Some comment spammer just started crawling my whole site, so I finally had to track down and install the SecureImage plugin for WordPress. It seems to have done the trick… Thanks Thom and Dave.

I just ran across agkamai’s Cat2Tag plugin for Wordpress — looks great. My first suggestion would be to add type-ahead tag guessing like on the del.icio.us post interface.

I finally got around to upgrading to WordPress 1.5. Why? To get back on the trunk, and to get some of the new features, especially templates and pages. Overall, my upgrade went pretty smoothly. I had to replicate a few of my core hacks, but 1.5 also eliminated the need for some of those.

To start with, I followed the 1.2 -> 1.5 instructions on the wiki. Surprisingly, I managed to create a theme based on my customized index page pretty quickly, which was a relief.

* I had capcha\-based anti\-comment-spam plugin installed before, and I haven’t put that back in place yet. I’m hoping the built-in stuff will improve things so that it’s not necessary, but that’s probably asking too much.
* The Loop has changed, and so I had to update my code that pulls in moblog and now_playing posts, but that went fine.
* I had written a function to fetch and echo out my del.icio.us links (filtered by category, if appropriate). I replaced this with rawlinson’s lovely rssLinkList plugin. Nice work!
* I had to fix what I consider to be a bug in wp_list_cats(). For some reason, this function doesn’t include a seperator parameter, so that it spews out categories seperated by either <li> or <br>, neither of which is what I want. So I hacked template- functions- category.php to add this parameter to wp_list_cats() and list_cats(). Ugh.
* Since my v1.2 setup uses the same index.php to display both the primary view and the archive view, I had added a couple of vars into wp-blog-header.php to help me with this. I’m sure there’s a better way, but for now I re-added a $in_archives flag and a $real_category_name variable, but nastily pulled straight from the GET string.

A few other hacks of mine should be eliminated if I move to using Flickr instead of my own embryonic WP-based gallery. I’ll post seperately on that topic.

Lastly, the only thing really missing is a tag-style UI for entering categories when posting/editing. I don’t care for the plugins that add “tags” as additional meta-data alongside the existing category mechanism - I see these as one and the same. It’s just a UI issue — for me, the long list of checkboxes is awkward, and also makes it impossible to add a category on the fly. All I want is a single text field with tag guessing and the full list of tags shown below, just like the new del.icio.us posting interface. There’s at least one plugin that seems to be heading in this direction, so I’ll try that soon.

PS - the category edit screen is unwieldy when the number of categories gets large. There should be a nice UI solution to this.

More as I think of it. Thanks to the WP team for 1.5 - it’s cleaner, and I like the new features. Way to go!

I’m in the process of upgrading to WordPress 1.5 — please bear with me…

wbloggar is a pain. It’s nice to have an editor app to write blog entries, but for some reason when I edit an entry with wbloggar and then post it again, it sets posts.post_category and post2cat.category_id to -1, which causes all wordpress to barf. You can’t fix it from the WP interface, so I’ve had to go straight to mysql to fix it when this happens. Ugh. Maybe someone out there knows of a better blog editor?

Why don’t I just use WP’s online post interface? 1) it’s online, and sometimes it takes me a while to complete a post, and 2) it has these f**king HORRIBLE keyboard shortcuts that cause the whole entry to be erased sometimes. I know that would be easy to fix, but I haven’t bothered yet because I usually prefer to write offline anyhow.

Also, Picasa2 is sooo nice — BUT I can’t get past the fact that I don’t have a way to easily post images to WordPress. I spent some time a while back scripting up an interface btw iMatch and WP, and it works so well I don’t want to abandon it. Luckily the edits and captions I put in place with Picasa seem to stick when I suck the photos into iMatch, so not too much is lost. It’s really too bad that Picasa isn’t a more open platform - maybe someone has figured out the database format? Or maybe there isn’t a database… But then where are the tags and captions stored?