LightPress

I have just committed preliminary support for Lighttpd rewrite rules in LightPress. If you feel adventurous, you can download our development package and let us know of anything that needs fixing. I am not a Lighttpd expert, so any input is welcome.

It's been quite some time since our last release -- not quite what we intended. But I'm happy to announce an update to the stable 1.1 version of LightPress. This is a maintenance release, so there are very few new features as we have concentrated on bug fixes.

Notable changes in version 1.1.1:

• Fixed return-by-reference errors raised by the newest versions of PHP.

• Added PostsChronological plugin to display posts in forward-chronological order.

• Fixed bugs #31, #32, #36 and #44.

• Sample

  config.php

  file renamed to

  config-sample.php

  to prevent overwriting file on upgrade.

I've been promising this for some time, but now it's finally done: our very own themes site. Now you can try out some of the themes available for LightPress and download the ones you like. There are only a few themes up at the moment, but we'll be adding more as they get submitted. Should be fun!

The most trafficked blogs powered by LightPress are those published by the Italian nanopublishing company Blogo, which I helped found last year and later left. The 15 blogs are housed on an old Celeron 900, and backed by a dual-Xeon MySQL server which is mostly sitting idle thanks to our caching module.

In September, the old Celeron served 2.25 million page views, with a peak rate of 250 page views per minute on September 26 at 11:04:00. If you take into account that every page view involves several image hits (~10), at least one adserver hit (hosted on the same machine), and one stats logging hit (same machine, again), all of them served by a fat Apache, LightPress seems to handle itself pretty well under load.

Our long silence on this blog does mean we have disappeared: we are developing our next batch of major features for LP, and brainstorming our own backend which should hopefully see the light in a couple of months.
If you are feeling adventurous, you can have a look at our internationalization framework which I committed yesterday to the repository. It allows us to centrally manage our themes with a single master copy of each, and output it in different language/charset combinations using gettext translation files. Expect to see its output in our next beta, due RSN.

Fresh from two weeks of holidays in beautiful Lanzarote, I tried to tackle the WP pages problem I outlined in my previous post. The result is a 150 lines patch for

, which brings rendering time down from 18 seconds to less than 1 second in my test blog with 200 pages. The patch is also available as a drop-in php file, but remember to backup the original WP file in case you run into problems later.

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