I then tried to find a plugin that will help me deal with that mess and found none. There were few for older versions, but the ever changing WP internal structure that got more and more complex with each version forced those developers to give up.

So I did it manually. Deleted everything I did not want as category and thus ended up with 100+ posts in General category. Then one by one I assigned them to appropriate categories. Sucks, but it was the only thing that worked.

Does it really must be like this?

I did try to do it directly in the database. No way in hell. Posts are posts but are also pages. And maybe one more thing, not sure. Categories are not property of the posts or vice versa – instead they form a taxonomy. Which can be multiples for one cat/post pair. Each update is new taxonomy, you see. Really useful. And taxonomy is then one part of relationships table. The other part is object_id. Quite explanatory. You see object_id is …

Bah. I probably got half of the previous paragraph wrong. I can understand why no one wants to write a plugin that deals with that mess. I do hope Automattic has some sort of database re-factoring planned along the way. Otherwise this thing will self implode.

However, this has one interesting consequence in WordPress — this link confuses the_content() API call and it returns empty string. I removed this Adsense link (broken into several lines for clarity):

<a title="Ads by Google" href="http://pagead2.googlesyndication.com/pagead/iclk?sa=l


&amp;num=0&amp;client=ca-ref-pub-1148791019820431


&amp;adurl=https://www.google.com/adsense/%3Fhl%3Den_US%26ai%3DBSsF-kUZjRc6ZFpWA-wK2rKTwCI2f8heZ0tCAAsWNtwEAEAEgyM


61BEDLFkicOVDBw_S-A2D8pvuN9CWgAZeVyP0DsgEFYXBsdXPIAQHaARBodHRwOi8vYXBsd


XM6ODEv4AECgAIBlQITul4KqAMD


&amp;ai=BwfOLkUZjRc6ZFpWA-wK2rKTwCI2f8heZ0tCAAsWNtwEAEAEgyM61BEDLFkicOVDD64L


CAmD8pvuN9CWgAZeVyP0DsgEFYXBsdXPIAQHaARBodHRwO


i8vYXBsdXM6ODEv4AECgAIBlQITul4KqAMD">Adsense</a> 

and things were back in normal. No idea what is exact problem, just posting for the sake of others having the same problem. Thank you goes to commenter David that alerted me to this.

wget http://wordpress.org/latest.tar.gz
gzip -d latest.tar.gz
tar -xvf latest.tar
cp -r wordpress/* SITE/wpa

That should do it. Now off to upgrade rest of the blogs.

Note that wpa in the SITE/wpa above is my wordpress folder. Replace that with correct path for your installation.

This theme is technically identical to aplus theme: it has integrated time since and time of day plugins, support for gravatars, recent comments and blogroll display.

What’s new is that I changed the way design assets are loaded. Instead of pulling images from CSS, I used good old img tag and placed in inside of heading tags, where needed. Feels…strange. :)

Another thing is that Yasmeen’s photo is also simple img which makes it very easy to block. If that image is office-unfriendly for you, but you like the colours and would like to use the theme, then simply add the image to ad-block (whichever you use).
This also makes it very easy to change the image with something truly yours (when I actually offer it as download). The image can be 200px wide and unlimited in height, so you will have fun playing around.

This theme was a really long way in making. I started with something quite different and eventually changed everything but the main image.
The space at the top is perfect for ad placement, but I have not bothered to set any placeholders for it, so that would be your part to do.

Way forward

I do not offer this theme for the download yet, nor I have any idea when I would. To be easily customizable, I’m thinking of implementing sIFR, but that will have to wait some time.

Knowing me, that would either be 1–2 days or several months. Hey — even in the state like this, it waited a good year or something…

Tonight I dug in into WP core and found that the problematic part is line 76 in file wp-includes/functions-formating.php. When you remove that line, all is displaying nice.

$pee = preg_replace('!(</pre><pre .*?>)(.*?)</pre>!ise',
" stripslashes('$1') .  clean_pre('$2')  . '' ", $pee);

Since wpautop function is not really required in my case (I write entire HTML for my posts), I instead opted to comment out this filter — it’s line 64 in wp-includes/default-filters.php:

// add_filter('the_content', 'wpautop');

I downloaded 1.5 on the soft-launch day, but had no time until this weekend to actually try it. I read the announcement, read the reactions and reviews, but I was mainly interested in two things:
/category-title/post-title/ permalinks and themes.

Permalinks

I have hacked my way to such permalinks in 1.2.1 version, but it was a lot of work. There were some loose ends left and I did not want to dive any further into it. It was also puzzling would I feel benefits from this or any future WP upgrade since all public pages on my blog used few plugins I put together, which were mostly copies of 1.2 code base.

Thus with this transition to WP 1.5, I abandoned my changes and now use integrated permalink options. First the good things — default permalinks work really well. WP will, when you save new permalink structure, update your .htaccess file with appropriate mod_rewrite rules — really great from usability perspective.

It does that each time you save the structure. Thus if you do this, then mix your own rewrite rules with WP’s, and then again save the permalink structure (for whatever reason) you will loose your rules, because WP overwrites everything inside its comment lines. Even though that’s reasonable to expect, there should be a note placed in .htaccess about this, so sleepy developers like me won’t lose more sleep when doing changes in 2am.

The one thing I don’t like is that permalinks for category are, by default, prefixed with category. Hopefully, some future version will change this default behavior. For now, I needed to hack wp-includes/classes.php file and update this line:

function get_category_permastruct() {
	...
	if (empty($this->category_base))
		$this->category_structure = $this->front . 'category/';
	...
}

into this:

		$this->category_structure = $this->front;

Rewrite rules that WP creates already handle this. I’m not sure why developers add the cruft — when I removed this everything worked just fine. The only reason I can figure out is that it can collide with existing directories with the same name — category archive would not be accessible then.

