Word press for Barry's news

[Nathan F]

Hey Barry, if you're reading this-

I was using Wordpress for quite a while for my own news blog (for Grafpup) and I think it's a really nice idea. I'm running it with sphpblog now but the only reason I switched was so I could run it without a MySQL database. For the amount of traffic the Puppy sites recieve Wordpress is probably about the best you could do, especially with security in mind.

The first annoyance you'll probably encounter is people trying to spam your blog. This is getting extremely common now. The nice thing about Wordpress is that it allows you to view each and every comment before it gets posted, the not so nice thing is having to do it when you're getting 8-10 spam comments per day. Of course, once a person has been approved to comment on the blog then they can post at will without your having to moderate it anymore. Still, the spam gets tiring.

There's also a ton of themes out there, so it should be easy to get it looking nice. There's also plugins for a lot of added functionality, I didn't get the chance to try very many but in particular the backup plugin is essential. I think there's also a way to allow others to register and have their own blog if you wish but I'm not too well versed on that.

I know that David May uses WordPress for his blog http://blog.bubbleletter.org/, so check it out and maybe he can give you some input also.

Nathan

[BarryK]

Yeah, hopefully later today I'll actually get some time to use it, after having
installed it yesterday.

Apart from the News page, I was thinking also to have special pages for contributing suggestions for the next version of Puppy.
Like the "suggestions for 1.0.9" thread in the forum. One problem on the forum is that bug reports and suggestions are scattered all over the place.
Having such a page linked off the News page would be good I think, and of
course it can have links to threads in the forum.

[BarryK]

I'm already bogged down handling spam elsewhere, such as my email accounts.
bkaulerATgoosee.com gets so much spam, you wouldn't believe, and they are very clever, get through filters.

I was wondering, with WordPress, could I set it to reject everyone, and have a notice to contact me first, maybe with a special form with one of those graphical
images with text in it that they have to type in. Having received the application,
I then activate posting for them. Severe I know, but genuine posters are mostly
going to be our committed Puppy developers and users, and they will only have
to do it once.

[J_Rey]

Apart from the News page, I was thinking also to have special pages for contributing suggestions for the next version of Puppy.
Like the "suggestions for 1.0.9" thread in the forum. One problem on the forum is that bug reports and suggestions are scattered all over the place.
Having such a page linked off the News page would be good I think, and of
course it can have links to threads in the forum.

Wow. How about that for timing! At today's Foundation meeting we discussed setting up a bug/issue tracker for you. We also went over the suggestions for 1.0.9. Hope to see you there next time. You can stop by our IRC chatroom, where jmarsden and I frequent, for a quick response or continue discussion on the forum.

Also, Raffy installed WordPress and gave me the primary admin responsiblities at http://www.oss-2.com/coms/ for a Puppy Linux Foundation related blog, but its hard to keep up with everything Puppy Linux related going on so I/we haven't used it much. Also, this was before we moved to servage.net, so now we could share the blog on an official server.

Now about WordPress, you can limit posting to registered users and even have their posts wait in a queue to be reviewed before manually approving the posts. It is mature and has advanced administration features, so probably what ever you'd want is available. You can register at the mentioned blog and PM me to notify me and I'll give you user level 10 (full admin) access so you can experiment with an existing blog. There is even some spam in the Moderation Queue.

[Nathan F]

Yeah, the nice thing is that the spam gets caught in moderation and never gets through to the site until you approve it. What I was saying is that that's also a pain in the butt, having to constantly moderate all the trash that people are trying to get in there. They'll keep trying no matter that it never sees the light of day.

I'm not sure if there is a feature that makes you read a jpeg image before posting or not, but6 my guess would be yes since it's so fully featured. I didn't give myself the opportunity to explore it enough I guess.

