In the last 38 days there have been two urgent security fix releases of Wordpress. In the last 3 and a tiny bit months there have been three maintenance releases of Wordpress. In the last 4 and a tiny bit months there have been four releases of Wordpress.

Other than the fact I’m starting to get pretty worried about the security and stability of the software in general, it’s a pain in the rear to have to keep upgrading. So I’m making it easier for me. Wordpress themselves have helped by having a decent system in place for making it easy to get the latest.

I now have the simplest of shell scripts which:

1. Backs up my database.
2. Backs up my Wordpress folder.
3. Gets the latest Wordpress release.
4. Unpacks that release.
5. Deploys that release live.

Being nice, I’m going to share it with you:

mysqldump --host=localhost --user=wordpress --password=wordpress wordpress > wordpress.sql
tar -zcf wordpress_backup.tgz wordpress_live
wget http://wordpress.org/latest.tar.gz
tar -xzf latest.tar.gz
cp -r wordpress/* wordpress_live/
rm -r wordpress


Of course this assumes that you have a wordpress database in a localhost MySQL instance with username and password wordpress and that your live wordpress folder is wordpress_live so you can cope with a temporary wordpress folder from the unpack. It also assumes that mysqldump, tar and wget are available in your shell.

Also, I don’t just do this on live. I back up my live, put it on my portable instance and test the new version first. Then I do it on live. Then I update the versions of my plugins.

What an arse. This is why I prefer Geeklog. It’s more secure and doesn’t change at an alarming rate.

Now I can SSH into my server and type ./upgradewordpress.sh when I’m ready then hit http://inanger.com/[secretlocationofadmin]/wp-upgrade.php and finish things off. Job done. I still have a pain in the rear as I have to test the release locally first (./upgradewordpress.sh on local instance of course, after restoring a fresh backup of live into it and adjusting the config to refer to my local instance).

And I think this is less risky than tracking Wordpress via SVN on live.

Popularity: 55% [?]

So, today I’ve finally finished installing and configuring a Wordpress installation for running InAnger.com. This may seem a fairly odd decision to certain people who know certain things. The main reason it’s odd is that I am a member of the core development team for the Geeklog system. Wordpress is a PHP application using a MySQL database for running a Blog. So is Geeklog. So then, if I am a Geeklog developer, why have I chosen a competing system to run my new site? Interesting question, and one I shall discuss in length.

Firstly, I consider it important to investigate the innovation going on in competing products. I take a similar approach with software languages and tools. Something else is out there and has some buzz, so I play with it to find out why it has that buzz and what that new thing can do for me. With software languages and tools this is likely to be a switch to develop with a new language, even if it’s just for certain tasks that that language is particularly handy for. With a piece of software like a Media Player it’s a possible full switch to that product if it’s better.

With a CMS however, it’s more likely to be that I experiment with it and frankly steal the neat features and implement them in Geeklog. So, I’ve often seen posts “I tried geeklog, but now I’ve switched to wordpress and like it more”. Time to find out why and see if I can address those issues.

That’s not all though. I’m a terrible one for tinkering. I can’t find-out that some piece of software I use is customisable or configurable without becoming dissatisfied with what it can do, and try and customise it. As a Geeklog core developer, if I was using Geeklog, I’d get constantly side-tracked customising things and re-writing things. With Wordpress being a stable application with an active development community which I am not a member of I’m more likely to be able to keep my hands off, and concentrate on using the application.

So, Wordpress vs Geeklog, what’s the difference?

Wordpress

Wordpress is a highly popular Open Source blogging tool. It’s focussed on “aesthetics, web standards and usability”. It has a simple elegant usable interface.

Geeklog

Geeklog is also an Open Source blogging tool. It’s focussed on security. Out of the box it provides a full portal implementation as well as the core blogging features.

Installation

Installation of both is reasonably simple. In both cases you download a tarball archive of the latest version. In both cases you extract this and create an empty MySQL database to install into (in Geeklog’s case, you may use a Microsoft SQL Server database too). In both cases you set up database connection information in a configuration file. In the case of Geeklog all your site’s basic configuration is also in the configuration file and may be edited at the same time, plus, there is the additional need to configure file paths in two files (the configuration file and lib-common.php, the core functionality file). In Wordpress’ case you have to copy the config file to a new name.

Then you navigate to the install script location for either system and execute the install process. Voila, two complete blog package installs. You’re then left to configure up your system to meet your needs.