This applies to me, actually. I have, for example, wch directory which contains intro and examples for the scripts, but no files in the actual directory — exactly because of this category permalink problem. That’s how I wanted it. To make permalink works, I explicitly added rules like this, after the WordPress rules:

RewriteRule ^(wch)/?$ /index.php?category_name=wch [QSA,L]

Themes and Pages

The concept of themes is good and easily extensible. I created my theme in several hours, and then spent days playing around. It’s that fun.

Pages, new feature in 1.5, are also great. Using archives.php from default theme as example, I created Feeds, monthly and category archive pages. Simple and powerful.

With pages, I think I encountered one bug. Once you add pages, WP updates its part of .htaccess, but it writes the category rules (mentioned above) to the wrong place. They should always be at the end, but it places them in the middle, before the entry and by-month rules. This in turn gives 404 for them. Make sure you check those every time you make changes in Options or add new page.

Wish list

1.5 upgrade is totally worthwhile. All the things developers did are useful and welcome.

In future versions, I would like to see:

• clean category permalinks, without cruft, by default.
• Option to turn paging off, on archive pages.
• The use of normal absolute links like /browsers/, not full links like http://sitename/browsers/. There is no need to use full absolutes for every link in the blog.
• There should be a short and long description for categories. Short one could be used for title attribute on links, and long one as description on category archive page. Since I use HTML in descriptions, it can’t go inside the title.
• Facility to preview post using the selected theme.
• Facility to move post between categories.
• Facility to list posts in category, not just month.

Use dynamic publishing

I grew weary of daily, slow static republishing using MT 2.6x, each time when one spamming whore managed to pass through MT-Blacklist

Use nice URLs

I have changed my URLs once and realized I did brake a lot of links while doin’ nothing to make them easier to guess. I want to use /category/post-title/

Build custom templates

I want to craft my own way of index and archives display + have enough freedom to build custom pages for examples

These are the impressions I wrote back then.

Movable Type

I hate the fact that I have to register for TypePad just to be able to download free version. Took me three tries to force myself to do it. Eventually did it. Had high hopes. Really like the interface look&feel.

First attemp to import old entries stuck, without errors or anything. Simply stopped. I deleted the weblog, tried again, this time it worked.

I needed to read the help to figure out how to assign a formerly parent category as sub category of something. When you click “move”, you get the category you want to move listed alongside the rest of the categories; now, that is plain stupid.

There is no option to build everything dynamically. You can:

• Build All Templates Statically
• Build Only Archive Templates Dynamically
• Set Each Template’s Build Options Separately

No way to simply set all as dynamic. I need to go through each template and set it manually. Huh?! Is 6A trying to tell me that MT is so perfomance-weak it can’t handle being 100% dynamic?

Keep in mind that by using dynamic publishing, each un-cached page view will result in a number of database queries to build the page. Depending on the performance of your web server and the complexity of your templates, this may take anywhere from a fraction of a second to several seconds.

Yep, looks like they are trying to tell me exactly that.

Another new feature: page-level caching. This feature gives you near-static page speed. Kewl; where is that in the options? Err…nowhere. You need to manually create directory for it, then hack the templates by adding one line of code somewhere…It should be placed just above the line that reads “$mt->view();””.

You got to be kidding me..? No, they are not. Moreover, to even use dynamic publishing, you need to create templates_c directory in the web site root.

Why did not they created those dirs by themself? Why it is not in /mt directory, where the code already have all the rights to do what is necessary?

I could go on and on…But it is late, and I have work to do. I’m very disappointed with what 6A published after so much time. I feel like they were working solely on TypePad/TypeKey services, and only recently started to do something with MT, and jumped to release too soon. Maybe I’m wrong. But since the final release is driving such thoughts, this is nowhere close to be good.

TextPattern

Look & feel entirely strange. After several days, I’m still lost and can’t get used to it. First thing I did was to turn clean URLs on. Then I did some other things, moved around. Imported MT entries using a modified WordPress importing script — worked like a charm. Then clicked “view site” and…nothing. Not a single thing, except two select boxes and two links.

Turns out that clean URLs require .htaccess. Well, I’m on a Windows 2003/IIS at home, which is my only web server. Installing Apache just to be able to build the blog is like using cannon to shoot the fly.

Easy gateway option was to build 404.php that will handle redirects localy (good enough for checking things out), and use mod_rewrite at the new server. However, I really, really dislike the interface and I felt that this was too much to do just to try things out. Maybe it’s just me, but it simply did not work for me.

WordPress

Lots of people moved to this one after MT licensing mambo-jumbo. Matt is heavily promoting it, seems there’s a fine amount of development happening, with regular nightly builds.

Looks like interface designer just passed by it. Well, it’s better than TP, much less alien. Found permalinks option; .htaccess again. Really frustrating.

Has built-in link manager with categories, exactly what I need. Importing entries from MT is standard option, quick and easy. No new tag set to learn. Customization is done by way of writing your own functions that work with existing content. Joollyyy…a chance to finally learn PHP.

Now what?

OK.…

If I don’t want to mangle with .htaccess, I will need to create custom 404 page that will do the redirects. Or I should do static MT pages, like before. That’s not an option, actually. So, MT is out.

I’m left with two new blog apps. TP is very attractive with its txp tags and separation of content and presentation. However, after working with MT tag system, I just did not feel like learning another.
WP is more straight-forward. You write regular PHP. Also gives you those damn .htaccess rewrite rules, so I easily post them to my new *nix based server. TP does not give me this.

WP wins. Will see how it goes further.