Using it for a bug tracker is a great idea, as is having a page devoted to suggestions. What I like about a lot of the blogging software out there right now is how extensible it is. You can also pretty easily embed other applications in it in most cases (like image galleries, wikis, forums). I'm not sure what software is running it but check out http://wolvix.org/ to see just how far things can be taken. The entire site is built around a blog but with an image gallery and forum embedded right into it, and even a news aggregator and more importantly a search feature. It's actually looking a little cluttered right now but the concept is pretty nice.

Nathan

[moosepup]

There are all kinds of ways to prevent spam.

Check it out here...
http://codex.wordpress.org/Plugins/Spam_Tools

There are image entry checks, bayesian filters, AKismet checks, and there's even one which will e-mail the comment poster with a link. The comment poster will be the one responsible to say that his/her post is valid -- no intervention necessary from Barry.

Anyway, I really like it.

--Dan

[J_Rey]

OK jmarsden has a bug/issue tracker installed. See this post for more.

[Lobster]

Barry from Developer News page:

I know my web pages are badly in need of an overhaul, so I'll play with WordPress and see if it is what I need. If anyone reading this has experience with WordPress and would like to comment, or maybe give me a suggestion about some feature of WordPress that would be good for my site, please post on the Forum and we'll have a chat.

Well I feel this is a great move.
I have used a great number of blogs and find that a wiki format suits me better. However I feel wordpress will be better for your situation. You are lucky in having a ready made audience, so you do not need to change much - now you will find comments and recommends are more direct.

Just do it and see how it feels - how you get on . . .

More interesting is the possibility of you getting broadband. Hooray! This will change and enhance Puppy - we might have weekly builds
Even though you do not have direct line access, it is possible to build a tower that would allow for reception . . .

I would suggest adding pics and screenshots or just pics of the yellow Puppy flower - out back etc. This may seem strange but a picture of your desk or a view out the window is something that involves people.

It is also possible that you will become less neutral - which I gave up being a long time ago . . .

I wish you every success . . .

[BarryK]

It is also possible that you will become less neutral - which I gave up being a long time ago . . .

Over time I've become more neutral!

I've just replied to Jonathan, re his tracker, over in the orphan thread he suddenly
found himself stranded in.

Um, yeah, there's duplication going on here, or about to happen.
I've already installed my own WordPress, and intend to install a bug tracker
soon. I hope no one gets annoyed....

I know I'm tardy, not dropping in on the Foundation discussions, but I seem
to have picked up the vibes anyway and got moving on this stuff in the last
couple of days.
I'll pull my socks up and attend the next one.

[BarryK]

Over on his other thread, Jonathan states this:

I have no particular strong desire to host Mantis forever... if one of the more official / larger Puppy sites wants to take it on, we can of course transfer it very simply as long as they run PHP and a MySQL database (basically). As long as usage of it is enough to make it useful, and not so large it hurts financially (which seems unlikely at this point), I'm willing to continue it -- but if someone else wants to host this for the Puppy community, or it would be better / faster/ more reliable / whatever somewhere else, let me know and we can work out transferring it.

I've got the capacity now, and I basically want my site to be "developer central",
so I'm happy to host the bug tracker. The WordPress blog also will mostly be for developers, I don't see it as replacing the forum in any way.

"Community central" will remain puppylinux.org on Servage.

[puppian]

A Developer central would surely help Puppy's development
And if the tracker/blog can generate rss feeds (which most trackers/blogs do, either come as default or available as a plugin), we can have a nice side panel showing the latest items, just like the Latest Downloads panel here

[raffy]

These are great developments. BTW, thanks to JM, JRey, Seth and everyone who prepared the IRC access system, chatting with/in Puppy is as easy as doing two clicks!

Please note that oss-2.com was just a temporary solution - note that since the move to servage.net, i have built www.puppylinux.org/home for the foundation and continued using the wiki.

will update the /home pages soon and move the remaining pages of oss-2.com into it...

[jmarsden]

Um, yeah, there's duplication going on here, or about to happen.
I've already installed my own WordPress, and intend to install a bug tracker
soon. I hope no one gets annoyed....

