Our original blog-or-news site was programmed in-house, based on the Zope database program. We wrote it before today’s crop of slick blogging software existed.
While it served us reasonably well, the chief blogger, Yours Truly, found himself suffering from a nearly fatal case of blog envy.
Other bloggers had tag clouds that allowed readers to quickly home in on their favorite subjects. They displayed links to recent comments on the sidebar, allowing talkers to easily spot hot topics. And when you commented, you could actually see the article while you commented.
Why, other bloggers could even whip out articles in WYSIWIG!
Meanwhile… on the nuts-n-bolts side… since we have been steadily heaping MySQL this and PHP that to our servers for some time, switching to a matched blogging platform with all the bells-and-whistles seemed like a natural. As my reluctant blog programmer is sick of supporting his custom-built blog, he was easily convinced to take the leap.
So. Over the last few weeks, we’ve been migrating our news system to WordPress. Most of the time has been used programming and testing the database migration, creating redirects for our old home-style links and mashing-up various apps that were never designed to co-exist.
Considering the complexity, the transition has gone fairly well. But that’s largely a matter of perspective.
My programmer notes that open source projects have varying levels of community involvement. He says individual help requests get more attention in the Zope community. He speculates that it may be due to the difference in post volume.
He has also concluded that “Zope has a more sophisticated cache manager in general.”
In fact, after we interfaced Zope with squid, we easily withstood tens of thousands of hits per hour. My programmer says he’s finally tweaked WordPress caching. But I’ll be on pins-and-needles till the next time an article gets slammed by 30,000 page views in an hour. If WordPress withstands such an attack, I’ll breathe easy again.
Blog programming issues are important. But the real critiques come from the users, both blogger and bloggee.
In general, I’m pleased. It’s easier to post. Comments are easier… we display the last few comments… and I got my tag cloud. My programmer even jerry-rigged an auto-news aggregator that works kind of like a news scroll, adding new items frequently. Headlines from newsfeeds we like are automatically added to the NewsWire section with an excerpt.
We’re tinkering with Email Battles NewsWires to come up with the right presentation. Suggestions are welcome.
Important Note About Blog Spam: Email Battles NewsWires are:
- not submitted as part of our Google Sitemap
- not searchable on our site; and,
- update quite frequently.
I think that renders them useless as blog spam.
With any luck, our NewsWire teasers will help you discover a great new source for information (which, I hope, is almost but not quite as good as Email Battles).
What’s Missing?
With my custom-built Zope site, I could easily generate a properly formatted list of related articles for those who wanted more information. I don’t know how to do that yet with WordPress.
On some of my computers, my Firefox is so tricked out that, when I save a post, I find myself staring at a blank page. I reload the draft from [Manage] to continue editing. On another system, I get a tinyMCE error when I try to invoke the HTML editor, which apparently derives from a conflict between WordPress and a Firefox tabbing extension. I’ll untangle these ticky tack annoyances when I get a free minute or two.
Submitting NewsWire newsfeeds, Newsbytes, and Feature stories is a bloody pain in the tail. But then, it always has been at Email Battles. I hope to make it all more contributor and administrator friendly.
Some fields didn’t end out quite right in the conversion. Occasionally, you’ll find an old article that leads with a literally printed-out link. If you run across something that’s kind of screwy, I’d appreciate it if you’d drop me a line.
Despite all that, I’m glad we did it. I got my tag cloud.
If you’re considering new blogging software…
Vinnie Garcia wrote a comparison of three of the most popular blogging platforms for sitepoint in November 2005: Movable Type, WordPress and TextPattern. That’s a good place to start.
13 comments
Comments feed for this article
July 26th, 2006 at 11:36 pm
Marc
What does your programmer think of the actual code of WordPress. Last time I looked at it, to debug a problem, it seemed to be a bit of a mess.
July 27th, 2006 at 7:54 am
dataguy
I’m one of those who thinks tag clouds are a cool idea but have not found them that useful (rather use search). The news feed is very nice. Thanks for the update to your site.
July 27th, 2006 at 8:01 am
Aaron
Marc,
I can’t really comment on the messiness of WP’s code, because we haven’t broken into it. WP addresses most of our needs out-of-the-box, and we’ve either written or found plugins to handle the rest.
