As much as I love my hosted version of WordPress and the power I have to customize it however I see fit, there are some drawbacks to the system that I have yet to be able to hurdle.

• openID. I’ve wanted to set up an openID server for my blog for quite awhile now.  The idea of being able to use my domain to securely log into other websites that use openID, rather than having to hassle with different usernames and passwords, was very appealing to me.  However, the technology was initially so new that it was difficult to incorporate openID into WordPress without some hefty file hacking to make it work.  Then plugins started coming out, some of which worked better than others.  Unfortunately, I’ve never been able to get openID to work here, despite a nice little WordPress plugin that’s supposed to take all the hardship right out of installing it.  I suspect that problem lies with inadequate support from my webhost, and all my attempts to contact the plugin’s author have been met with the silent treatment.  The plugin itself hasn’t even undergone any changes, additions, or revisions since it was first published, so I suspect that it’s probably no longer being supported.  This, then, continues to leave me in an openID black hole until something changes either with my webhost or with a plugin developer that can produce an openID plugin that works so well that almost anyone can use it on any hosting package.
• dp.SyntaxHighlighter. I work enough with CSS in the occasional WordPress or bbPress theming project that I do like to share snippets of code when the situation demands it.  There’s a host of good code sharing plugins out there for WordPress, but the WordPress.com developers have incorporated a syntax highlighting package into the .com blogs that’s really slick.  The thing that I like so much about it is that it has a little button that will automatically copy all the code to your clipboard for easy pasting into a text editor.  Gone is the need to highlight and copy and then have to manually remove the numbers from the beginning of each line.  Unfortunately, dp.SyntaxHighlighter has not yet been bundled as a WordPress plugin, and not being terribly adept yet at coding in PHP, I’m not sure where I’d even start to create a plugin to incorporate it into hosted versions of WordPress.  I may try tackling the project here at some point and learn much more, I’m sure, about PHP in the process, but that will have to wait for another time when I don’t have quite so much on my plate. I suspect, though, it’s only a matter of time before else beats me to it.

• LaTeX. The WordPress.com blogs also have LaTeX installed on them for the uber math geeks.  I had a brief introduction to LaTeX when I took Calculus from my father-in-law during my undergraduate education (though I hadn’t yet then met his daughter).  I’ve always been somewhat intrigued by coding and markup languages, and LaTeX seemed similar in many ways to HTML and C.  The beauty of LaTeX, though, lies in its ability to allow you to easily and attractively put complex mathematical formulas and diagrams on a page.  The downside to LaTeX, though, is that the software necessary to make it work is rather complicated to install and somewhat less complicated to use.  It’s gotten better in recent iterations, of course, but it’s still somewhat cumbersome to set up.  The brains over at WordPress.com actually took the time and effort to make LaTeX work with their blogs and to allow anyone who wants to do so to render LaTeX formulas on their WP.com blogs.  There are a couple of plugins that allow you to use LaTeX on hosted versions of WordPress, as well, but they depend heavily on all the LaTeX software being installed on your server.  Most webhosts do not have these software packages installed, and it is incredibly difficult, if not impossible, to install these packages yourself or to get tech support to install them for you.  So, unfortunately, I have yet to get LaTeX installed on this blog.  This does, however, providing a major driving motivation for me to use my WordPress.com blog a bit more, especially since I intend to spend some time working my way through my old Calculus textbook (yes, I did keep it) in an attempt to learn Calculus again and learn it better this time.  So, I may end up referring you back and forth between the two blogs, at least until I can find a way to get LaTeX installed here.

I’ve been toying around with the WordPress 2.3 Beta 1 most of the day today.  I basically copied this site’s files and database to another location, uploaded the 2.3 files, and ran the upgrade script.  Then I spent the next several hours mucking about with the new system.  Here’s what I’ve discovered so far:

• The only plugin that ‘broke’ upon re-activation was the Custom Write Panel.  And even then, I’m not sure it actually broke.  It generates a ‘Plugin could not be activated’ fatal error, yet it clearly showed as active in the list and seems to function just fine when I go to it to write up a new entry.  I have a feeling it has to do with the new tag field in the write screen that the Custom Write Panel plugin will obviously not be able to account for properly.
• The UTW tagging conversion process works pretty well.  I have a massive database, though, and the tag importer counted just shy of 1200 tags that I’ve used in the past and nearly 4000 tag-to-post relationships.  Writing the UTW tags to the new WordPress taxonomy system took awhile, I think in part due to the size of the database as well as to the somewhat sluggish nature of my computer.  The conversion appears to have gone off without a hitch, though, and I’ve retired the UTW plugin on the beta test site in favor of the native taxonomy system.
• The categories-to-tags conversion process failed tragically, however.  It’s been generating duplicate entry database errors, thus failing to convert category names to tags.  Of course, it did, for some reason, single out my Commentary category to convert properly, thus removing every entry from that category (and every other category), effectively removing them from my blog – unless they happened to also be filed under another category, in which case they got to stay.  I had similar problems with converting categories to tags with UTW, as well, so it could be something problematic with the whole system.  It matters little to me, in the long-run, since I prefer to keep my categories separate from my tags, but since I’m helping to beta-test the software, I wanted to see how badly I could break things.
• The new tagging system has two new functions – <?php the_tags(); ?> and <?php wp_tag_cloud(); ?>.  The first takes three parameters and is most useful for displaying your tags at the end of entries.  The latter takes a string of options and is most useful for displaying a tag cloud of your specifications in the sidebar, on a page (say, as a site index), or in a post, if you prefer.  I’ll talk more about the tag cloud function in the following entry.

• The plugins page in the dashboard also now displays when plugins have new versions (according to the wordpress.org plugins database).  It’s a slick little addition that I’m very pleased to see.

  By and large I’m happy with the new changes to the WordPress core.  I’m eager now to see what sort of new plugins will come out of the new tagging taxonomy. 

BlueSands for WordPress is finally ready for release.  It’s a 3-column, widget-ready theme with a fluid width main content area and is built on the famous Sandbox theme.  As a result, BlueSands has much of the powerful markup that Sandbox has become known for, including special classes for preformatted text, code, and definition lists. 

BlueSands also provides support for the Ultimate Tag Warrior plugin.  Once WordPress 2.3 with the UTW tag importer is released, I’ll update this theme to replace the UTW sections with the native WordPress tagging system.

BlueSands represents about 20-25 hours worth of work, about two-thirds of that simply troubleshooting a couple of unfamiliar Sandbox elements.  I’m very pleased with the final result, which receives a fair bit of inspiration from the Navigation theme, which I’ve always loved.  BlueSands uses the colors from the WordPress dashboard to create a clean, crisp look with a minimal design.

Since I also use and love bbPress, I’ll be making a version of BlueSands for bbPress soon, as well.  Once it’s ready, it will be available for download from the BlueSands page, along with the WordPress version, both individually and bundled together.

You can check out the full demo or download the theme from its home page.  Bug reports, problems, or questions about BlueSands should be directed to my support forum.

BlueSands is released under a GNU General Public License.