine, at this point, so I don’t have a whole lot to show you. What you can see right away is that I can tell, with a glance, what’s going on. I could see, though and at this point I have a ‘nobody’ process. That just means someone’s accessing my website. No, really! That’s good! The CPU and memory usage seem high, but they vanish in a second. Basically, someone rang my doorbell and for that brief moment, electricity was used. The next thing I see is the top command, which is run by me (hi!) and down the line is that idiot, clamd.

I actually scan top a lot at work these days, trying to understand what’s causing issues. It’s good for ‘right now!’ things, but not so much if I want to see what started a strange spike a couple hours (weeks) ago. For that you need a whole mess of tools.

Maybe I’ll talk about optimizing servers for WordPress next. Or maybe I’ll talk about TV. Who knows!

ClamAV is an tool that you put on your server and it detects malicious software. In short, it’s a server virus scanner and most servers use it to scan email for viruses. Now those of you who use stuff like McAffee and Norton and other virus scanners for your email, you may not know that servers also scan for that stuff as well, and try to kill the emails before they ever get to you! Yeah, think about how many emails with viruses you get. Personally, I’ve never had a problem with viruses and not because I use a mac. It’s because I pay attention to the content and context of an email before I open any attachments.

But this is about ClamAV and server-side scanners.

The story starts with my twice a week check of my server. I like to keep tabs on what it’s doing, how it’s doing, what’s going on, etc etc. I was a little surprised to see my server load spiked. Server load is sort of how you know how hard your server is working. A high load means its looking at a lot of work. A low load is ‘better’ but you have to admit that you’re going to have SOME load, so you may as well figure out what’s a good load for you. I’ve had problems with WordPress and right now I’m using WP Super Cache (See “I take it back. WP-Super-Cache is a Super Hero” from September 2009).

The point is, I know that a spike like this is okay:

That spike there was when I ran a small upgrade. You’ll notice how after the moment, it drops back down and has a happy nice day? That’s how things are supposed to work. A spike with traffic and then everything’s happy again. Great.

So what does this mean?

Yeah, I took a look at that, paled, and asked myself ‘What in the four hells is going on!?’ I did the logical thing and looked at the date and time. Noon on Monday I’d made a change to the firewall, moving from the perfectly acceptable, though harder to manage (no GUI), APF Firewall to CSF. That move was a TEENY bit on the spur of the moment, as I wasn’t having any problems with APF per se, but I was being hit up by a lot of spammers and my usual attacks of http:BL and Bad Behavior weren’t cutting it. They’re front end fixes to the ongoing spam problem, alas. I hate spammers.

Worried that my new firewall was ‘bad’, I started to Google if CSF caused high server loads. And found nothing. So I went back to the beginning and checked top. Top is a unix command that you use to see what’s using up resources on your server. It’s like Task Manager for Windows, but it’s a lot more informative. Top lets you see details and sort and basically when you want to find out what ran off with the spoon and killed your server, baby, I’m the bottom and log on to top. Top showed me, interestingly enough, that ClamD was using between 70 and 90% of my resources. On a slow week, like the net generally has for entertainment sites between Christmas and New Years, that’s not really a problem. There’s not a lot going on with the sites I host right now, the extra CPU usage wasn’t a problem. Come back on January 20th, though, now that’s a problem.

But the thing of it is, back in September, I optimized my server and I remember reading on multiple places that ClamAV and ClamD use up a lot of resources and people turn them off. So I did.

Isn’t that much nicer?

The real question, at the end of the day, is if having ClamAV turned off causes more problems than having it on? So far, no one’s breached my servers, though that’s a function of my firewalls, and SpamAssassin seems to be taking care of the spam emails, which is where most viruses come from in my experience, unless the server’s hacked, at which point I’m kind of screwed anyway. But what I find myself wondering now is if it’s dangerous to not be using ClamAV or what. And I don’t have an answer to that yet.

I really do like the Gallery project. I do! I learned a great deal about photography from it, and I’m thankful for it. But. I needed to move on as a user, a developer and a photographer. On that last one, I’m not a profession one, I’m just a goofy girl with a camera who likes to remember where she’s been. As a user, Gallery2 did the job well and without major issues. As a developer, it made me want to cry. Many times. Once I had to log into my friend’s server to fix his install. That just whomps.

Even the developers admit that Gallery2 suffered from bloat:

The code base is too complex and over-engineered because it was designed to fix every single thing that was wrong with Gallery 1 (Second System Effect) leaving its scope hazy and broad.

The whole idea of it was “Your photos, your website.” And personally I love that. I hate having flikr or picasa in charge of MY photos. Let alone FaceBook. I have a blog on my domain for that same reason. But Gallery2 was too much. I never used half of it and it was 16+megs at its slimmest install. That the developers agreed with my feelings delighted me. And the Feature List was also exciting. As soon as G3 popped out, I grabbed a copy and started playing.

