Tablet Mania

1 year ago
by gatekeepeR in

Apple just released the iPad2 today.  Woopee.  There’s at least 100 others that are coming to market.  So what to choose?

I posted last year my thoughts on the iPad as a viable platform, especially for it’s “Kindle replacement” argument (obviously that hasn’t happened yet).  I still stand by the argument that if you want a pure reading device, that’s your best bet.  But I’ve found myself away from my PC’s more (sitting in the Great Room) and despise having my phone for internet access. My laptop only has a 2hour and change battery (what I get for going low-end, but I didn’t need the monster I had prior to this one).  (more…)

This is why you never…

1 year ago
by gatekeepeR in

This is why you never upgrade a “live” site, especially when you’re dealing with multiple softwares that need to interact together.

WP 3.1 rolled out on Wednesday, and silly me, thinking it’d be fine to upgrade, did so on both t-gk.net and cans-crew.com.  t-gk.net was fine (and why shouldn’t it be?), but cC went into a tailspin.  After multiple hours of frustration, I finally got cC back to basic functionality again, but it’s still missing some key features.

The integration (WP-United) redefines several functions that until WP 3.1, had been in a file that was rarely called.  3.1 moved those into an “always active” file, creating PHP Fatal errors.  Not good.  As a temporary work around, I wound up just renaming the files in WP-United.  It’s at least restored template functionality, but the user-integration method is somewhat borked for the time-being.  As a solution, I *think* that if I comment out the offending functions in WP, all will be well.

This is what happens when you use a piece of software that’s not actively developed right now.  Officially, the last “stable” release of WPU is compatible with WP 2.9 and phpBB 3.07-pl1.  The dev has been disappeared for over 6 months.

I’m thinking at the present time that I should take a serious look at pulling several pieces of his  software and merging them with another one out there that’s missing them.  I don’t feel 100% comfortable doing it, but I think it’s going to have to be done. =(

New Site Rolled Out

1 year ago
by gatekeepeR in ,

I’ve been remiss in updating the rollout of the new site design.  It’s been a rather busy week here, fixing up some of the problems that I’ve run across and doing some other things.

The design is for my gaming community, cC (formerly’ cAn’s Crew).  I’ll spare anyone *not* interested in the gory details by posting everything below the cut.   (more…)

WordPress & other CMS Systems

1 year ago
by gatekeepeR in ,

WordPress is a great CMS, no doubt about it.  But unfortunately, some of it’s core functionality is lacking, even when using every plugin known to man.  For instance, integrating a phpBB forum into WordPress is trying.  While WP-United solves that to some degree, it’s a one-man dev shop, and he’s been prone to take long breaks away.  His latest plugin (0.8.5) was released long before WP 3.0, and while it seems to work ok, still has some errors.

I’ve been struggling to integrate MediaWiki, phpBB3, and WordPress together.  Basically, WordPress is going to run the functionality of the overall site, including the template.  This is for my gaming community, and we’ve had phpBB and MediaWiki running together for quite some time.  Unfortunately, they’ve always run disjointedly, meaning there was never any real integration between the home page, the forums, and the wiki.

Sadly, Mediawiki won’t integrate with the WP-United setup.  It’s left me very frustrated the last few days.  The idea of adding a few lines of code that call up the WP header may work for WP & Mediawiki alone, but not with WP, Mediawiki, and WP-United.  Maybe phpBB4 will fix that, but that’s easily 12 months away.

The elegant solution, it seems, is to just use the idea of the integration instructions and use another Wiki package.  Seems I’ve found that solution with WikkaWiki, although it remains to be seen if I’ll be able to get the data inside our MediaWiki install and convert it to WikkaWiki.  I hope that I can.

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