LightPress

Jerome has been busy this weekend merging his dev branch and bug checking all the new additions. I have no excuse then to postpone the release of the first 1.1.0 alpha much further, so I spent some time this morning before getting to work merging the (unreleased) general cleanup I did last week to the 1.0 branch with the trunk, which is now officially tagged as

.

In the eat your own dogfood spirit, I have also update this site to 1.1.0-a1 so that we can properly test it, and so that you can see a few of the new features in action. The more visible feature (and the one I find more interesting) is what I call contextual content: showing different information depending on the context (category, archive, post) the user is in. More on this later. I have also enabled caching, so general users (i.e. users without a WP/LP cookie) should notice a speedup in rendering times.

Before I release a1, I'd like to finish the WP plugins to manage our configuration options from the WP console. Hope it will not take too long, stay tuned.

A couple of hours of free time before getting to work this morning have produced Google Sitemap support for LightPress, and a new 1.0.6 beta release. It's a beta since Sitemap support is not well tested, and I would like to add gz compression support before declaring it stable. Our Sitemap implementation has a few interesting features:

• the "home" Sitemap lists URLs for all categories, archives, and the latest

  posts_per_rss

  posts

• each category and each archive has its own Sitemap, listing itself and all its posts

• a SiteIndex lists all the available Sitemap

• the

  lastmod

  element is set to the date of the last post for categories and for the current month in archives, and for the last day of the month in old archives

• Last-Modified/Etag support, since it shares our feed serving code

1.0.6b can be downloaded from the usual place, where you can also find its ChangeLog (also copied below). After having written this post, I noticed a couple of bugs in feed.php, which you can patch by applying this small patch to 1.0.6b if you do not want to wait for 1.0.6 final. [tag: sitemap]

Update After modifying the root element in the templates according to Google Sitemap Help, both our sitemap and sitemap index validate.

This site is now hosted on Textdrive. Apart from a few quirks (changed my shell password with

but the MySQL password did not change, reglar users have no access to most

commands, and the usual FreeBSD/Linux differences), everything went smoothly.

I have started work on the backend today. I have had a pretty clear picture of the overall architecture and the general DB layout in my mind for quite a while, but as usual it's difficult to find the time for a new project, at least until there's some code running. A very incomplete but working draft of the authentication/profiling class is in CVS, and I hope to have a working framework (authentication, permissions, roles, menu and modules management) sometimes next week. I am anxiously waiting for Jerome's input (and inevitable patches) as soon as he gets back from his vacation. :)

In the meantime, I have opened a new account on TextDrive, since SourceForge hosting is really really slow and has a few drawbacks (like not being able to send mail to the outside). I will move lightpress.org there as soon as possible, and slowly add new features (daily posts from our Basecamp account, and an Instiki-powered wiki).

We have been getting ready to release 1.0.3, but the maintenance on the CVS servers is slowing us down. Since it's already pretty late here, the release will delayed until tomorrow (Italian time), unless Jerome has the time to do it.

1.0.3 fixes a pretty serious (for the page layout and content displayed) bug, improves the integration of Jerome's latest AdminOptions plugin, and adds a new Delicious plugin which you can see in action on my blog.

As you may have noticed, I have registered LightPress on SourceForge and moved the site and CVS repository here. I hope this will enable me to better manage LightPress, and more people to participate in its development. I have also released 1.0.0pre1, which I will anounce in the next post after I have finished modifying the templates to point to the SF project area.

As promised, I have applied most of the patches Jerome sent me yesterday night and released 1.0 beta 3. I chose not to apply the following two patches:

• query logging in DB_lite/MySQL.php, it's a good idea and very useful when you need to debug a SQL statement, but it's trivial enough to add/remove it by hand, and I prefer not to add code that will never be used in production

• the

  'name'=>'post'

  context mapping used for WP compatibility, as it interferes with the comment registration cookies, rendering the whole site unusable; the patch is good though, so I guess I will have to rename the cookie vars after 1.0 is released

A huge thanks to Jerome which has spotted quite a few bugs, and worked hard for WP compatibility, something I'm not really interested in but which may be crucial for many. If everything works as expected, we may be able to release 1.0 stable in a few days.

I know you're supposed to enter a features freeze before releasing a beta up to the final release, but WPFF is such a tiny project that I could not resist adding a few features in this latest beta:

• a search interface, with RSS/Atom subscription for search results

• categories feeds (they were already there, I added a page to display them)

• author pages, listing the author's details and posts

• new hooks for plugins

Apart from the new features, I have fixed quite a few minor bugs. I am starting writing detailed user and developer docs, and a couple of support scripts to install WPFF and manage the config.php and .htacsess files. As soon as I have finished them I will declare WPFF stable and release 1.0.0.

On a side note, WPFF is now handling around 15-20k pages (not hits, pages) a day on an owerworked old Celeron 900, who is doubling as db server (MySQL+Interbase) and doing tons of other things as well (mailboxes, spam filtering, stats aggregation in SQL, etc.). We often have serious traffic spikes, with a 30 min average of 5-6Mb/sec (which means burst rates of at least double that) which WPFF handles without any problem.

The tarball is in the usual place.

After a couple of very busy weeks and quite a few patches and improvements from Jerome (among them Atom support and WP GET vars compatibility), I am proud to release 1.0.0 beta1. The new features, and the weeks of pretty heavy load on our commercial blogs (eg autoblog.it which has been repeatedly linked by the autoblog.com monster in the past few weeks) without any major glitches, have made me bump the release version up to 1.0.0.

With this release you may need to add a few options (mainly for Atom support), and remove the 'permalink' option which has been discontinued since you can include date format strings in the 'post_prefix' option (eg. 'post/%Y/%m').

A few fixes and modifications in this release, most notably the disappearance of the trackback.php file as trackbacks are now managed by the PostComment.php plugin, and subject to spam check. I have yet to implement the getComments() method Jerome and I discussed lately, it should be ready in the next few days for the latest beta. Enjoy!

Thanks to Jerome who sent me a few patches, and Matt who noticed that the templates produced non-XHTML compliant pages, I am releasing 0.99.0 beta1. Documentation is still in the works, expect it for the final 0.99 release. There's still work to be done on trackbacks (they don't seem to work anymore here, they work on Jerome's site), but I hope we're not far from a stable release. As for speed, Jerome confirms my measurements of a 5x speed increase over a stock WP installation on his production site (2x on his development site). YMMV.