LightPress

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.

I forgot to update the rss2 template in the last release, so five minutes later here is a new release with the fix.

I have wrapped up the new, refactored version and released it as 0.99.0 alpha1. Lots of changes, expect a bit more documentation soon.
update this release contains an old rss2 template that does not work, the fix is in 0.99.0 alpha2.

I expect this to be the final candidate before 0.1, which will hopefully be a bugfix release only. Right after 0.1 I will release the next unstable release, where I will refactor following two of Jerome's suggestions.

This release fixes a few bugs related to mail notifications, and adds a simple mechanism to avoid duplicate comments insertion. It is available for download in the usual place.

As promised in the previous post, I have put together a new release. It's a Release Candidate, as I won't change anything major before the first stable release, and I will add only one more feature (duplicate detection for comments) before declaring 0.1 stable.

The new features in this release are:

• streamlining of the post loop and the single post actions

• "send to a friend" for posts

• sidebarlets

• installation instructions

• general bug fixing

The new release is available for download.

As promised in the previous entry's comments I have just packaged a new release which integrates the new features I had already made to our custom branch:

• pagination (previous page, next page) in the index, archives, and categories pages

• a simpler entries loop (the number of posts displayed is now always the same as the

  posts_per_page

  options)

• fixed templates which are now validating

• other small fixes

I have moved the release from alpha to beta status, as I have fixed the few bugs left and I see no new ones. More details in the ChangeLog.

On a side note, I have got different reactions to WPFF, some like its cleanness and simplicity, others find it messy. Whatever rocks your boat..... :)

Nothing as the prospect of releasing to the general public to make you work harder. I've just finished porting the excellent Kitten's Spaminator to WPFF. I did not test very thoroughly (it's a 0.1 alpha release after all), but it seems to work. I also fixed a few minor things and released wpff-0.1a2.tar.gz, if you try it let me know.