Category: Blogging

I’m striking out on WordPress Glossary Plugins

I wanted to add a glossary to my directory’s blog to handle some repetitive knowledge tasks.

Well I’ve looked through most of the WordPress plugins available and:

  1. The free version is under powered and the Pro version is a damn subscription costing $55 annually.  Dream on.  I got too many subscriptions already.  This ain’t a commercial blog.
  2. The whole glossary plugin is way to complicated for what I want.
  3. Sounds perfect but requires block editor.
  4. Sounds good, not recommended for my version of WP and/or has not been updated in 2 years.
  5. Should work, tried it, didn’t work. Plugin homepage 404 and plugin designers website in French.

 

I could also make do with a wiki plugin, or maybe a Knowledge Base plugin.   Both are a bit more than I need.

Feature Wishlist for Hypothetical Indieweb Personal Blog Script

IMHO the Indieweb needs to have a plug and play blog script in order to gain wider acceptance.  Keep in mind I’m not a developer or a coder.  Script is aimed at individual bloggers for personal blogs.

Whole script needs to be something that can be 1-click installed on most hosts.

  1.  Simple themes that are easy to customize and share.  (A lot like the old HTML templates of the past.)
  2. Extending the stock blog script would be done through plugins.
  3. Commenting system built in.
  4. Indieweb stuff built in or the core plugins pre installed.
  5. Flat file database for long term robustness.
  6. At a minimum, a Markdown based editor to keep things simple.
  7. Categories and tags.
  8. Site search.
  9. Ability to migrate your posts.  So the migration format needs to be something most blog scripts use. WP?
  10. RSS
  11. SEO competent out of the box. Spiderable.
  12. Anti-spam – ship it with something like the Anti-spam Bee to protect comments.
  13. Some sort of captcha system.

What else?

Redoing or Rearranging My Blogs

My current blog problem:

  1. I like micro blogging on Micro.blog and I like the community there.  But I don’t like the work flow of writing and posting long form blog posts on Micro.blog.
  2. I hate micro blogging on WordPress.  But I prefer WordPress and it’s full features for long form blog posts.  Plus I like the ready availability of plugins to extend the platform.

My current everything blog is on Micro.blog (long and short form) and I may have to split that, keeping the MB blog for short blogging (and community) and establish a new *Press blog for long form stuff.

Must ponder.

Successful Conversion from WordPress to ClassicPress

  1. New site.  Started with a fresh WordPress install.
  2. Got WP site set up.
  3. Installed Indieweb plugins and a few others.  Avoided using WordPress owned plugins like Jetpack and Akismet.  Found alternatives.
  4. Wrote some posts.
  5. Rediscovered ClassicPress.  Decided this was the best time to try ClassicPress before I have too much content and before I add too many more plugins.
  6. CP is compatible with most WP plugins that will run on ver. 4.9.9 or older.  Checked all plugins.
  7. Just to be safe, prior to conversion, I disabled almost all plugins including all Indieweb plugins.
  8. Installed the ClassicPress migration plugin.
  9. Followed instructions on that page for migration plugin.
  10. Plugin detected no conflicts.
  11. Migrated.
  12. Yea!  Nothing broke. No errors. Utterly painless.
  13. Started reactivating plugins disabled in step #7 above.
  14. Everything works.  The reactivation of the Indieweb WP plugins caused no errors that I can detect.  But, the site being so new, they remain untested.

Why Convert to ClassicPress?

If you don’t trust the direction WordPress is headed (ie. block editor and more commerce oriented).  Combined with all you need is a full featured blog.

What have we learned?

My web host does not support ClassicPress auto installs.  However I can 1 click install WordPress and very easily convert it to ClassicPress right away via that migration plugin.