I’ve been working on this off and on since this summer and I never got around to wrapping it all up. Now I finally made it so far as to making it usable. It’s “Yet-another-wordpress-gallery-plugin” I know, but I’ve been looking for a gallery plugin that suits me and that doesn’t require any third-party gallery software to work. So I jotted down some lines of code and out of that emerged the GDC Gallery plugin.

It’s quite feature less at the moment but I’m working on adding some additional features that are “nice to have”. If you are used to using Gallery2 and it’s WP plugin, GDC Gallery will probably piss you off. It’s not even in the ball park feature wise. You can upload pictures, one by one, and tag them. Thats it for now.

I chose to distribute it now because I want feed back, thoughts and what not before I get too far in the coding. And by releasing it before hand people wanting to learn more about WP coding can follow along more easily. So, head over to the code section and grab a copy. And then let me know of all the quirks and errors it produces.

Detta är ett inledande utkast till en diskussion angående skapandet av ett CRM(Customer Relationship Management)-verktyg baserat på GNOME plattformen och med GNU/Linux i botten. Det är min fasta övertygelse att med Ubuntu kommer GNU/Linux och FLOSS rörelsen att nå ut till en bredare massa än aldrig förr. Sedan ungefär ett år tillbaka tycker jag att man kunnat höra/läsa om olika FLOSS projekt i både radio, TV och tryckt media och det är väldigt glädjande. Jag har till och med fått höra från tillförlitlig källa att en svensk datortillverkare av bärbara datorer ligger bra till för att erbjuda förinstallation och support av Ubuntu på sina datorer.

Allt detta är väldigt glädjande, dock finns det alltid smolk i bägaren. Ett område där jag inte kan hitta riktigt gångbara alternativ till Microsofts plattform är just CRM. Det finns en del projekt där ute som är i varierande grad färdiga och funktionella men de jag kunnat hitta är webbaserade system som i princip endast fungerar i sin egen miljö utan integrering till andra applikationer. Read the rest of this entry »

I had a little downtime a couple of days here. The culprit was a package upgrade on the host that snuck by the administrator, the upgrade overwrote some of the configuration files for the database server. So when the server had to bee rebooted, due to a system hang, the database server didn’t go back online. Hence the downtime. It happens.

New Wordpress version

If you havn’t noticed yet, Wordpress has had a major version upgrade to 2. This new release includes features such as a completely rewritten backend, faster administration due to Ajax, inline uploading and faster posting to name a few. The interesting part is the inline uploading and faster posting parts. “How can you upload files to a webhost through the webbrowser without having to reload the post?” you ask. Well, it’s all due to a ‘new’ way of programming websites. I put new in qutationmarks because in reality the technology isn’t new, it just hasn’t been used to any extent until now. You see, you can make a http request with javascript, and thusly you can have a form which uploads a file, but instead of calling the page via the usual form submit button you make javascript call the page for you. That way you don’t have to refresh your page and wait until you request has been handled. You simply go about your business. The same goes for the posts.

What does that mean for wordpress?

Alot of things probably, but the most noticeable ones must be that you can now upload files along your post, say images for instance, without having to jump around inside the administration interface. That is really nice. Also there is now a ‘Drag-and-drop’ feature that allows you to upload images with your post and then drag them into the new and improved WYSIWYG editor. Also posting is much smoother due to, as I wrote earlier, Ajax. Some people do alot of site pinging with their posts and that could drag post times down into the dirt. Since this is now done in the backend you don’t have to wait until it’s finished before you go on about your business.

What, there is more you say!?

Yes, lots more. But I’ll only bring up two more points here. There are now two plugins pre-packaged with WP that are well worth mentioning. One is the Akismet spam blocker for comments. The more you, and others, use it the better it gets at detecting spam. There is one glitch however, it seems as though you have to have a Wordpress.com account in order to get it working. But if you are fine with that just go ahead and get one.

The other new plugin is the Wordpress Database Backup which lets you backup your entire database to a single file if you wish, and the safely store it in case you ever need it. Great thing to do when upgrading, for example.

This site will be ported to Wordpress shortly, so expect some glitches.

This last month I’ve been up to the neck writing various CMS related things. First and foremost I’ve been focusing on my companys intranet basically rewriting it from the ground up. The last time I wrote it I had to put it together in a relatively short time frame, so it didn’t turn out that well. It didn’t scale properly and if you wanted to add a feature it meant quite extensive re-writing of the entire system. So that has been dealt with and a module system has been implemented.

In working on the intranet the question arose if we perhaps could use the eminent Drupal system. Since we need to use SQLite at work and there is no such support for that in Drupal I had to look into the possibility of writing a database schema for Drupal to use SQLite. Now SQLite is not ANSI SQL compatible, and so some things had to be done in the terms of parsing every sql query before sending it and, if needed, edit it so SQLite could understand. That was not the biggest problem, it turned out someone had already done that for me :). What made me turn back to my own solution was the simple fact that I didn’t have the energy to convert the file that contains the defenitions for creating the tables in MySQL.

I have also fiddled around some with Mambo, Wordpress and Karlstadunix’s homepage. So to sum it all up, the PHP and SQL code that is currently pertruding my inner cortex is enough to put a sweet purple haze on the environment :).