It's Here

February 14, 2005 7:43 PM

Word Press 1.5: People have been waiting, and people have been talking, and now, the wait is over. If you're in the Bay Area, consider attending the party.
posted by eustacescrubb (19 comments total)

what is this program?
posted by tiamat at 8:22 PM on February 14, 2005

Wordpress is a blogging application written in PHP. Its most notable feature is extreme ease of installation and setup.
posted by killdevil at 8:27 PM on February 14, 2005

Hmm. I wish there was a way to somehow coordinate and categorize images inside of posts. Some kind of MySQL backend for images that supported tagging that slipstreamed into WP's existing posting procedure. This is a really good start, though.
posted by Civil_Disobedient at 9:05 PM on February 14, 2005

Does 1.5 support more than one blog installation yet?
posted by mathowie at 9:09 PM on February 14, 2005

Upon reading the forums, it looks like people have been able to hook it up to Flickr and Picasa, which is nice if you already use their services.
posted by Civil_Disobedient at 9:32 PM on February 14, 2005

Matt - It's still single-blog-style (i.e., multi-user, single installation).
posted by Civil_Disobedient at 9:35 PM on February 14, 2005

Re: multiple blogs: still have to do a multiple install/ single DB hack. WordPress is a very nifty piece of software. The WordPress Pages feature is conceptually smart and is the right way to go if blogs are going to take over the corporate website world.
posted by juggernautco at 9:45 PM on February 14, 2005

Hope the new version fixed the SUPER-vulnerability to comment spam.
posted by spock at 9:54 PM on February 14, 2005

I hope so too, spock - the two things keeping me from switching both blogs from Moveable Type to WordPress have been: the lack of user control over permalink strusture in WordPress (which this version has resolved) and comment spam.
My blog that doesn't have comments has already been switched over; I'm waiting on the other one until I read some reports about spam handling.
posted by eustacescrubb at 2:43 AM on February 15, 2005

Where's the list of new features/fixes for 1.5?
posted by Brandon Blatcher at 3:57 AM on February 15, 2005

i tried to install Wordpress a couple months ago, during the whole Movable Type pricing fiasco. i couldn't manage to get past the initial steps, despite really wanting to try it out.

i've installed textpattern, movable type, and greymatter before with only minimal problems.
posted by lotsofno at 5:05 AM on February 15, 2005

I tried WP back during the MT license pricing brouhaha as well; I switched back within a week when I realized that I preferred to accept the limited license terms on the free version of MT than have to deal with WP - I had no install problems, but I didn't like the way it set up archives, I didn't like that no matter what I did, it wouldn't give me the functionality to change my stylesheet within the program, and I definitely didn't like the lack of multiple blogs without hacking.

I won't even get into my rage at discovering there was no export option, I had to go find a hack to do it and lost some of my old entries in the process. Did they fix that? I definitely disliked being locked into a blog program. Seems unsporting.
posted by angeline at 5:27 AM on February 15, 2005

I didn't like that no matter what I did, it wouldn't give me the functionality to change my stylesheet within the program...

Really? I've never had any difficulty there. The "Templates" tab allows you to edit any file under the Wordpress install folder, including the CSS, provided that file is CHMOD'd to give you access.
posted by grabbingsand at 6:19 AM on February 15, 2005

Does 1.5 support more than one blog installation yet?

I don't know that answer to that, but pMachine Pro is now free and it does.
posted by terrapin at 7:15 AM on February 15, 2005

Sweet Jesus! A new version of a blog tool!

So this is "Best of the Web."
posted by Ayn Marx at 7:34 AM on February 15, 2005

The "Templates" tab allows you to edit any file under the Wordpress install folder, including the CSS, provided that file is CHMOD'd to give you access.

I CHMOD'd the dickens out of that file, did a cookiedump in my browser, cleared the cache, and reloaded a dozen times with no luck. It simply wouldn't let me alter the stylesheet unless I did it via FTP.

It just frustrated me. If I'm going to have rebuildless changes, I want to be able to control everything via the web interface, and it wasn't playing ball even though it should have done.
posted by angeline at 9:38 AM on February 15, 2005

I have used MT & WP for some time now - and for many projects I prefer WP:

* faster
* dynamic to the core
* theme engine

So far WP is more robust against spammers, but you can and should install spam prevention tools anyway - no matter if you use MT or WP.

MT is better in overall content management since it offers search & replace functions as well as better sorting/filtering of posts capablilities in the admin panel.

WP has a very helpful and active community out there. Many WP user are coming from MT.
posted by homodigitalis at 10:12 AM on February 15, 2005

Frankly, the only thing stopping me from changing from MT right now is the fact I completely lack the skills to convert a custom MT template a friend made for me.

I'm hosting a couple of WP blogs, and I've been quite pleased with it's speed and low system load. (I'm a better admin than I am a page designer.)
posted by Samizdata at 1:55 PM on February 15, 2005

Any engines that support tags, directly or plugged in?
posted by Gyan at 6:41 PM on February 15, 2005