FLiFnotes

March 25, 2009

Choosing bbPress / WordPress

Filed under: Projects — Tags: , , — Deborah Hawkins @ 2:57 pm

My pet project has undergone many changes in the past several years. What started as a 20 pages of HTML on a free webhost in early 2005 has developed into over 150 pages of content with a news blog, forum, and gallery. Back in 2005, though, I had a lot of free time on my hands. For a while, there was even a wiki for my content. That had been my original idea behind using Chavez360 as the site name: if you followed links around the site, eventually you’d link back to where you started from. But that seemed to be kind of overdoing it, and at the time I couldn’t figure out how to integrate the wiki membership with the rest of my site.

What I had just wasn’t working as planned. As I learned more about webdevelopment and coding, I more and more wanted to create a new CMS and forum from scratch so I could have exactly what I wanted. Unfortunately, it was a needlessly complex task, and it took well over a year before I realized that I wasn’t going to create anything that I’d be satisfied with anytime soon. So I started looking around. There were big CMS’s, blog software, forum software, all in several languages and with a huge variety of features available. How to decide which was the best for me? I wanted something:

  1. simple–something that wasn’t already bloated with features that probably would never get used and something where I would at least understand most of the source code. This was probably the strongest factor in my choosing bbPress. By default, it has only the most basic functionality, and anything else can be easily added to taste with plugins.
  2. clean–not just the code, but the actually look and feel of the forum pages. It’s easier to find what you’re looking for quickly when it’s neatly organized and not cluttered with lots of unnecessaries.
  3. with a community–okay, so maybe the bbPress community isn’t that large, but the WordPress community definitely is. Between the bbPress forums and the WordPress codex, I can find anything I’m looking for.
  4. fresh–not so old that everything you could possibly do with it has already been done. I’m looking forward to making a couple of plugins available for others to use… eventually.

It may be weird to choose bbPress first and then WordPress also for consistency, but so far, so good.

March 24, 2009

Role Models for Women In Technology

Filed under: RandoMe — Deborah Hawkins @ 8:45 pm

I’m not quite sure what to make of Ada Lovelace Day. They cite research on female role models which I don’t quite relate to:

…students were asked to name a real person who was a role-model for them in their career ambitions. Sixty-three per cent of female students chose a woman, 75.6 per cent of male students chose a man. But crucially, whereas the male students said gender was not a factor in their choice, 27 per cent of female students who named a female role-model said that they were inspired by the gender-related obstacles overcome by their choice.

Personally, most of the role models I’ve ever had were male–from MacGyver (resourcefulness and inventiveness) to Ricardo Lopez (discipline and determination). And 100% of the tech role models I’ve had have been men. A few years ago, Udi and Wally were my dev idols. Then I was exposed to Wayne and Bruce’s PHP wizardry and backend skills. Yes, and if there had been any women role models in there, I still don’t think I could have been more inspired than I am now to work in technology. If I find a real standout in the next year, I’ll do a blog on a woman in technology for the next Ada Lovelace Day, but otherwise it’ll be a man, and I’m sure that’ll still work to keep plenty of others inspired.

Moving to WordPress / bbPress

Filed under: Projects — Tags: , , , , — Deborah Hawkins @ 7:42 pm

After many months of planning and procrastination, I finally used Spring Break to move my site from plain php for content and SMF for the forum to WordPress with bbPress. As much effort as it took, I have to say that either it was much easier than other conversions and integrations I’ve experimented with or the experience from those previous experiments has really paid off.

For the most part, I followed affacat’s instructions on his successful convert from SMF to bbPress, trying it out first on my own machine of course before ready to go live:

  1. Install bbPress 0.9.0.4 and WordPress 2.7.1. I chose to put bbPress in a subdirectory of WordPress. Set up the database integration as part of the bbPress installation and delete any posts created on install.
  2. Install the latest phpBB with the necessary converter to move my existing members and posts to bbPress.
  3. Install Jaim’s phpBB to bbPress converter. I had to change bb_users to wp_users, and delete the first user and forum from the SQL because there are already a first user and forum in bbPress. I’m not sure what the topic_resolved key was from, so I removed that option. Then I copied and pasted the code from bbPress into this tool to generate my topic and username slugs. (There may have been other changes also that I didn’t keep track of.)
  4. Finally, I imported the SQL into my database.
  5. Install and activate SuperAnn’s WordPress plugin for WordPress / bbPress cookie integration.
  6. Activate other plugins.
  7. Post the first blog entry and new forum thread to announce the updates.

Man, it feels good to finally have the base I need to build up my site.

March 1, 2009

XHTML5?

Filed under: Web Standards — Tags: , , — Deborah Hawkins @ 7:46 pm

This may not be new to many of you, but I just discovered last week while reading The WHATWG Blog that the folks at HTML5 are planning to use the XHTML namespace. My first thought was “What?!”

The article linked to a mailing list post by Lachlan Hunt about why XHTML2 can’t use the XHTML namespace anyway :

But XHTML2 also has several major incompatibilities with XHTML1, which would effectively make it impossible to implement both XHTML 1.x and 2 in the same implementation, if they share the same namespace. XHTML 5, on the other hand, has not only been designed with compatibility in mind, success is dependent upon continuing to use the same namespace.

Basically, the only solution to this issue that should be considered is that we continue using the namespace and the XHTML2 WG use a different namespace.

It took much reading before I finally came to a post by Hunt in June 2007 that explained how HTML 5 is an extension of XHTML:

The fact is, whether the XHTML2 WG likes it or not, we are creating a revision of XHTML by extending XHTML 1.x. Therefore, it is correct for it to be called XHTML.

Although it still seems weird that HTML 5 was designed with compatibility in mind, but compatibility with XHTML rather than previous versions of HTML, I’m about ready to let it pass for a while as the back of my mind slowly tries to comprehend this. Maybe they’ll put out a much better explanation whenever it is that HTML 5 is finally ready for consumption.

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