I'd suggest installing Mantis version 1.0.1, and then we can just transfer the MySQL data to your site when you want to do so. If you want, I can install it for you, though it was almost trivial (at least at my ISP).

As some folks may have noticed, I'm not trying to create "Jonathan's Puppy related web site", at all. I'm just setting up specific tools that the community suggests it wants. Three so far, all suggested by others (CGI:IRC, Mailing list for developers, and now Mantis). They exist because someone (or a bunch of people) thought they would be useful. They "belong" to the community, not to me. I just had the time and skill to set them up. We can stick them anywhere we want for the long term.

I'm a little puzzled by Barry wanting to host "developer central", after having said he's trying to move on to a new project in, what, about 19 months time? But for those 19 months, let's do it

I know I'm tardy, not dropping in on the Foundation discussions, but I seem
to have picked up the vibes anyway and got moving on this stuff in the last
couple of days. I'll pull my socks up and attend the next one.

Yay!

(Oh, and puppian: Mantis does RSS feeds, out of the tarball. It's just that mine/ours has no data in it yet to feed, but that is about to change...!)

Jonathan

[jmarsden]

OK, the issue tracker now has 21 issues in it from my list.

If anyone wants to check whether its RSS feed works, go for it

Jonathan

[jmarsden]

If anyone wants to check whether its RSS feed works, go for it

Well, it does work, but only if you allow anonymous access. My initial attempt at setting that up works for the news RSS feed, but not for the issues one. http://tracker.nfshost.com/mantis/issues_rss.php gives me lots of errors...

Jonathan

[Nathan F]

It would be nice to see some links to the bug tracker on the other Puppy sites.

Nathan

[jmarsden]

It would be nice to see some links to the bug tracker on the other Puppy sites.

That is probably best delayed until we can get it to be visible at http://bugs.puppylinux.org which is intended to be a fairly permanent name for it, no matter who hosts it longer term.

BarryK is working on getting a CNAME added to the DNS for puppylinux.org, so that bugs.puppylinux.org points to tracker.nfshost.com for us.

With 1.0.9 coming out fairly soon and 40+ suggestions to go through from forum posters before it does... we needed to do *something* quickly

Jonathan

[Lobster]

Hey Barry, if you're reading this-
I was using Wordpress for quite a while for my own news blog (for Grafpup) and I think it's a really nice idea.
Nathan

This is what I find on the right of your blog Nathan

# 03/06/2006
<div align="justify">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&n

# More server packaging
03/04/2006
<div align="justify">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbs

# Monkey webserver and php5
03/03/2006
<div align="justify">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbs

I also posted a long comment about Grafpup and Puppy etc and it was lost saying the error would be reported - so maybe you got it?

Why did you move from wordpress to the simpler? system you are using now?

Anyway sorry to bring bad news but hopefully you will make good of it

[Nathan F]

The code you're seeing has to do with the fact that those posts are using html code, as I was playing with the formatting. Not sure why your comments would disappear, I tested it pretty thoroughly to be sure it would work.

The reason for the switch had a little to do with my bandwidth issues. I had to temporarily move everything to my home server, and I didn't yet have MySQL running right on it. I kind of liked the way the new software was working out so I stuck with it for a while.

I've actually got MySQL up and running now at home so I may switch back to Wordpress. I've managed to set things up so I can boot Grafpup or Vector and have the same servers running, with a trial installation of phpBB and earlier today I got Wordpress working as well. So anyway I now have the capability to mirror all of grafpup.com from home.

Sorry, not my intention to hijack the thread at all.

Nathan

[BarryK]

Nathan, there's a blog plugin for phpBB. It's called "phpbbblog" and created by people called "outshine" -- I don't recall the url, but found them via freshmeat.
I downloaded it, as the description is very interesting. I was particularly interested in its ability to be embedded into ordinary html pages and link back into the main phpbb forum.