Tune in tonight at the NH-ICC for the meeting of the Seacoast WordPress Developers Group. I’ll be talking about WordPress backups. See my slides (and outline) with complete notes and links at http://www.tedroche.com/papers.html.
Want to attend tonight or a future meeting? Meetup details here.
On April 6th, the Seacoast WordPress Developer’s Group met at the New Hampshire Innovation Commercialization Center to talk WordPress. Networking and casual conversation started around 6:30, with the meeting formally starting at 7 PM with a round of introductions:
Dave – former Cold Fusion, ETL, new to WordPress,
Carl Eric Johnson – web developer, WordPress instructor and eveloper, fan of Thesis framework.
Amanda – BIL doing Joomla, Drupal, and WordPress
Sharon, Rye Public Library, Technology Coordinator, just launched a freshened site on April 1st using WordPress and Atahualpa theme/framework.
Will, a graphic designer in a print shop who’d been encouraged to learn web design and now WordPress.
Book recommendations:
Amanda praised the Wrox Professional WordPress book.
Carl Eric has enjoyed WordPress: Visual QuickStart Guide [Updated link — ed.] to get up and running, and WordPress Bible(Aaron Barzell) from Wiley as a reference.
Main Presentation: Carl Eric Johnson: talk about themes and frameworks
Sitepoint.com Wicked WordPress Themes book has free sample download chapter. Table of contents points out the choices of custom themes, child themes, building a framework.
Child themes: load with parent’s theme files, in your child file, you import the parent, then override what’s different.
In WordPress 3.0, theme TwentyTen has a lot of options built in. Thesis and Atahualpa have a number of pages of options: sizing, features, colors, styles, etc.
Amanda talked about file structures and “the loop” – directories of wp-admin and wp-install are pretty much off-limits, containing the installed WordPress files and overwritten up updates; wp-content contains most everything else, including the stuff you customize. Add your own functions.php and copy the functions you want to override. A theme consists of index.php and style.css as a minimum; you can add as much as you want from there. See the Codex for the hierarchy of theme files WordPress looks for in order to render your content. Consider starting with a “blank” theme if you’re building your own, such as Starkers or Boilerplate themes – essentially stripped-down skeletal themes with all of the style removed.
See http://codex.wordpress.org/Template_Hierarchy for a description of how WordPress selects the correct template(s).
See http://codex.wordpress.org/The_Loop_in_Action for an overview of the loop.
A new version of WordPress is available, and I’ve updated the blog to version 3.1 and downgraded it again. It seems like some of my custom hacks didn’t make the transition as smooth as I’d like. A good lesson there: always make backups; they’re handy for quick rollbacks. Check out some of the new features, listed here.
It appears that the Header Image Rotator (http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/twenty-ten-header-rotator/) is the problem. I’ve disabled it, got the update working, re-enabled it and it broke again. Sure enough. I’ve let the author know about the problem and the error messages in my logs. Let’s hope for a painless fix. In the meantime, I’ll post a favorite old picture of mine, taken on a cold snowy night.
Organizer Amanda Giles announced a second meeting of the Seacoast WordPress Developers Group:
When: Wednesday, March 2, 2011 7:00 PM
Where: NH-Innovation Commercialization Center, 75 Rochester Avenue, Portsmouth, NH 03801
Why: Let’s get together for another meetup. More details coming soon. Please send me your suggestions or ideas for things you would like to share or see shared.
CMS Learning Curves
Six people attended the December 2010 meeting of the Central New Hampshire Linux Group, held at the NHTI‘s Library from 7 to 9 PM. David Berube was the featured speaker, talking about his experience with large scale high-performance MySQL applications.
David is an independent software developer and consultant. One of his larger projects over the past couple of years has been an application for scheduling actors for auditions. This involves agents and projects, auditions, roles, videos and a number of other entities in a complex and fast-moving application. He’s used Ruby on Rails, PHP, MySQL, a NOSQL database, Amazon S3, A rack of Mac Minis, BSD, Linux, and a number of other elements. He had some insightful things to say about the development process, managing a client project, handling difficult requirements, scaling up million-row databases for subsecond response times and more. It was a meeting well worth attending.
There were a lot of useful tools and reference sites mentioned, and I was only able to take note of a few: Useful Ruby add-ons: New Relic, Query Reviewer, Percona Operations Day, Cacti for data aggregation. An In-depth discussion of NoSQL (“Not Only SQL”) Databases: what are they, what are they good for, what are the liabilities? A good discussion of the trade-offs of using NoSQL, reference to the NHRuby presentation on Redis a few months ago, and more.
Thanks to David for an informative presentation, to the attendees for a dynamic interactive session, and to the NHTI Library for the facilities. Future meetings at the Concord location have been suspended, we encourage our regulars to attend the Manchester ManchLUG meetings. If you haven’t already, consider subscribing to the announcement list so you’ll know when there’s an upcoming meeting. (Subscribers to the discussion list will automatically receive the announcements, too.)
The December meeting of the Central NH Linux User Group will be held as usual in Room 146 of the NHTI Library – details and directions can be found at http://www.centralug.org – and will feature David Berube presenting “Real World Experience with Large MySQL Deployments”
David recently attend the Percona Operations Day training covering real world howto’s on big MySQL deployments and will share what he’s learned.
