Wordpress 2.9 - the votes are in

The Wordpress site has just released the results of the survey on media features for Wordpress 2.9.

While the results are complicated, and best looked at right there, what I found intriguing was the number of features people found desirable, and the dilemma about including them in the core, distributing them with the core release as cannon plugins, or developing cannon plugins but keeping them in the repos for optional download.

The strength of Wordpress is its sleek efficiency, which will not remain so sleek, if things keep getting added to it, and the package keeps bulking up. Not everyone uses every feature, obviously. Most bloggers don't need exotic media stuff to blog. Yet, who would dispute that it would be fabulous to have the ability to work with media more efficiently? I dare say many bloggers will begin using it once they find it available by default.

Also, the more things added to the main distro, the more complicated it will be in terms of continued development, testing, updating..... that much more code to wade through, compatibility to ensure and functionality to be tested before each release. It is going to hold meaning in terms of manpower and skilled resources.

Its an interesting dilemma - functionality, but how? Increased function, or minimum bulk and high efficiency.... will be interesting to see how the decision flows.

Redirecting most old Postnuke pages to the new Zikula site

The first order of the day is to redirect old pages to the new pages.

For this, go to your old sitemap, and see the links that you have. If your site is not very heavy, you can redirect each page individually from the old permalink structure to the new one.

Create a file called .htaccess in your root folder (where your index.php is) and put the following into it:

Options FollowSymlinks
RewriteEngine on

Then, we will be writing in our redirects. If there is already an .htaccess in the root folder, just edit it to add your redirects to it (make sure the above lines are present already, or add them in):

RewriteRule ^Article1.htm$ http://www.foobar.com/foo/bar/ [R=301,L]

http://foobar.com/Article1.htm is where the article used to be (you don't need to put in the whole url) and we are now sending it to the new location. Refer to your old sitemap, and point everything to its new locations as separate lines.

This will tell the search engines about the new locations, as well as redirecting any referral links pointing to the old locations along with the traffic and good karma.

For a very large site, this method may not be practical. In that case, you have to make tough choices. Save what you can, and pray for the rest.Some suggestions.

1. Figure out the pages with the most links and traffic, and be sure to redirect those specifically.
2. Install your sitemap, and point the url for the old sitemap to the new one, so that all engines coming to look for info at your site will directly go to the new information, though they came out of habit to the old sitemap.
3. See if there are patterns you can roughly redirect (rather than shelling out 404s) For example, anything with a certain module name, goes to the page for that module.
4. Edit page content of index locations of new pages where possible (that haven't been individually redirected) - for example, the main downloads page where all downloads are getting redirected to, can contain an index of downloads and their new links for quick reference and manual click through.
5. It helps to have your 404 error (page not found) page describe what's happening, and assure visitors that things will soon be smooth again, in the meanwhile, to navigate using the very convenient options you will provide.
   

You can use RedirectMatch for this stuff:

RedirectMatch (.*)\.pdf$ http://www.foobar.com/downloads/


Be sure to put your RedirectMatch list after your redirects, so that specific redirects go to their accurate pages before the slack gets taken care of.

So download number 64 may not redirect to the exact page, but all downloads will go to the main downloads page. This is better than 404s. With some study of the older and newer link structures, it will be posssible to use regex to get quite accurate redirects, particularly if you aren't using short urls (though that kind of defeats half the point of the upgrade)


RedirectMatch (.*)\.gif$ http://www.foobar.com/downloads/$1.gif


Test. Test. Test.

Issues with redirects will be visible instantly, so if things work, they work. If not, tweak. There are abundant resources on the net to use .htaccess redirects. Search. Sometimes, inexplicable issues can happen which are peculiar to your server, software, installed modules, or other things, so if something is working for the world, but not for you, don't lose hope. There are enough websites in the world and someone or the other has experienced your settings too. You'll be sure to find references that work.

Last, but most important:

• Keep a sharp eye on hits from search engines to your new url structure - indicating that that engine is now aware of the change on your site.
• Keep an eye on your traffic sources - referrals in particular, and share updated links where possible - most people will appreciate having updated information to replace outdated information (though, sometimes it just might trigger some lazy ones to delete your link and leave it at that, so see how well you know them)
• Keep an eye on your error log for two things:

1. 404s: which are the pages that have large numbers of 404s? You may want to redirect them specifically, or as a pattern to some page.
   
2. 500s: Internal Server Error - these can sometimes happen when your .htaccess gets too large, or is creating issues and will crash your site till they are resolved - urgent.

Following this should get much of your site back visible from your earlier links, while ensuring that the transition to new links is happening smoothly in the background.

Postnuke to Zikula with minimum disruption

Everyone who uses Postnuke and is upgrading to Zikula are going to go through the pain of lost links, indexed pages, and so on.

It was precisely for this reason that I held back for a long time too.

However, Zikula is better than Postnuke, and eventually, there comes a time to commit to the move, or start losing interest in the whole system itself, particularly since nothing is happening with Postnuke anymore.

There are some problems I faced, and some solutions I found, which I will be sharing in a series of posts here.

• The first, and key thing to do is to make a copy of your current sitemap, so that you have all the links.
• Do the upgrade as instructed after backing up the site.
• Go through your modules list with a fine toothed comb, and test them - navigate, access, edit, etc. Upgrade all those that have upgrades.
• Identify the ones that can't be upgraded and deactivate them for now.
• Navigate through your site and see which blocks don't show, which links don't work, and so on.
• Create a list of everything that is going wrong.

In the next posts, we will deal with some of the most urgent aspects of getting your site back into functioning for most visitors coming there rather than 404 pages and inexplicable issues.

FLock - The Amazing browser

Thanks to the comment from i-hater on the Scribefire post, I downloaded the Flock browser. I had heard about FLock before, but hadn't really had the time or inclination to invest in discovering yet another browser.

After hearing such resounding recommendation from him, I downloaded the browser and here I am, making my post from this browser. Not just that, in the process of discovering my browser, I have added my gmail account to send emails from by default, my yahoo account, Facebook, Flickr, ......

I can blog, stay connected across many social networks, drag and drop links to share, read my RSS feeds...... and I haven't yet added a single anything. No add-ons, no nothing - this is what I have "out of the box".

Considering that I use this site to share my learnings about online life, there is no way I can't write about this. For a blogger, the ease of use and the sheer number of things at your finger tips is fabulous.

• Share links across your networks - facebook, twitter etc.
• Make blog posts easily
• Get updates in your sidebar
• Click email links to send emails from your gmail account
• Upload tons of photos (1000 at a go) to Picassa, photobucket...
• Its fancy, its fast.

Curious, go and see the full range of all they offer on their site and while you're there, download the browser. You can't afford to miss it.

The one drawback I see as compared with Scribefire is the lack of labels/categories to select from to add to the post, which (if I know my habits) runs the risk of me not using some suitable tags I already have, and creating some similar ones .... in short, a categorizing mess waiting to happen, unless I leave that blank and then edit them after logging in, which kinda defeats the whole purpose.