LightPress

As much as I like the concept of WP "pages", which should enable the use of WP as a lightweight CMS with built-in blogging, I do not think it is currently usable for anything more than very small personal sites. The problem is (again) in the liberal use that WP does of MySQL resources, and in the bad design of its DB layout.

I just finished inserting a couple of hundred pages in the db to move a site which is currently using a custom CMS to WP+LP, and imagine my surprise when trying to access "Manage Pages" in the WP admin console PHP exited with a

error. I raised

to 24M, restarted Apache, and......waited 25 seconds for the page to load!

A couple of months ago, Jerome wrote a quick and dirty WP plugin to display the data logged to MySQL from our Stats plugin. We never got around to release it, always hoping to find the time to add some extra functionality. As time is always short, and lp-stats may be useful to some of you, I have decided to release it while Jerome is on vacation. :) It's not even an alpha release, but I have been using it for quite some time without any problems.

K1.5 is a new LightPress theme, borrowing heavily from Michael Heilemann's beautiful K2 theme for WordPress. K1.5 is included in our latest release, 1.2.0 alpha 2 (tar.gz archive), which also features a few bugfixes and several minor improvements. On a clean install, alpha 2 automatically activates most tag-related plugins, and uses the archive and category list pages which were unused in previous releases.

If you are curious, you can see K1.5 in action on my English blog. I will probably migrate this site to K1.5 while we finish designing our new layout with Aaron Schaefer.

Patrick has just released the first user-contributed plugin for LightPress: TagSidebar. It will work only on the 1.2.0 alpha release, and will be included in the next alpha (beta?) if Patrick has nothing against it. Thanks, Patrick!

Fresh off the press, we've decided to release a very early alpha release of LightPress 1.2.0. What's new in this version? Integrated tags.

There's certainly more changes coming for 1.2 but we didn't want to keep this feature to ourselves. Remember that this is an early alpha, so it hasn't gone through much rigorous testing. That said, I've been running it on my personal site for the past few days and it seems to be working out ok. :)

What you get:

• Add tags to posts and pages in the post editing screen. Tags need to be separated by commas but can contain whatever you wish, even spaces.

• Display tags for each post with the PostTags plugin.

• Display a tag cloud with the TagCloud plugin.

• Add your tags (and categories) to the meta keywords field in the page header with the TagMetaKeywords plugin.

• Search your site for tags using the search function or tag URLs.

If this sounds very similar to a certain WordPress plugin, you're not far off. But I like to think this version is better.

Download: lightpress-1.2.0-a1.zip or lightpress-1.2.0-a1.tar.gz