About David: David is a principal at Berube Consulting. David Berube is a software developer, consultant, speaker, and writer. He is constantly researching, perfecting, and practicing his trade. He is a prolific writer, appearing in places such as Dr Dobbs Journal, Linux Magazine, IBM DeveloperWorks, PHP International Magazine, and many others. He speaks frequently, notably including his seminar series, “Making Money Using Open Source Software”. He authored the books “Practical Rails Gems” and “Practical Reporting with Ruby and Rails”, and co-authored the book “Practical Rails Plugins.” He is also a leader in the Open Source community. He was involved with the AmphetaDesk project, developing much of its Win32 GUI code.
The topic of the month is Wikis. “Wiki Wiki!” is Hawaiian for “quick, quick!” and is a pattern of presenting a read-write web site. There are more variations and implementations than grains of sand in the universe. but we’ll look at a couple of them, specifically:
We’ll talk a little bit about the range of markup languages, the technology behind the wiki, the social and community aspects of how a wiki works (or doesn’t), and how Free/Open Source has played into the success of wikis.
Recommended Reading: “The Wiki Way, Quick Collaboration on the Web” by Ward Cunningham (inventor of the wiki) and Bo Leuf, Addison-Wesley, 2001, ISBN 0-201-71499-X and http://wiki.org/. We’ll have a copy there for your browsing.
Comments from other members suggest we might also want to look at:
MindTouch (http://sourceforge.net/projects/dekiwiki/)
Wekkid https://launchpad.net/wikkid
Wikipedia’s entry on Wikis: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wiki_software and
a list of software with comparisons: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_wikis
and http://www.wikimatrix.org/
My most active Wiki experience: http://fox.wikis.com (Not open source, either in implementations nor base language).
Patrick will do a talk on memcached (http://memcached.org/), the moxi memcached proxy (https://code.google.com/p/moxi/) and about Northscale’s memcached AMIs for Amazon EC2 as well as using these with the memcached functions for MySQL (user-defined database functions) that he wrote. How you can use these for caching data to reduce the load on database servers.
Patrick has been working with Linux since 1993. Some of his previous experiences have included working on Slashdot, Linux.com, Newsforge.com, launching Slashcode.com and Sourceforge Foundries, developing and maintaining DBD::mysql, mysqlslap development and more than I could possibly list here.
He is the author of “Developing Web Applications with Apache, MySQL, memcached, and Perl” published by Wylie and Sons.
Sixteen people attended the May meeting of the Central NH Linux User Group. Thanks to Larry Cook and Sybase for the use of their meeting room and projector!
Announcements:
Cole works for Dyn Inc, the parent company to DynDNS and the other Dynamic companies. Cole Tuininga presented tips and tricks on optimizing the performance of MySQL in high-traffic, large-dataset situations. He talked about the selection process Dyn, Inc went through to select databases and the large scale processes they have automated at Dyn. You can find the slides on the GNHLUG site at http://wiki.gnhlug.org/twiki2/bin/view/Www/MySQLOptimization.
By the way, seven of us made it to Panera Bread before the meeting for a breaking of the bread. I hope to make this a regular extension to the regular meetings.
Thanks to Larry Cook and Sybase for providing the facilities, to Cole for the presentation, to all for participating!
June meeting *Might* be next week, or we may have to reschedule — securing a location has proven to be a problem. Stay tuned.
Twelve attendees made it to the monthly meeting of the Monadnock Region Linux User Group, MonadLUG, at the SAU #1 offices in Peterborough. Our host, Ken, did a great job of finding us an alternate conference room within the building when another group bumped us from our usual spot.
Charlie Farinella called the meeting to order at 7 PM and we had a round of announcements and introductions. There were several new members as well as a few who hadn’t been seen in a while. Charlie announce that Philip Sbrogna had stepped forward to help Charlie run the meetings. Welcome aboard, Philip, and good wishes!
Our main presentation was from Patrick Galbraith. Patrick maintains a web site at http://patg.net , blogs at http://capttofu.livejournal.com/, is currently employed as a Principal Engineer at Lycos, Inc., and has some great stories to tell from past employment with Grazr, MySQL, VA/Linux, OSDN, Slashdot and others. He’s involved with a number of Open Source projects, including as maintainer of DBD::mysqld and libmemcached and others.
Patrick started with slides from a presentation he recently gave at the O’Reilly MySQL 2008 Conference, to establish some basic definitions and terms. He discussed the various models of replication and the pros and cons of each, comparing replication to clustering. He highlighted the files and scripts which needed to be invoked for replication, and the means of running multiple instances of MySQL on a single machine.
Patrick then switched to a terminal window and we began reviewing the configurations of the MySQL instances on his machine. Using a sample database, he established a master-master-slave configuration. Due to the fact that his machine is in constant use as part of his job (and a book he is writing!), the databases were in an inconsistent state. This, imo, is the best part of the meeting, seeing a practitioner use his tools to troubleshoot a system, diagnose the state, and use sometimes obscure commands to return it to a consistent state. Patrick ran a non-stop commentary while debugging his three instances and pointing out metrics of interest and the significance of various debugging commands. When completed, he inserted records into each master and showed how they appeared correctly in each slave and showed off the binary logs used to make the transactions. Excellent illustrations of replication!
There were lots of related discussions and side conversations, too. An intriguing thread involved “blackhole” data storage engines, where the data actually never is written to disk, but the engine exists purely for posting log entries, which can then be replicated. Wow.
Patrick also took a few minutes to tell us about Sphinx, an independent project thats created an extremely fast and powerful full-text search data engine that’s compatible with MySQL. Very impressive. Patrick also mentioned (and customer Philip endorsed) his wireless ISP business, but I missed the name.
Thanks to Patrick for a great presentation, to Charlie and Philip for running the meeting, to Ken and the SAU#1 for the facilities and last minute Mac video cables and to all members for attending and participating!