Sun, 19 Jul 2009

Wordpress - oh the horrors...

I've been working on a couple of new websites recently, including the Balbriggan Community Childcare Group website and the Internet Audio Network, both of which I've built on a base of Wordpress. Installation of the base wordpress package was relatively seamless, though I was a little disappointed that an upgrade was released only a day or two later. I'm still working on figuring out how best to do the upgrade. I suspect that it's going to require me to read documentation. Some kind of auto-update would be nice (for the record, an auto-update facility that does not clearly detail what file permissions you have to set to make it work is not truly useful.)

Like every software product these days, it seems that all the useful functionality is in themes and plugins, and it's here that the true horrors of what some PHP developers can produce becomes evident. While I've found some excellent code written in PHP and the WP core seems to be monitored carefully from a security point of view, the plugins seem to be a hit-and-miss affair. In fairness, perhaps I was just unlucky in the selection of plugins that I chose to download. I now have two plugins insisting that they be updated, despite me updating both to the latest respective versions. I suspect this might be a bug in wordpress in its handling of revision numbers for plugins (Major and minor version increments appear to work okay, for the record.)

Despite the not-quite-smooth ride, and the complications of learning yet another blogging / CMS / web framework, I'm finding WP a relative pleasure to work with. The featureset seems good, the plugins are prolific if nothing else, and I suspect the largest part of the learning curve is learning from others what plugins are good and which are more trouble than they're worth. The back-end MySQL database seems to work well and I'm contemplating moving this blog into something that uses a database for storage instead of the files-in-directories storage method of blosxom. That is, however, a task for another day.

posted at: 16:28 | path: /technical | permanent link to this entry

Fri, 03 Jul 2009

Airbus having a really bad month

It must be a really bad month for Airbus with Air France Flight AF447 crashing with the loss of all lives, and Yemenia Flight IY626 crashing with the loss of all but one life.

Crash investigators have now determined from the debris that AF447 hit the surface of the sea largely intact, and broke up on impact - which raises the question: What went wrong? All previous theories suggested that the plane broke up mid-air due to flying too fast or too slow in turbulent storm conditions.

Secondly, I read today that the surviving 14-year old from flight IY626 has been told that her mother is in the next hospital room, and not that she is missing, presumed dead. Is that fair? If you were the 14-year old, would you want to know the truth or be protected from it for a little while so you could recover?

posted at: 18:58 | path: | permanent link to this entry