July 27th, 2006 at 8:10 am
kedai
you never mentioned the blog product you used, but i’d assume it’s coreblog.
you should have tried bitakora before the jump to wp. it’s the later blog product, and caters for the wp crowds, methinks.
has tags, has wysiwyg, and more.
http://www.codesyntax.com/bitakora
July 27th, 2006 at 8:21 am
Aaron
Kedai,
Actually, our Zope blogging system was entirely home-grown. When we decided to migrate, we evaluated all of the Zope-based products. There are several nice options out there, including bitakora, if you’re dead-set against leaving Zope.
For us, WP’s maturity won the day.
We still use and love Zope for many other projects.
July 27th, 2006 at 4:19 pm
b
Migrated? What’s wrong with the word moved? Or am i missing summat?
July 27th, 2006 at 5:21 pm
BJ Gillette
I dunno. Guess I just liked the word “migrated.” Boy. Tough crowd.
July 27th, 2006 at 9:36 pm
Tom Lazar
have you considered Quills[1]? We got a tag cloud[2], too, you know
(and WYSIWYG-editing…)
[1] http://plone.org/products/quills
[2] http://tomster.org/
July 28th, 2006 at 8:34 am
Steve
Why is it, whenever someone announces that “We’ve switched to product X”, someone always has to chime in with the “You should have gone with product Y”?
Just becauseyou find that a product (bitakora) suits your needs better than another (WP), doesn’t mean it will suit everyone’s needs better. Hell, you don’t even know what this sites needs really are, so how can you possibly claim that some other product meets those needs?
July 28th, 2006 at 8:57 am
BJ Gillette
Hi dataguy.
Tag clouds give me a quick feel for a site. For instance, if I’m only interested in spam, I can go directly to features, newsbytes and newswire stories that deal only with spam.
With WordPress, searching has improved dramatically. The prior jerry-rigged search was so bad that, when I wanted to find something on my own site, I used Google with the site criteria.
The recent reduction in my output, is largely due to figuring out how to work juggle the new WordPress system, with the parts that are still in our old Zope system, like article submission by external contributors. It’s a freakin pain.
Even Angie, who does a lot of Newsbytes, must still submit through our Zope setup on the website, instead of WordPress.
My ultimate fantasy is to provide a home for other email, IM, network, operating system, security, etc, specialists to run their own blogs, supplemented by other Email Battles bloggers and NewsWires fitted to their subject areas and taste, to help keep news fresh. (Don’t tell anybody.) I figure a small group contributing together might evolve into yet-another-Internet-oasis. Plus, any one of us wouldn’t have to work so darned hard. (This thing’s killing me. ) That multiple-blogger goal is one of the obstacles making the submission changes so tricky.
Come to think of it, when b complained about my use of the term “migrated” as opposed to “moved”, I should have said, “We are migrating, as opposed to moving.”
That’s progress. It always looks easier than it turns out to be. I think readers, contributors, bloggers and Aaron will all be happier in the end.
July 28th, 2006 at 9:22 am
BJ Gillette
Hi Tom.
Aaron should be the guy to answer this, but he’s off on his 5th Anniversary celebration. At the risk of misrepresenting the facts, I’ll take a stab at the plone/Quill thing.
Our Aaron-built blog depended heavily on some Zope add-ons that were left behind when Zope made the big switch to the current version.
In addition, I have business needs that demand more MySQL, I’ve pushed him into a bunch of PHP apps, and on top of that, the poor guy actually has real work to do.
As if all of that’s not enough, the Chief Yammerer has been mesmerized by all the WordPress chatter, and I have a million things I want the blog to be able to do without requiring an extra minute of his time or mine.
I think Aaron would tell you he just aimed for the path of least resistance.
Was WP the absolute best choice? Probably not.
Was it the easiest? Yes… I think.
November 6th, 2006 at 7:55 pm
tetsuo
Could you place a bit on how you exported the data out of zodb? Did you export to XML, a flat file, or shove it right into mysql? Were there images that you held in zope that were in the database? if so how did u get those out with the db dump? Your scenario is EXACTLY what i’m facing with our site and want to move to.
many thanks!
November 7th, 2006 at 8:56 am
Aaron
We exported the entire Zope-based blog as one gigantic SQL statement, designed to fit WP’s data structure, which took a bit of trial-and-error to get just right. We left the old graphics in the ZODB, new ones are handled by WP.