WordPress Headaches: Caching and FeedBurner

Posted in PHP, The Internet by Dan on August 1st, 2008

Still suffering a few teething problems following my attempts to Digg-proof this blog.  It seems that WP Super Cache, in its default configuration at least, is incompatible with FeedBurner and its WordPress plug-in.  So if you’ve been having trouble accessing my feed, this is why (for some reason it has been serving up the front page HTML instead of the feed RSS).

I tried a few things to fix the problem.  Each time it seemed to be working for a while but it soon went wrong again.  Rather than waste time figuring out what exactly is going wrong, I’ve switched back to WP Cache.

I have to agree with Jeff Atwood that caching really ought to be core functionality for a blog publishing platform like WordPress.  Then we wouldn’t have to mess around configuring different plug-ins and trying to get them to play nicely together.

In terms of functionality, WordPress still appears to be the best option for self-hosted blogging but it’s not without its annoyances.  If I were to switch from WordPress to something else, these are some of the features I would like to see:

  • Built-in page caching.
  • Support for multiple blogs with a single installation of the software (with WordPress, you have to use a different branch of the software to achieve this).
  • Support for databases other than MySQL (PostgreSQL as a minimum, but really any mainstream SQL database should be usable).
  • A better approach to themes (I shouldn’t have to write PHP to develop themes.  With appropriately structured pages, I could probably achieve everything that I want using just CSS).
  • Integrated support for popular advertising services such as Adsense (I shouldn’t have to cut-and-paste JavaScript into PHP files).
  • Ability to import posts and comments from WordPress.

Does such a platform exist, or will I have to write it myself?