I had to install a WordPress installation on IIS last week (I really would not recommend this is done – a linux install is so much easier) and part of that installation requires the install of MySQL for the database. The most current version is 5.1.35 but unfortunately there is a big bug with the install. It completely fails to install with the error message of “The wizard was interrupted before MySQL Server 5.1. could be completely installed.” With no useful explanation in the dialog box, event viewer or installation log files it is extremely hard to work out what is wrong. The solution for the time being is to download the 5.1.34 installation. The windows version is available at filehippo. It doesn’t help that the official MySQL web page does not link to previous versions of the software either. After logging a “me too” comment on what now seems to be the official bug report at MySQL Bugs – #45418, the number of people with the same problem has increased dramatically.
I had to register with the MySQL website to log my bug and they sent me an email a couple of days later mentioning the release of the new software (that has the problems) – rather annoying as it’s not a good idea to publicize software that doesn’t even install. I tweeted my comment that they should fix the issue before emailing out and I got a reply that they are aware of the problem and are working on it. No post has been added to the bug report though.
My lifestream plugin in WordPress that keeps track of most of my social networking sites suddenly stopped working a few days ago and I was not sure how to kick start it back into action again. It turns out that disabling the plugin and then re-enabling the plugin adds the relevant jobs back into the wpcron system. My Lifestream (that appears on Absoblogginlutely! – IRL is now being updated correctly (and also shows my geocaching finds now too).
In common with a lot of bloggers today I upgraded my blogs to WordPress 2.8. Thankfully I didnt have any problems upgrading any of them. So far in the few minutes that I’ve used WordPress I’ve not actually noticed anything new or drastically different.
Ok, so creating my google sitemap didn’t help due to a setting I had already setup in WordPress. When I was testing the migration I had set the privacy options under Settings/ Privacy to block search engines but allow other visitors. This had the unfortunate result of adding the disallow * in the robots.txt file – thus blocking google. Setting it back to make my blog visible has (hopefully) done the trick. Note that the robots.txt is automatically generated by wordpress so you not find one if you go looking with shell access – just access the file through a browser.
Hopefully this setting has not harmed by Google Page rank too much.
Update – just checked and my posts are now appearing in Google again – phew!
I was asked in the comments why I migrated from MovableType to WordPress. There were several reason why I decided to make the switch. The primary reason was the incredibly long time it would take to publish a post in MT. I could actually hit Post in MT, fire up a new web page, connect to my testing WP site, create a new post, enter the title, paste the content in, hit publish and then view the website. In the meantime MT would still be thinking about saving the original post.
The time taken to republish the site after a change such as a design change was so great that some of my older posts still had old styles as the republishing system would time out before it could complete the task.
One of the other things I really like about WordPress is the ease of upgrading the software to the latest version. Yes, WordPress has had more releases, but when it takes about 2 minutes to upgrade the system its really not a problem (especially now that there is an automatic upgrade function). MovableType has also just released a new security release which is one of the reasons why I made the switch *now*.
I was also hoping that the spam filtering would be better on WordPress than MovableType. I’ve had several idiots spamming the blog with russian comments in MovableType – they wouldn’t get through but I would have to go and delete them. In the one day that I’ve had WordPress up I think I’ve had more spam comments get through to the spam queue, but again it was easy to delete them all – a “select all” option and then delete, followed by an “all done” about 3 seconds later.
Themes in WordPress seem to be a lot cleaner and there are a lot more themes out there to pick from – MT’s selection was pretty small. This wasn’t that much of an issue to me as I was pretty pleased with my existing theme in MT (and have had it copied by a few people so it couldn’t have been that bad!)
The big concern about switching from MT to WP is typically due to the fact that WP is database driven and therefore doesn’t have any of the pages (by default) saved on the machine so if the database is down, then so is the website. This site doesn’t have that many visitors so I don’t see this as being that much of a problem and normally if the sql database is down, then its probably likely that the web server is going to be down too.
I’ve not looked at the various caching plugins as I doubt I’m going to need it, but it is nice to know this option is available. I may switch it on later once I’ve got the site up and running and I’m not making many design changes to it.
For those of you interested, I will also be posting my experience about the upgrade and some hints and tips – the existing WordPress migration documentation is in dire need of being updated!
I was hoping to get the switch from MovableType to WordPress up and running for the 1st of January but I didn’t want to go live until I was ready and near a keyboard in case there was problem. I’ve spent several hours this weekend getting the layout and stuff ok to go live. For those of you using feed readers to see this, you probably won’t see much difference although I have added a few options to the feedburner feeds and also include my delicious saves now. Do stop by the main website and let me know what you think though. Any issues then let me know, most of the work and testing was done with firefox as that is what most of you use. There are a few cosmetic issues with internet explorer that I’ll work on over the next week or so.
I’ll also be posting some hints and tips on the migration steps too.
There’s finally a Wordcamp coming to Columbus, Ohio on the 16th May 2009. There’s not a lot of news on the Wordcamp Columbus blog at the moment but I’m sure that will change as the date gets closer. I’m looking forward to this, especially as I’ve just switched from MT to WordPress! This is in addition to the Podcamp Ohio in June 2009
As I am now not the only person working on a WordPress based site, it was time to look at providing the ability to load plugins from within WordPress – Installer – the plugin looks like it will do the job – now all I need is some more plugins to use it with!
I upgraded wordpress on my uniform server to 2.0.3 and got stuck in an endless loop stating that I needed to upgrade. Solved by running the upgrade url in ie instead of firefox.
Hmmm – if you are like me and forget your admin password, then you can follow the instructions at Tamba to reset the password. Note that this does rely on you remembering your phpadmin password – which shouldn’t be the same as the wordpress one!