Publishing Blog Entries

The main thing you’re going to be concerned with day to day with your blog engine is writing, editing, posting and maintaining entries.

Both Geeklog and Wordpress have similar options for your posts. Advanced HTML editors (though I feel the use of FCKEditor gives Geeklog the edge here), control over the way the link is generated (post slug in Wordpress and Story ID in Geeklog, they form part of the URL for Search Engine Friendly URLs), control over user feedback permitted (comments etc), the ability to place an article into a category (and here Wordpress wins with multiple category support), image upload etc.
So where are the differences? Well, Wordpress allows Custom Fields on stories. I have yet to fully explore these, but they allow plugins to provide rich functionality easily to stories. Geeklog has Autotags which replace this functionality.

Geeklog has a strong security model, you can have many user groups and can set permissions for stories and topics in a very controlled fashion. Wordpress lacks any of this subtle security, it’s focussed on public blogging.

Geeklog also has the ability to auto-archive stories after a certain amount of time.

Really at the story level, the only differentiation seems to be that Geeklog has an excellent security system and also allows users to contribute stories (via moderation if necessary) to the site.

Both have strong API’s for plugins to extend things, however, I think extending the posting engine in Wordpress is a lot easier than in Geeklog.

So what about at the display end of stories? Both support comments, trackbacks and pingbacks with anti-spam measures and control over who can comment etc. Both have ways the display of a story can be tailored to suit the webmaster’s needs. It’s pretty even , with minor differences.

That leaves the user experience. Geeklog is (out of the box) a richer and more complex application than Wordpress. It does more. And thus, it’s a bit harder to learn your way around at first. That doesn’t mean Wordpress is a saint. I think I found my way round it reasonably quickly, from scratch, but, it could have been a clearer process. That said, Wordpress’ documentation which is linked at the foot of every admin screen is rich and detailed and vastly superior to the limited (by comparison) documentation for Geeklog.

Other Features

Wordpress is a blogging engine. That’s about it. It gives you static pages and links. But out of the box, that’s pretty much your lot. Geeklog is more of a portal, it comes with a calendar (for events, not to be confused with a monthly post view calendar which both systems have), polls system, links directory and static pages. Geeklog has a modular system for blocks on both the left and right hand side of the page, which allows the administrator to configure up static text, import RSS feeds, or use various built in functions to produce various types of dynamic boxes. To do this in Wordpress, you must edit the theme to include the HTML and/or function calls.

Themeing/Skinning

Both Geeklog and Wordpress come with perfectly nice default themes. But you don’t want your site to look like Just Another Geeklog/Wordpress Site. You want it to look individual and have an identity of it’s own. Both systems therefore offer a theming system to change the look and feel of your site.

Wordpress has a small number of PHP files that make up the base theme. These contain PHP function calls to output data and even loop structures to iterate over posts. This is quite confusing for non-programmers to get to grips with, but there is a lot of documentation, many community developed themes and lots of community support for this work. Plus, there aren’t that many files to edit.

Geeklog has many THTML files that make up the base theme. These contain HTML and place holders for dynamic data (in curly braces, for example {story_title}). It takes a fair bit of work to get your head around how these files are used to actually construct the layout of your site, and the documentation isn’t fantastic on these. But, I feel the content of each template is less confusing.

Extending

Both systems support plugins to provide the functionality you want. Some of Geeklog’s out of the box functionality is from core plugins (calendar, links, polls) and can be uninstalled if you do not like it.

The Geeklog API consists of a lot of functions you can define that get called at appropriate points. The Wordpress API consists of a lot of places you can tell Wordpress that your plugin wants a function call inserting into the chain. Both API’s seem to be pretty mature and well thought out and provide a really great way of extending the application.

If anything, I would suggest the opinion that Geeklog’s API is more mature and powerful, implementations include various image galleries (including integrations of popular Open Source gallery applications like Gallery), forums, file repositories and even further anti-spam measures. Wordpress however seems to have many more plugins available, more focussed on adding features to the story engine.

Summary

So, to just recap. Geeklog is a bigger system. It does a lot more. But, for people who just want to set up a simple blog, that might be too much, too daunting, too confusing. They’re targeted at different audiences. Geeklog is for running sites that are more than just a blog. Wordpress is for sites that are just a blog. The reason people are switching, is because all that power and all those features get in the way of having a plain, simple blog that everyone can read.

Popularity: 69% [?]