Ok, just installed a Joomla 1.7.x site on my main business site after a move from shared to cloud based hosting. Went very smooth except for the FTP configuration. That gave cryptic undefined errors, but the settings took anyway. So far, so good with the rest of the configuration and setup. I’ll do a follow up at some point after configuring a theme and the rest of the site.
Dec 292011
May 292011
I’ve pretty much steered away from using anything but WordPress recently. Installing it is easier than anything out there currently, and it has gotten much easier to customize and make it look how you want. There is also a HUGE amount of widgets/plugins you can get to do just about anything.
Aug 122010
Posted here: WordPress PHP/MySQL 4 Announcement
No surprise there, even I haven’t been programming in version 4 for well over 2 years. Any host that only has this version is probably going out of business anyway. There is one part of the announcement that is going to cause some grief for a lot of hosts though: “For WordPress 3.2, due in the first half of 2011, we will be raising the minimum required PHP version to 5.2.” The big problem here is that a majority of hosting companies are using Redhat Enterprise and 5.2 is not currently supported under this distribution. Enterprise 6 is currently in beta and if your host is working under Redhat, you better hope it goes to release before WordPress releases 3.2. Also from what I’ve been reading, pretty much all releases of software are going to require 5.2, such as Joomla with version 1.6 (currently in Beta too). Makes you wonder why Redhat is so slow at implementation. I realize they have a policy of maintaining support for a really long time, but 5.2 has been out since Nov 2, 2006, almost 4 years now.
Jun 262010
Upgrading to the latest WordPress went extremely smooth with no issues at all. Now to do a little testing with the new options, maybe setup a secondary blog to see how that goes. I’m more and more impressed with the stability of WordPress as I work with it.
May 062010
This is a test to look into hyperlink copying.
A customer is having issues copying text within MS Word to posts in WordPress so this is to test and see if it works.
Jan 222010
I’m upgrading to a Cloud based server environment, if you came by over the past day you might have noticed it was down. This was the easiest of the sites to migrate over and I must say it seemed to go fairly well. The toughest part was configuring an FTP server for ease of access.
Nov 122009
The 4.0 Beta version is out and I’ve upgraded to it. Of course I backed everything up before making any changes, that’s only good practice. Tiki-Wiki is a bit different than most since it is a Jack of All Trades and has a bit of everything in it. It also has about 3 times as many files, over 9000, so there are many different ways something can go wrong. The upgrade instructions are not very clear, and at first glance seems to skip some steps.
Step 1: Backup – This is fairly straightforward and is basically backup the database and any customized CSS or TPL (template) files you have. I backed up the database and don’t have anything currently but stock CSS and TPL files.
Step 2: Choose your upgrade path – Not clear here whether you should when upgrading overwrite or simply delete and start a new installation. After clicking a few links and reading other upgrade options, it says to overwrite all the files with the 3.3 release, which I did. At this point there is no indication of the steps to upgrade to 4.0, but I did the standard overwrite like previously and that worked. The script is self-explanatory and works great. I did get 2 SQL query errors during the upgrade from 3.3 to 4.0, but haven’t seen any impact on the workings of the install.
Step 3: Process the install script – Same as a fresh install and you point it to the existing database.
Step 4: Update Theme – not really a big deal since I’m not using a custom theme.
Fairly smooth, at least for a vanilla installation like mine. I’m guessing a fully customized site may run into issues since there are structure changes and the install instructions even warn about this. No complaints here.
Nov 052009
Hard to put together a first impression of Joomla when I’ve been using it for a couple of years now, even back before 1.5.x came out. Installation is usually a breeze, but depends on the host. I’ve had to troubleshoot some of the strangest errors, and some of them were only fixed by a fresh installation. I’ve found it to have the most capability for customization, probably due to the vast about of plugins and themes that you can get for free for it. But there is also a large number of for-pay items as well, and I’ve gotten to deal with them too. And I don’t see much difference between them, both have both good and badly written code, and both can be secure or non-secure. Joomla does seem to have the most attention, and as a result seems to get hacked more than others if you don’t keep it updated properly. Nevertheless I still continue to use it and will keep using it for it’s ease of modification and the large base of users that help keep it alive.
Oct 262009
I will say I am impressed with the automatic upgrade system within WordPress. I was able to click it and all was complete. Not bad considering everything I need to do to upgrade anything else I’ve tried.
Oct 262009
Another quick follow up on Tiki-Wiki. Thought I had found a bug today. I was trying to edit a post within one of the forums and got a query error. After that, things went downhill and it completely quit working. I tried to run some repairs on the database, but had some trouble logging in. While figuring that out I was getting an error about the mysql.servers table not existing, which led me to some interesting facts about my server. I run a Virtual Private Server (VPS) for these tests and I try to keep all versions of the software up to date. Well, one of the MySQL updates seems to have de-synchronized version-wise. I found the answer at: http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.0/en/mysql-fix-privilege-tables.html which cleared up the problem. I was then able to get logged in and repair the tables which fixed the entire Tiki issue. Still not sure if Tiki may have caused the initial issue with the table, but it seems to be working fine now, but if I have any more issues I will research it and post my findings.