Louis Kessler’s Behold Blog

Slower than I hoped, but I am working through the WordPress/bbPress integration. This is very important to me, since I’ll be melding the Behold Blog and the Behold User Forum together into what I hope will attract a “community” of Behold users and others who are interested in Behold. I’m trying to make it a nice and inviting environment in which everyone can discuss Behold and help me decide how best to progress into the future.

My main struggle over the last week was how WordPress handles registration, logins, user profiles and lost passwords. I was not pleased to see how unfriendly it was. So first I customized the forms to make them look like my new website. Then I added a login bar across the top of the Blog and Forum to encourage anyone interested to register. Then I changed the user fields so that there are only these: your UserID, your name, your e-mail address, your password, and two optional ones: your location and your website. Then I made it so that you can select your own password when you register, rather than WordPress’ horrid idea of sending you one it creates. And of course, there will be single login for both the Blog and Forum. I had to learn a lot about cookies to get this working together. And my PHP programming skills are improving rapidly.

The other exciting tool is I found the mailing program for my newsletter. It is actually a plugin for WordPress from ShiftThis and I’m very impressed with it. It will allow me to generate multipart HTML/text messages instead of just plain HTML like I had before. And I think I’ve solved my ISP mailing problems as well. I’ve found the ISP Dewahost who is affiliated with Plimus that has a hosted SMTP service for sending no-spam bulk-mail. The server is designed only for mass mailings, and the cost is reasonable. I expect I’ll be able to start my newsletters again soon after I get the new website up and working.

There’s still a lot of work left to get everything working, but I’m getting through it.

There’s a new version now up. For non-purchasers of Behold, Behold had only 4 days left until it expired. So I needed to release a new version, even though all it has new is 2 small bug fixes.

I didn’t realize until now how long this site redevelopment has been taking. It’s now two months and still isn’t finished. But that’s because I’m tacking everything on: A new website. A new web host. A new blog tool. New forum software. New mailing software. New automation scripts. In the meantime, other than new software, I’ve also learned the PHP script language, mySQL database, and CSS web markup. So I’ve been busy and my head hurts.

I’ve come to realize that it was necessary to do this prior to getting to beta and then version 1.0. Soon my site will be ready for growth and increased traffic. Will that happen? I hope so, but at least I’ll have a nice modern site with all the tools in place to handle it if and when it does.

So with all decisions in place, it’s just a matter of implementing everything, bit by bit, until it’s done. My current Behold website uses 8 year old HTML/ASP/Access technology that lasted up to now. This rewrite will bring my site into the new CSS/PHP/mySQL world, and should hopefully last me for 8 more years.

Yes, I had planned on going to Simple Forum. I’m still very impressed by it. But, I wanted to customize it to my site and change not only the appearance (which can easily be done through CSS), but also the content of what is included and where.

Unfortunately, although the PHP code is all available, it is very tightly written and is not easy to change. I’d have to be very much an expert at PHP to do it properly. And such custom modifications would make it very difficult to upgrade to future versions. I wouldn’t want to get stuck at the current version.

So we hereby redeclare the winner to be bbPress. Works just like WordPress. It can also be easily extended by plugins, but more importantly almost all of it is easily customizable. I should be able to add some really useful features, such as showing you the topics you started and all the topics you participated in.

I commented last entry that bbPress was “primitive”. Well, yes it is. But it is just starting to take off, and people are really getting excited about it and starting to turn it around. And as far as handling large forums goes, just check out the Wordpress Support Forum which has well over 600,000 posts already. It uses bbPress.

The one intangible I really like about it is that I can have it in its own directory called “forum”, rather than under the blog directory as “blog/forum” or as a strange url such as “blog/?page_id=6″ as Simple Forum requires since it is a plugin under WordPress. People on Unix boxes can use pretty permalinks and can change that, but on my Windows host, I can’t.

I decided to completely reinstall WordPress and bbPress and start fresh. After all those databases I tried, I really gunged everything up and needed to clean it out and be sure it’s all working. That only took a day and now I’m merrily customizing and integrating it into my new site design. Still not done, but its getting there.