It’s official: the cumbersome title of WordPress Fast Frontend has been put to rest, replaced with the elegant “LightPress”. I happily welcome this change, even if my suggested name didn’t make the cut. In fact, LightPress is so simple it makes you wonder: why hasn’t anyone used this name before?
The other news is that LightPress has defended it’s claim to speed. The test results show LightPress serving pages faster than TextPattern, and 3 times faster than WordPress 1.5.1.
I still haven’t made the switch yet. Why? Demand for my WordPress keywords plugin has far outstripped my expectations, and I’m having trouble finding time to finish the LightPress version! But the LightPress plugin will actually be the basis for the faster (and simpler) 2.0, so the change is coming soon.
My host moved this site to a new server the other day, so hopefully everything made it over in one piece. It was amusing to get e-mails about new comments being posted despite the fact that I couldn’t access the new server myself (DNS issue with my ISP). So if I haven’t responded to your e-mail or your comment has disappeared, please let me know.
PreFormatted 1.0 Released
The newest PreFormatted release is now online and includes some minor fixes. Specifically, a few filters had to be tweaked due to changes in the official Strayhorn release. I also added a fix for a common WordPress problem: wpautop() likes to place your <!--more--> and <!--nextpage--> tags into their own paragraph blocks. This produces invalid XHTML when your post gets split into multiple pages. PreFormatted will remove the offending tags when possible.
I have many features planned for the next release, including keeping a copy of posts in their original format. I’ve been using Markdown lately (on another project) so expect PreFormatted to play nicer with other formatting plugins — my strategy should allow it to detect which filters need to re-arranged automatically.
Jerome’s Keywords — Roadmap
Thanks again to everyone who has sent me feedback about this plugin. As mentioned in a previous comment thread, there is an alpha of version 1.5 that can be used to create a tag cosmos. I plan to release 1.5-final in the next few days, which will add a “top X” (insert your number here) keyword list and will fix the way category meta keywords are handled.
I suspect that the new features of 1.5 won’t scale very well for heavily used sites, so the next major release (2.0) will move to a different storage scheme. Don’t worry, the conversion will be painless and completelybehind the scenes. The plan also calls for an options page for easier customization.
Ludo announced the first beta for WPFF 1.0.0 a few weeks ago, and the second beta is now available. I finally found some free time to fix my test site and upgrade to the lastest & greatest.
The latest version is more polished since my last review and offers a few new features, including:
- Full search capabilities, complete with a custom template and a search term highlighter. Great job on this one, Ludo!
- Atom feeds and category-based feeds.
- Author pages.
- Basic comment formatting.
- Plus a bunch of small tweaks and bug fixes since the 0.99 betas.
I’ve just sent Ludo another small patch today that increases WPFF’s compatibility with WordPress. Hopefully the patch make it into the next beta, slated for release tomorrow. The changes are intended to allow you to use your existing .htaccess file generated by WordPress. I want to make sure that it’s easy to make the switch, so watch out for ports of popular WP plugins too.
Just a quick note to announce the latest release of the “Jerome’s Keywords” plugin for WordPress 1.5. The new version fixes a few (minor) bugs and adds some requested features. The coolest part is that I’ve hooked it into WordPress’ rewrite rules code, which means that .htaccess rules can be updated automatically. This also fixes problems seen when using the index.php/%blah% style of permalinks.
The short list:
- Improved permalink handling for tag searches.
- Automatic
.htaccess rule generation.
the_keywords() now accepts parameters for formatting if you want to get fancy.- Fixed XHTML validation bug and handling of tags containing forward slashes (
/ ).
- Temporary workaround for conflicts with the mini-posts plugin.
Thanks to everyone who sent me feedback, found bugs and suggested new features. Keep ‘em coming! The only request that didn’t make this release was adding an options page — I’m still not decided on that one. Also, a special award for bravery goes to Dave Metzener for beta testing the new permalink/rewrite code.
At the prodding of “rg”, I’ve updated my keywords plugin to improve keyword searches. Previously, post keywords — or tags — were simply linked to the WordPress search function. This is fine if your tags show up in the body of your post, but for photos and other odd content this isn’t necessarily the case. So now the plugin creates its own search results from posts that use similar tags. The results page can even use its own template if you’re so inclined.
I always wanted it to work this way but hadn’t sorted out all of the WordPress filters/actions to make it happen until now. You can give the plugin a try on this site, or download it and try it on your own. Get tagging!
Since I released my PreFormatted plugin the other day, I figured it was time to polish up my other active plugins and offer them for download. Plus it gave me an excuse to put together a WordPress plugins page. I’m working (or planning) on a few other plugins for WPFF so this will be a good home for them too.
Here they are:
- Keywords — A cross between a
<meta name="keyword"> tag plugin and a Technorati tags plugin, this lets you enter keywords for every post for searching and more! Learn more
- Page Date — Simple plugin to update a page’s timestamp every time it’s modified (you can do this manually for posts, but not pages). Learn more
I’ll probably try to get these hosted in the WordPress Plugin DB or the official WordPress plug-in repository, but wouldn’t you rather get them from the source?
I’ve just finished the beta version of the “PreFormatted” WordPress plugin. Basically, it stores posts & comments in their final, formatted form rather than processing them every time a page is loaded. It provides only a modest decrease in page rendering times, but that’s not it’s real purpose anyway.
WPFF lacks some of the nicer features of WordPress, including polished post formatting. But if the WordPress back-end pre-formats everything, then WPFF size and speed can be maintained without any extra cost! So this really is a WordPress plugin that makes WPFF look nicer. The bonus is that you can use it even if you don’t use WPFF…
I just switched on the new plugin today - this is the first post to use it. You can learn more on the new PreFormatted plugin page.
Just uploaded my first WordPress Fast Frontend plugin to the WPFF test site. It was a good learning experience and pretty simple to write. The plugin reproduces the category-based styles I have set up on my normal WP site which is a quick hack rather than a plugin. Once I port over my keywords/tags plugin then my WPFF site will be fully functional.
The new plugin architecture was somewhat tricky to figure out sans documentation, but very simple to write for once I grasped the basic structures. The default plugins are great to learn from and you only need to know a few hooks to get one to work. My stock WP plugin experience is limited to the backend, so I won’t comment on which is better (probably an “apples to oranges” comparison anyhow).
I still owe Ludo a response regarding the template system, but that will have to wait for another day…
Ludo released the refactored version of his WordPress Fast Frontend yesterday - you can download it here. I’ve been looking forward to this release since my review of the last version. I tried earlier versions on my test server, but never attempted the conversion of my actual site - until now.
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Google recently announced support for a new link tag: rel=”nofollow”. When Google indexes your site, any links that are tagged with nofollow don’t receive a PageRank boost from your link. This is intended to reduce the incentive for comment spammers.
Everyone’s jumping on the bandwagon: Six Apart has implemented nofollow for Moveable Type & TypePad; and the latest CVS for Wordpress already includes nofollow despite a raging debate on the hacker’s list about it’s use.
I don’t think nofollow is going to save interactive sites from comment spam. It’s a nice gesture but it really doesn’t address the root cause of spam. (more...)