Cruisemaniac.com

The answer to the question: “Wordpress”.

Well, thats about one of the main reasons why we moved away from the system of the Wiki that has always ruled the BCB systems till BCB8.

The other main reason why we felt that wordpress was better suited than Wiki is thus:

A wiki, is a collection of documents linked to each other.  There is only one hierarchy to the structure… and its FLAT.

Wordpress on the other hand is multi-leveled AND allows for a relationship that has always ruled the Barcamp like scenario:  A content provider AND the content provided.  Which when translated to the BCB scenario relates to:The Speaker and the content associated with the person’s talk / discussion.

So there goes, wordpress it was!  And then started the work of tweaking it to make the Content Management System manage the content and the content-providers and participants the bridge.  And what resulted at the end of it is what we have on the BarcampBangalore website currently.

The best learnings out of working on this whole thing, in my opinion is thus:

1. Mixdev IS GOD!!! He is one of the most complete and most awesome of coders I’ve come across!!!
   
2. There is a plugin to achieve every conceivable functionality in wordpress!!! <<  Tip from @mixdev and @the100rabh.  And yeah, I vouch for it!!!
3. There is no touching the subsystem that has been done in making this website.  All that you see on the website is completely delivered by just the theme! <<KICKASS>>
4. Following and achieving point 3 hence makes sharing the code that much easier!!! And that much less code to understand and modify.

The code of the barcampbangalore theme (for lack of a word for the theme name, thereof) has been put up for download and further work and development on Google code here.  There are some bugs, as there is always with very good quality code and since it is open to all please feel free to spread the word around and have people use it and do leave comments and tell us how amazing we are

And there goes 2 hits with one stone:  My first wordpress theme AND my first Opensource project! W0000t!!!

Visitors to the blog would first notice the theme change that has happened.  Yesterday night, i upgraded my WP installation from 2.5 to 2.5.1 as there was supposedly a security patch that was coming through with the upgrade.

As usual, wordpress blazed through the upgrade with no hiccups whatsoever and I was done with ftp-upload, upgrade, one-click, all that in under 5 minutes.  And then When I looked at the website I realised that I’ve been using the black-gold theme for quite some time now.  So here goes, a quick theme change.  The current one is called Brilliance by Jai Nischal Varma of Blog-Oh-Blog.  He has a wide array of really good looking widget-ready and browser-agnostic themes on his site and Brilliance was the one I picked up to use for a temporary period of time.  Till Navjot and I are through with designing our own theme.

The design-a-theme-in-12-hours thingy never went anywhere beyond 4 hours… navjot got busy, I got sleepy, but the theme is coming along good… and we’re both learning and enjoying the theme creation process.

That theme will be put up on this site once its done and production capable! Thats a term I pickedup from work

Till then, Chao…

I went on to upgrade my blog to wordpress 2.5 yesterday night and I really seem to like it now. The most evident of changes is to the admin dashboard which is really neat and clean and much more organised… It does scroll more than before but then WTH… its cool. And I’m choosing to leave the default blue colours on. They are definitely refreshing everytime I look at them…

The upgrade as the Wordpress team puts it, its just a 5 minute process…

1. Backup your database in-case things might go wrong… (Believe me, they wont!!! )
2. Deactivate all plugins from the admin panel so that they might not create problems!!!
3. Fire up FileZilla, traverse to your wordpress directory, delete wp-admin and wp-include folders.
4. Upload the new wp-admin and wp-include folders and continue overwriting the other files…
5. Take care as to what you’re overwriting from the wp-content folder… You might want to save the settings for the older plugins / themes / etc…
6. Assuming your blog is at abc.com/blog, point your browser to abc.com/blog/upgrade.php to migrate your wordpress mysql database to suit the new 2.5 version.
7. And you are done…

There are some things I noticed that’ve given me a lot of ease in handling my blog:

1. The Plugins section can now not only point to newer versions of plugins but also update them in one click… No more downloading the plugin from a 3rd party website, unzip, ftp upload, detect, activate… W00t!!!
2. Lots of Ajaxy goodness!!!
3. Widgets support built-in… No more hunting for specific Widget-enabled themes…
4. All my old themes seem to work… No breakages so far!!!
5. Multi-file uploader… And its flash javascript, I-Frame based!!! Looks cool! And the progress bar is live… Double W00t!!!
6. This is a guess: Because the wp-core has been tweaked well, as I read on other forums, it must be giving much faster page loads for the viewers… You peeps temme about this. The cache is being built with every ping… And i guess it’s gonna be waaay faster once the cache starts spitting pages!!!

The Wordpress team has done an amazing job with Wordpress 2.5. Congrats guys!!!