For those thinking of getting their hands dirty with blog technology (it’s worth it for the education alone) this might be of some interest. In the 18 months I’ve been using WordPress, I’ve rarely had significant problems. Sometimes plugins don’t work with certain themes but generally nothing that could not be overcome relatively easily. Things have taken a sharp turn for the worse this last couple of days.
First up was the note from Donncha (one of the lead devs on WP) that 2.1.1 users need to upgrade toutes suite to 2.1.2. OK – so I have a number of implementations, no worries. Just follow the usual routine of backing up the database and then apply the fix.
But…I’ve also been trying to make WordPress MU work. This is the multi-user version of WP which is already multi-user anyway. Installation is very easy and something newbie self hosted folk on WP would welcome. But that’s where advantages for many businesses would seem to stop. I see no real value in MU for modest organisations where there is a limited blog requirement but perhaps the need for multiple authors. WPMU brings a number of potential problems.
- Many of the themes that work perfectly well in WP break in WPMU.
- There are not that many plugins which have been destruction tested so it is hard to know what does and does not work.
- WPMU comes with no plugins so you have to start from scratch.
- Assuming WP2 plugins will work is foolish – there can be some serious code scratching to undertake.
I’ve no doubt that WPMU is great for large organisations with solid PHP and CSS skills. But those skills are in short supply. That is to be expected for a service that is relatively new but which has its roots in a very popular blog engine.
I’m not convinced WPMU is that scalable. It may be capable of delivering millions of page views and supporting many users. But that’s only a part of the equation. I have a number of WP.com accounts which use WPMU and all my accounts run like treacle. Several colleagues have WP.com hosted sites and theirs often run comparatively slowly. And no, it’s not my broadband connection. Because I experience similar problems in the WPMU forums.
I ripped out WPMU and installed the latest version of WP into a greenfield site. Out of the blue, I start getting errors like:
- Cannot delete posts
- Cannot create categories
- Cannot delete sample blogroll member entries
- Cannnot upgrade the status of another user to admin
The error message in each case is ‘You don’t have permission to do that.’ Yes I do – I’m admin buddy.
This problem has been doing the rounds for at least 7 months with various nuances on the topic. It’s worth following the various threads because this seems to be a regular if sporadic occurrence.
It turns out that in some greenfield installs, some Javascript weirdness can occur which denies the user of their admin rights. seanwedig has an answer. He has passed this on as a bug report with a suggested solution. The community seemed to find it works so I made the same code changes. And yes – it fixes the problem. And no, you don’t have to be a rocket scientist to make the changes and it does not seem to have any deleterious effect on other functions.
Blog technology is moving at incredible speed and things that were impossible a year ago are well within the grasp of today’s Excel power. They’re not so easy that your neighvbour’s dog will pick it up in 2 minutes. They require investment in time to learn a little about MySQL, something about scripting and a touch of PHP. I do recommend learning CSS because that’s how you can make sites stand out from a design perspective.
To complete this week’s learning experiences, I managed to inadvertently delete an important database – one that wasn’t backed up. Doh!
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