joelwalsh

Serious question: what is the most appropriate forum for updating to 2.0?

That did it for me (unchecking “remember me” that is).

Question: what do you think is an upper post limit at which this plugin no longer is feasible?

And to get on-topic, I purchased WP Elite, because I have quite a number of blogs to manage. I soon requested a refund, because it seems that if you set a blog up right in the first place, WP Elite isn’t going to have much to do.

Thanks for that–you’re saying that WP elite only sets up the blogs, it won’t help you manage them all from a single admin? What I want is to be able to go from site to site adding posts and moderating comments without having to re-type in the urls and wait for the thing to load etc. If WP Elite doesn’t do that, I don’t think I’ve understood it very well.

I know with postie you can add posts via email but I want to check them when they go live anyway.

Finally to go off-topic again. I would to be able to customize my installs much than I am now. I would like all of my options already selected in the files I upload. I searched the forums, but was not able to find any help for this.

I would be very interested in this, too. What I have done on a couple occassions is just to “move” the original site. That is, I created a blank Mysql database for the new site, then inserted the tables from the old installation, and ftp’d the theme and plugins. Everything will be exactly like your old site.

One problem is that you will also be porting over all your posts, pages and comments. You can edit this stuff in the mysql file. However, in practice, directly editing a mysql file is treacherous. It is very simple in principle to edit a mysql file, but the devil is in the details–remove a single character that you shouldn’t and hte db won’t work and the error messages won’t be too helpful.

Other big problem is that it turns into a huge headache if there is any server incongruity whatsoever between the old and new installations’ servers (and if you are doing all these sites for SEO you’re probably using different hosts for most of them). Worse, the servers can be running the same version of Apache and still these little problems crop up. It can be an issue of server permissions, for instance–once, when I chmod’ed a directory to 666, the whole site went blank, some server security thing (I guess) preventing access. In short, it’s a headache.

If anyone knows an easier way, or a team of offshore programmers who do this stuff well, please do let us know.

You might think this would be an instance of “WP wasn’t intended as a CMS, just a blog, and so you weren’t supposed to go around making copies of it.” But I have never heard of any CMS, at least an OS one, that makes it all easy to port the installation and make changes to it. If anything, WP is easier on this count since it is so code-light. Of course, I may have missed something, so if anyone knows another CMS that is good for this purpose of creating multiple sites on multiple servers, please do let me know.

Thank you, podz, for the clarification.

If anyone has actually used this software and sees fit to share their experiences here, I would greatly appreciate it.

It really would save time to be able to manage multiple WP installations all from a single admin.

Of course, part of the reason I went with WP is that its ultra-light code base makes installing multiple versions relatively simple, and the admin is very easy to use and fast to log into, especially with cookies. But a few seconds here and there do add up.

VK, you could also interpret “personal” as “just one publisher” as opposed to a community site such as drupal.

Wow, this guy sure has a lot of defenders. So I guess it is kosher to go and buy it? (That was why I was originally posting, to ask about buying it, not just to bash the guy.) But has anyone (podz help me out here) actually seen the thing used in action? It just sounds too good to be true, and like I said, their marketing materials don’t inspire confidence.

To be perfectly clear, I have nothing against using WP in a commercial context; I am using WP primarily in a commercial context (see: UpMarket Merchant Credit Card and UpMarket Website Content). It’s just an issue of what is ethical when you are distributing software and plugins. And the ethics is primarily of interest in terms of whether you can trust these people generally.

“That’s not true at all. You’re allowed to charge a fee for a GPL product. You just can’t restrict what someone does with that product once they pay for it.”

You’re saying that this guy has licensed his product under the GPL so that if I buy a copy I can give it away free? Somehow I doubt that; it would make much more sense for him to set it up so that it doesn’t touch the WP source code.

I know Denis releases the Semiologic theme/cms under the GPL, but what Denis does is as much a service as a product so the business model there is different.

Meanwhile, I don’t know of any CMSs that allow for multiple sites on mulitple servers to be administered from a common admin (except for FTP, the original CMS). Anyone know of any?

I understand your concerns about veering into libel or harming someone’s livelihood. So let me just make this clear: I am not saying that they are violating the GPL. In fact, I just said above that they probably have an excellent argument for not touching WP. I’m just wondering how this thing is set up in its specifics since they don’t offer a free-trial download and their website does not exactly inspire confidence. And no, questions of propriety should not be off-limits, especially when a business is skating so close to the limits of propriety in its own marketing materials.

This is very relevant to the community so I think it does belong here. What are the guidelines for what isn’t relevant to these boards?

Question: Someone contacts me and says “Can you install WP for me ?” I say “Yes, that ￡20” and they pay me. I even install some extra plugins. Have I broken the GPL ?
Answer: No.

You’re not distributing software in that case! You’re just providing installation services. The GPL was designed to encourage just such a transaction, building a cottage industry of service providers. But it was not meant to set up a cottage industry of private software development for distribution.

OK, I just checked out Drupal again, and I guess they do have nice permalinks and a few nicer designs now. But I swear I didn’t see any of that when I first checked them out over a year ago–and once you go with a system, you go with it; it’s too much work to retrofit from WP to Drupal.

Besides, Drupal and the other similar systems are intended more for community sites. There’s a lot of stuff in there that would just be bloat if you were just doing a simple content site with RSS feeds and user comments.

“they do NOT violate anything at all”

So they have, for instance, Semiologic’s permission to distribute the Semiologic plugins?

Even if they do stay within the legal boundaries of the GPL, aren’t they violating the spirit of it by using a GPL project as the basis for a closed-source software project?

By the way, GPL only allows you to distribute the code if you make it free–charging for it is out of the question. That’s the whole point of OpenSource. Anything else is forking the development.

My guess is that the WP Elite people’s arguments would be that they aren’t actually touching the WP code, they’re just building a sort of accessory that feeds into it but is no more dependent on the underlying code than a web browser.

WordPress was never meant to be used as a CMS. There are better systems, such as Drupal, for that.

No, Drupal is not much better than WordPress for using as a CMS. The default designs are just awful, it’s not as well integrated with RSS, it’s not as flexible. Above all, it doesn’t have the nice permalinks option (or else didn’t when I checked). In the end it’s not very good from a usability or SEO standpoint. The same can be said for the other OS CMSs such as Mambo.

Also, wordpress is officially billed as a publishing system, not just a blog. There are many CMS-style plugins for WP, such as “static frontpage.”

At any rate, I’m using it as a CMS and a simple “you shouldn’t be doing that” isn’t very helpful.

I don’t see why it would be impossible to create a single admin interface for multiple installations. Why hasn’t it been done? Maybe in part because of attitudes like yours.

Just a thought: are you absolutely sure your page templates have the appropriate headers identifying them as templates? Of course, if they worked in 1.52 they should work in 2.0, I guess, but just in case it’s a new template, that’s something to check.

But is there anything that lets you manage 10 sites from a single admin (different sites on different servers)?

If you’re using WP as a CMS rather than a blog, it does get cumbersome to log into each one individually.

And how is that you can create a private code project off an OpenSource one?

Any examples of their SE spam? They can’t be doing very well if they still have PR 0 for a site created in August (the last PR toolbar update was in October). A lot of these spammy sites seem to be all hopes and no results (thank the lord).

Thanks to all the people who have checked out the theme (over 200).

However, I’d really like some comments on it. I’d really appreciate it if you could post your comments here or on: https://upmarketmerchant.com/merchant-credit-card-theme-template/

Thanks

Joel