Wordpress

Going from one CMS to another can be huge challenge - especially as I wanted the various pieces I’ve managed to bring along from the past 20 years along (content from the first years of the site is sadly lost over time).

Getting content out of Wordpress

Getting content out of Wordpress is quite easy. It has a built-in export function and while it took some time, resulting in a large zip file. As Wordpress powers huge parts of the Internet, the export format is well-understood and documented so it only to a little time to find a tool which could do a conversion from the Wordpress export to Marked which is what the Hugo CMS wants.

This site has been running for 20+ years. Most of the years I’ve been using wordpress to post occasionally and have fun messing around.

Wordpress have been a moving target and gained more features through the years. Far more than I ever needed, and to keep simple I’ve decided to move to a simpler setup using the HugoCMS.

Getting to here

One of the benefits of Hugo is, that it’s easy to have it running locally and rapidly let you see changes and update you make to hugo configuraion, themes and content - and I’ve even used it across Linux and MacOS during migation.

One of the great features of Wordpress is the wide variety of plugins available. They often enable a lot of interesting functionality and integrations to other services not native to Wordpress itself. Most of these plugins are developed by individuals or small teams independent of the core community - and often not with a keen interest in security, but an exclusive focus on “making stuff work”.

I’ve been using the Wordpress “Google AdSense Dashboard” for awhile, and after the recent host of password leaks, I’ve been changing and upgrading password all around. This change lead to expose what I would call a critical password exposure in the plugin and so far caused me to remove the plugin everywhere I’ve installed it.

It’s often the case that security is an inconvenience and gets in the way of usability and ease of use. There are exceptions though and for a number of weeks I’ve been playing with the Yubikey (thanks to Schack) from Yubico.

It’s a small device, which plugs into a USB port, and to the computer acts as a keyboard. It has some advanced security build-in with the ability to generate one-time verifiable passwords, but is incredible easy to use – plug it into the USB port and press the single button when you need to sign in to services supporting the Yubikey.

A new wordpress has been released (2.6). I’ve upgraded - took 60 seconds and caused no issues what so ever (- so far anyway). There isn’t one big new thing, but a fair number of improvements in many different areas. Get the latest version from the Wordpress site.

Backups seem to be a constant pain for just about everyone. It’s something we know we should do, but somehow never get around to actually doing. Since switching to Wordpress on this site, things have been different though.

One of my many installed wordpress Plugins is the Wordpress Backup plugin. It runs once a day and makes a complete backup of my wordpress database (with all these precious posts) and sends it in a mail to my Gmail-account.

The past days I’ve been posting stories with a few code samples – Perl, PHP, Javasscript and/or HTML. While Wordpress is fantastic to a number of things, handling sourcecode examples in the posts, reallly isn’t one of them.

I’ve been playing with a number of plugins, but none of them really works for me. What I’m looking for is this:

• It must be able to handle HTML, Javasscript, PHP and Perl sourcecode.
• The code samples should work with the visual editor (preferably entered in this, but ”code mode” is quite alright) – Visual post editing shouldn’t break the code example.
• The plugin should be alive (maintained and tested with recent wordpress releases).

I would have thought it would have been easy to find a plugin that covered the above requirements, but so far I’ve had very little luck – any suggestions?

While trying to respect the notion that URLs dont change, moving to a completely different engine for a website is bound to cause many URL changes. I’ve been trying to redirect old broken URLs to their new destination, and one of the tools was the 404 Notifier plugin for Wordpress.

The idea is that you configure it to send you a mail every time a 404 error occur. I did that and configured it to mail me at my GMail address (with endless storeage). It seemed like a great idea, but somehow it seem to mail me plenty of false alerts.

Publishing a list of which pluins you use seems to be popular among Wordpress users, so here’s my contribution in case you’re wondering, which plugins are in use around this site.

• Askimet - Anti-comment spam (comes with wordpress)
• Amazon Showcase (hacked) - Displays the “Currently reading” on the frontpage; hacked to display valid XHTML.
• FeedBurner FeedSmith - Handles the Feeds from the site (and moves load a way from this server).
• Google SiteMaps - Helps Google index the site.
• Sociable (hacked) - Places “sharing” links on posts & pages (StumpleUpon seemed to be broken).
• Tiger Style Administration - Beef up the backend of wordpress and make it look nicer.
• Underscore Permalinks - I like underscored permalinks over the default dashed permalinks.
• WordVerify - A simple spam-prevention method.
• WP-ContactForm - Used for my contact page.
• WPG2 (and friends) - Trying to make Gallery2 and Wordpress play nice together (not quite successful yet though).

In line:

Just in case you’re wondering, this new design isn’t a homebrew. Moving content and other stuff from the old (movable type powered) site to this new platform was hard enough without me having to challenge myself to come up with a design and learn how to create a wordpress theme from scratch.

The core of the design is from gluedideas’ subtle theme. I’ve made it 200 pixels wider than the orgininal, but that’s about it on the theme side of this. I will probably switch the default header image (and colours) with images of my own at some point.