Mini HOWTOS.

While I was sorting out my WWW & Mail server I started blogging. Not to keep a diary but to make notes of what I was doing and what web sites and books I read. So I had a record of where all the good stuff was. I have a bad memory and its simpler to remember where the info is that to remember all the info, if you see what I mean . D I also wanted to remember where to find useful documentation, HOWTOs and examples downloads and all that sort of thing.

Follow up:

My ISP, IDNET.com , provides a basic free web space to all of it's subscribers, part of that is a Wordpress install. Not knowing any better I started adding posts with stuff I searched for, info about setting up a Mail server etc. See the HOWTO when its written . So my first introduction to blogging was Wordpress on an ISP provided web site with only on line documentation for support.

Me being me, I wanted to make it do, what it did, but in a slightly different way. This I could not do as I had no access to the installed software. I could not even add new themes or plugins. To solve this I read up about Wordpress as I knew it.

• Installed a copy and played around with it
• Uninstalled it, reinstalled it.
• Played around some more tweaked, poked and prodded it.
• Unistalled it, Installed again.
• Installed a few Themes.
• Played around with plugins.
• Installed and uninstalled loads of plugins.

None of which seemed to do just what I wanted So I started to write my own plugin. I'm not really that good at php. I come from a Perl background and find php simply annoying it's syntax is so close you can almost just write Perl. BUT it's pattern matching is just so sophisticated.

Then I discovered that Wordpress messes with HTML tags, in that it will remove the css class parts (whatever they are called) if IT thinks they are invalid! Time to bail out and use some other blogging software you do not have to fight with just to make it do what I want!

For those old enough to remember the 4GLs on the late 80 and early 90s they were great for done the really simple out-of-the-box, and yes quicker that the COBOL, C or the new C++ languages. BUT and it is a very big BUT, they were absolutely useless for anything else. You had to fight the language to get round itself to do anything slightly complex. That's my feeling about Wordpress. Sorry guys.

I have a play with Expression Engine did not like that much. I looked around and found Textpattern, now that was a shock to use! Seemed quite promising but very little useful documentation. Which is a shame since the software is very unconventional in it's usage and the terminology is just mind boggling. After playing around with that for a few days I gave up with that too. Just too much effort.

Next I found Drupal, this was a lot more like Wordpress and well just as annoying.

Then to my joy I found this wonderful site Open Source CMS. It not only lists loads and loads of CMS and blogging software it has links to home pages and best of all links to already installed demos. I cannot remember all the different packages I tried or looked at. Some of the demos were good some were just well broken. i.e. looked good on paper but the demo fell over or was not intuitive or involved a high learning curve. :wave:

Then I found b2evolution, the demo was great, I played around for days and days. I got to a point were the hourly reset was annoying as it took 20 minutes to reset my changes. Well here I am using it! I got my plugin written to highlight code blocks, yes I know there are
already a few but they either

1. didn't work,
2. didn't do what I wanted,
3. both of the above
4. didn't reply quick enough to queries

joking about the last one.

b2evolution is not perfect but it's as good as there is. Got to leave something for version 3.x So I'm going to put some effort into bending it around to do what I want.

I'm off to play some more and find more things to go on my b2evolution TODO list.

I'm having fun make sure you do!!