WordPress Headaches: Caching and FeedBurner
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?
on August 3rd, 2008 at 10:12 pm
There’s Pebble – pebble.sourceforge.net – no idea if it covers everything you want, but it’s written in Java and it supports multi-blogs…and it’s got a plugin api.
One thing though, it doesn’t use *any* database!
on August 3rd, 2008 at 10:54 pm
Hey Rich, fancy seeing you here
Thanks for the pointer to Pebble. The documentation is a bit sparse but it looks reasonable. I guess its suitability depends largely on what kind of memory footprint it has. Java webapps generally aren’t very slimline in this respect. Maybe under Jetty it would be OK? Especially if I could completely drop Apache and PHP and have Jetty do everything.
It’s not clear how themes work with Pebble. The no database thing is not a show-stopper. These apps ought to be serving up static files for scalability anyway.
I’ve been playing around with Django and have managed to write the world’s most basic blog engine (seriously spartan). This is not particularly impressive given that Django gives you half of the functionality for free. I’m wondering if I can summon up the motivation to actually turn it into something useful.
on August 6th, 2008 at 1:07 pm
Nice post Dan.
I’m actually glad I came across this post today as I was planning on installing Super-Cache soon and I have feedburner so that wouldn’t of been pretty!
Anyway, I think your requirements for the “perfect” blogging platform are pretty much inline with mine. In my opinion, a better approach to WordPress theming would be similiar to what CushyCMS have implemented. It entails adding classes to elements to signify what content goes where… So:
It would be cool if wordpress could automatically detect the “post” class and loop through the appropriate amount of times putting the right content in the right place. This seems like a much cleaner and fundamentally easier way to apply themes.