I’ve gotten a few questions about the new version of this site I’ve mentioned I’m working on, so I figured I’d just blog a response. I’ve been making good progress on it, but it’s been a bit more work than I’d expected. Partly due to my own scope creep. 🙂

The little template system I implemented back in 2002 still works, but is inelegant¹ and is being completely replaced with a fully WordPress driven system. In addition to all of the page content joining the blog content in the WP database, I’m also migrating the data from the news page into the database, along with the content from my golf blog. Having all that content in a single database and having everything work in different ways has taken a bit of doing.

In addition, I’ve created a new plugin and updated some others to add additional functionality I wanted. Here’s a status for what I’ve got done so far.

• 100% – Make the “E-mail this post” functionality a plugin and add some additional social web features.
• 100% – Script to import my old news content.
• 100% – AJAX to show comments inline (adapted from Peter Kashou’s plugin).
• 100% – An “About” blurb – important for folks showing up from search engines, etc.
• 100% – Find (or write) a good “most recent post” plugin.
• 90% – Hack the URLs so that /blog, /sports/golf and /news all work as expected.
• 90% – New mobile interface (plugin) that also works for pages and includes navigation for them, etc.
• 80% – Updated theme, evolutionary in nature.
• 80% – Add link blog functionality.
• 60% – Import my golf blog and make the URLs work.
• 50% – Update Popularity Contest plugin to support pages (and caching?).
• 40% – No more ‘www.’ in my URLs.
• 30% – Redirects for all old pages/URLs.
• 20% – Convert old static pages to database content.
• 0% – Custom page templates for my WordPress theme browsing/download pages.
• 0% – Pages for each of my projects/products with custom meta data for each.
• 0% – Make photo portfolio stuff work.
• 0% – Find/replace all old URLs in the database.

Unfortunately, I have some bad news for those of you who have asked about me releasing this code. While I will write up a high-level “how-to” for everything I’ve done and release the plugins I’ve written for this, many of the things I’m doing are neither simple nor easily abstracted into a plugin. Once I’ve got it all set I’ll explain what needs to be done, but if you can’t convert the high-level explanation into code yourself, it’s probably not something you want to undertake.

I will be chatting with the current core development team (and providing them a copy of all the code I’ve written) in the hopes that some of what I’ve needed to do can become easier in the future. Perhaps they can adapt some of my code. However, this site will be a bit of an edge case, and I do not expect many of the things I’ve done to be adopted as they don’t make a huge amount of sense in the core codeline.

1. Ugly URLs, can’t edit content through a web interface, can’t do in-site search along with blog content. [back]