Today’s post centers around how difficult it is to customize blog templates.

I have built blogs for SixApart customers, and my person and business blogs are currently running on WordPress, so I know a little about about how blog systems work.

Back in 2002, I would install plugins, tweak templates and spend hours getting my blog looking just so. Sidebars looking pretty, heavily customized archive pages, I spent too many Friday nights obsessed with making my blog look and function properly.

These days, I upgrade my template once a year or so. I look forward to the dentist more. I’d rather focus on writing than customizing my blogs.

The nightmare called the WordPress Codex is bogged down in unanswered questions, questions answered 23 different ways, or answers which are out-dated, or just plain wrong.

When will templates be as easy to customize as sidebars in the WordPress Widget admin screen?

After several years and at least 100 hours of configuring, upgrading, customizing and maintaining several blogs, I’m about read to move to a hosted solution and be done with the whole “roll your own” situation. Ok maybe not, but it’s frustrating!

And about widgets and plugins, authors, VALIDATE YOUR CODE. The majority of widgets fails validation. I don’t mean throw a few warnings, I mean they fail badly enough that it’s said Google will down-rank you, although I’m not sure if this is true.

I spent 2 hours cleaning up sidebar and widget code. It’s a mess. If everyone did their job right the first time around this wouldn’t be as much of an issue. Centralized plugin management is a step in the right direction, although the process is still buggy.

Now that I’m done ranting I’ll go back to picking out a new widget theme.

Seems several of my sidebar modules have been blown away, or I can’t find them, or the plug-in powering them isn’t working with 2.5. Very smooth upgrade otherwise. No more Subversion updates! The new WordPress automatic upgrade plugin works almost flawlessly- it didn’t know my wordpress install was in a subdirectory, which was easy enough to fix.

WordPress 2.5 preview is in the house.

A customizable dashboard, multi-file upload, built-in galleries, one-click plugin upgrades, tag management, built-in Gravatars, full text feeds, and faster load times sound interesting? Then WordPress 2.5 might be the release for you. It’s been in the oven for a while, and we’re finally ready to open the doors a bit to give you a taste.

Very excited to see that Zeldman et have given the interface a thorough scrub. I use Ecto for posting, because the WP write screen has always left me wanting, but I do poke around the other tabs fairly often. As for the new features, speed and plugin management is good, the rest I already have as plugins, nice to see some key features baked into the core.

Busy week. Jury duty, lots of client work and to top it off I’m upgrading to WordPress 2.3 and getting tags working again.  New template is  installed, need to figure out what’s going in the sidebars to balance them out. It’s times like this I wish I was a designer.

For most people, blogging is writing for a few minutes a day and going on to their other tasks. I like working on the blog system and tweaking templates and doing custom installs for clients as much as I enjoy the blogging process itself.

I’ve been blogging since 2002. I started on Movable Type and stayed on the platform when I moved over to Corante, the very first blog network. When I moved back to my own url, I decided to check out WordPress. My blog, although it doesn’t look it, has a lot of plugins and customization, so I go for the self-installable version. At some point managing my blogs in Movable Type was becoming a problem, and I thought that perhaps WordPress would make it easier to admin my blogs.

Guess what, I was wrong. At the time, WordPress had, and still has, just as many issues as Movable Type, which went in the direction of corporate dollars and is now swinging back around to offer an open source version after watching WordPress run away with  the free sector of the blog software market. My two main gripes were that both platforms (and their underlying blogging protocols)  failed to play nicely with desktop blogging clients like Ecto and lacked a serious tag management system. Ultimate Tag Warrior is my weapon of choice; both amazingly powerfull, under-developed and undocumented, a frustrating mix. I remain hopeful that WordPress 2.3 will roll out built-in tagging tools.

Now Movable Type 4 is out, and I stand at a crossroads. WordPress gets under my skin often: IMHO, open source != well written software, frequent feature updates or bug fixes. Which leads me to think out loud, will MT4 be any better than WP 2.2? I’ve set up some very cool blog systems using both platforms. Perhaps it’s time to check out Movable Type again. Reading the MT4 docs, it would appear so.

Especially interesting is the ability to run multiple blogs off of one installation, similar to WordPress MU. My problem with WPMU is that there have always been plugins that I want to use that are not supported.

I will hold off saying more until I’ve had a chance to kick MT4′s tires thoroughly. In the meantime, I just found out that an Alpha of Ecto3 is out in the wild. I can’t wait until it’s stable enough for day-to-day blogging. It makes you a better blogger, guaranteed.

I just added about 10 very cool links to a draft post in WordPress and deleted it by mistake. Where is the undo feature? It’s times like this that I miss Movable Type and Ecto.

You would probably like the flexible OLED screens. As for the rest, you probably knew about Compete’s new API and most of the other stuff I linked to.

Maintaining your permalink structure when moving between blog platforms is incredibly important. When I moved one of my blogs from Movable Type to WordPress, I decided to get rid of day of the /day/ directory and the trailing .php suffix, which WP doesn’t use by default. In doing so, I wanted to make sure that links from search engines and blogs continued to work.

I moved from:
www.example.com/archives/month/day/entryname.php

to:
www.example.com/archives/month/entryname/

The easiest way to do this was with the Apache server mod_rewrite module, which is installed by most web hosts by default. Unfortunately, figuring out the mod_rewrite code to do this in my .htaccess file was tough, the learning curve is incredibly steep. I asked around forums and the WordPress support site.

Here is the code to add to you .htaccess file. You may need to adjust for your specific situation.

RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /

RewriteRule ^archives/([0-9]{4})/([0-9]{1,2})/([0-9]{1,2})/(.*)\.php$ http://example.com/archives/$1/$2/$4 [R,L]

RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} ^archives/.*$
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !^.+\.php.*$
RewriteRule .* – [L]

Additional mod_rewrite tips and tricks to make sure your killer Page Rank and SEO work doesn’t go down the drain when moving your blog.

I’ve been having trouble logging back into WordPress after deleting cookies for my blog domain.

Signing in with valid credentials through wp-login.php reloads the same page. Notice the url redirect in the address bar.

It turns out that every time I delete cookies associated with my blog domain in Firefox on my Mac the domain is added to the cookie exception panel, blocking successful access to the WP admin area. Removing my blog domain from the exception panel clears up the problem.

Upgraded to 2.1. Ability to subscribe TheProgressBar RSS feed and Comment Feed fixed.

Took me a while to figure out why Ecto wasn’t downloading posts. turns out WordPress 2.1 has a bug. Fix via NSLog();