With each version of Gallery3′s beta releases, I would get excited and then disappointed. Excited for the new toys and disappointed for how the overall effect felt. It just felt wrong for me. It wasn’t really Web2.0, even though it was, and the usage felt off. It didn’t make intuitively as much sense as G2, though it was still far better than Coppermine (which frankly I hate, and I know more people who argue with it than anything). At first I thought it was because I was so used to G1 and G2, but then I realized that over the last 10 years, I’ve used so many different systems that I’m fine with subtle differences. I’m savvy, I’m smart, I can code, so why did G3 feel wrong to me?

It was too hard. Too much was built in and not plugable. Too much was hard coded in itself. Theming was impossible in the first release, and way too hard in the third. Understanding the theme system in G2 was easy, though implementing it was hard. Understanding it in G3 was hard and implementing was horrific. And before someone reminds me, AGAIN, that this isn’t even a beta product but an alpha, quite frankly that’s not an excuse. The basic things you need to be able to do with a first public release (be it beta, alpha or whatever) is to use it: Upload photos, change options, theme. That’s it. Those are the three things at it’s most basic that photo gallery software has to have, or you may as well be using an off-site solution.

And while I may sound like I’m ranting, I’m not. I’m sad and frustrated and … You know, I really like Gallery! I really do. But it was starting to feel like Movable Type. They made a big shift and suddenly I wanted to know who peed in my coffee. The code felt wrong, it felt klunky, it felt raw. It was like starting over, and I didn’t like where it was going. And I realized the fact was that I was going to say goodbye to an old friend.

Personally I’m all about the simplest, best, tool for the job. I wanted a way to update news on JFO and, when that was ALL I needed, I used CuteNews. When I realized the site was going to need something more, I weighed my options, tested software, and decided that while WordPress was a bit of overkill, I knew how to support it and customize it to be what I needed. In the end, that proved to be a perfect choice. When I had a forum (the first time around), it was IPB, which I liked, but it always felt too big. Now I use the very basic bbPress and it’s what I need and nothing more.

If WordPress had PhotoPress, I’d probably have snagged that. Instead, I shopped around. I installed Coppermine, again, to test. I put up G3-alpha3 and then 4. I went to WikiPedia and dug out the compares and ended up in a head to head battle between ZenPhoto and Gallery3.

ZenPhoto won by feeling better.

Seriously, it’s asthetics at this point. There are only two features I miss: Being able to re-upload a picture and keep it’s MetaData, and having ‘new’ images show up with a different background color. But I can live without those.

Actually Recently Registered didn’t get up on the WP site until May 1st, so it may be eligible too.

The one ‘gotcha’ for my possible submission (not that I think I’d win, but I think it’d be nice to try) is this:

You can only submit plugins that have been written for this competition and have not been released publicly before the start of the competition.

I didn’t. I wrote the plugin because I needed it.

Well, either way, once the contest opens I’ll submit them both and see what happens. Could be something, could be nothing, but it’s a nice attempt.

Yesterday I was pissed off at WordPress because of it’s user management tools, and no plugins really did what I wanted. See, I have open registration. It lets me sync my blog and forum and let people post. But where it fails is that I can’t set users as ‘banned’ in WordPress. This is a simple thing, I feel. A user role that has no rights and is just banned from commenting. They can read all they want, but no comment. I’ve tried just about every tool out there, but they never work. In addition to that, spammers sign up to my blog.

Since creating a ‘bozo’ user role is outside my ability, I decided what I wanted was a plugin to prevent people from registering if they were on my blacklist, similar to how I can prevent them from commenting on my comment blacklist. At first I was using TimesToCome Stop Bot Registration, which (among other things) uses StopForumSpam’s list of spammers as a stop-gap.

The problem with TTC is that if you register with a bad email (jane132@gmail.com instead of jane123@gmail.com) and then try to register with the RIGHT email, it notes that the IP is the same and bans both emails and the IP. Which caused a couple people no end of problems on my site. It had to go.

From there, I tried No Disposable Email, which checks against a list of known baddies. That was nice, but it was a text file list that you had to update by hand. But it got me thinking.

I quickly converted it into Ban Hammer, which allowed me to update and edit the text file from a submenu inside my admin session. But that wasn’t enough. Why did I have to have two places to keep my jerk list? If someone was on my WordPress Comment Blacklist, I didn’t want them to comment. That implies they’re just not welcome at all. So why don’t I make Ban Hammer pull from that list. Which I did.

I still have things I want to do to the code, like put in an option to use StopForumSpam’s list, and a way to edit the error message. But for now, Ban Hammer sits by my other plugins, Recently Registered (lists the last 25 registrations) and my bbPress plugin Spoiler Bar (adds in spoiler ‘code’ to bbPress) on my Google Code site. It’s not for ‘public’ release, but it’s there so my friends who have been helping me test out my ideas can easily download. What? I have nerd friends!

Wow.

There’s a minor hitch when it comes to finding everything I want, but the left-side menu with drop downs is a lot faster than the old way!

While I was at it, I optimized my site for xhtml and css, so I’m now compliant. My next task is to go through all the old posts and clean up the tags. I managed to pull this off on my other site, and I came up with four blanket categories, and then I used tags to sort things more finely. The blanket ‘categories’ for a personal site are a little harder, so I’m hesitant at hashing that out yet. But I’m sure after goofing around for a while, I’ll figure something out.