Posts Tagged ‘e107’

This Should Be Better

Friday, December 19th, 2008

Sorry about the bit of downtime earlier today. I actually moved my site over to a new set of servers in an attempt to improve performance.

When you ask people about GoDaddy.com, most people either hate them or love them. Me? Well, I’m mostly on the love the side of the house. I’ve never had any kind of major problem with them. In fact, when my site was running e107, someone exploited an issue with the services trackback functions. A support rep from GoDaddy contacted me, and we worked to resolve the issue.

I’ve been hosted on GoDaddy now for several years, and like I said, no major problems. However, for the last few months, I’ve noticed a considerable slowdown that just shouldn’t be there considering I’m running a single instance of Wordpress. I upgraded PHP, MySQL, and removed plugins in an attempt to speed things up. Nothing had anything more than a marginal impact. So last night, I upgraded my hosting plan moving from GoDaddy’s Linux Shared Hosting package to their new Linux Grid Hosting (beta) package.

I’m really not sure what they mean by beta hosting, but so far it is certainly faster.

Now that the site is working, I’ll have another moment of downtime while I upgrade my WP install to v2.7. ;)

Back To Black

Sunday, January 13th, 2008

Back when I first started my own site, it was black, crimson, and silver. Over the years my site has evolved quite a bit, and along with it the colors have changed. The most dramatic change was back when I started using e107, I found a blue/silver theme that I really liked and stuck with that for a while. It looked nice, but it just wasn’t me and I’ve been wanting to get back to black for sometime now.

While it may not be as black as previous versions of my site, I’ve come up with a new theme that I think fits me pretty good. I just finished it up this morning, so there could still be a few bugs lingering around. If you come across anything that looks odd, or is just totally fraked up, please let me know. I’ll get to the bug squashing as soon as possible.

Hope you enjoy the new layout and the new features!

e107 v0.7.11 Released

Wednesday, January 2nd, 2008

With the new year comes a new release for the e107 CMS. You may recall that e107 is the CMS that I previously used here on d3bruts1d.com. I switched to WordPress because I didn’t need most of what e107 offered,  and with each new release of e107 it failed to offer anything new.

e107 v0.7.11 is a bug fix release, and again offers no new features. The team points out that this will most likely be the last release of the 0.7 branch, and the team will be refocusing their efforts on the development of e107 v0.8. When will e107 v0.8 be released? They don’t have an answer for that, just expect it to be done, when it’s done.

Don’t get me wrong, e107 is a fabulous CMS , however after several years, it was no longer for me.

WordPress 2.4 Note

Tuesday, November 13th, 2007

Just noticed this post about WordPress 2.4. Granted, after a month I’m just now finding time where I can play around with WordPress a bit more, but I noticed right away that it was quick… and a hell of a lot quicker than e107. If WordPress 2.4 turns out to be even quicker than this, especially when using custom themes, I’m excited. I hate waiting for a website to load, especially when there is no reason for it to drag.

Wonder what else they have in store for the next major version.

d3bruts1d’s e107 News Archive

Tuesday, November 13th, 2007

Being that I am no longer using e107 as my CMS, I no longer have a reason or need to continue to maintain my e107 News Archive page that I built forever ago. It was still working a month ago, so things should be good until the e107 devs do something drastic with their code. — I don’t expect that to be for many years. :p

For anyone interested in using it, including the e107 core developers or any other e107 hackers you can find the source code here. Feel free to modify, use, or distribute. If you want to install it, save the code to a file called archive.php and upload it to the e107 “root” directory. — Do NOT put it in the plug ins directory as that just won’t work.

I’ll be happy to answer any questions anyone has about it, just please don’t expect any changes to it.

WordPress – My Thoughts After A Month

Sunday, November 11th, 2007

It’s been almost a month since I converted my site from the e107 CMS to the WordPress blogging platform. I’ve always tried to keep from calling by site a “blog”, but hey… it’s just a label, right? So, it’s been a month. I will admit, I had hoped to be a bit further along with the “new d3bruts1d.com”, but I’ve been a tad bit busy with other things.

So far I’ve been really happy with WordPress. It’s fast, it’s easy to use, and it does what I need it to do. Eventually, I’ll want it to do more, and there are a great deal of plug ins available for it. Don’t get me wrong, e107 was good, it was just a bit more than I needed. Though I do find myself missing some of the e107 features, mainly the user profiles and the aspects related to that. I’m sure as I move farther and farther away from e107, I’ll get over it… and if not, there might be a plug in out there that’ll do what I want.

One of the best things so far, is the Akismet plug in. So far it has blocked 253 spam comments from hitting my site. Phew! That’s a lot of spam. ;)

Let’s hope after another month of WordPress usage, I’ll still be happy with it. Maybe things around here will even look a bit different by then. Though my wife still hasn’t updated her blog.

Time For A Change

Sunday, October 14th, 2007

Things look a bit different around here. I’ve finally had as much as I can stand of e107. It use to be a great CMS, but it hasn’t been meeting my needs for a while, and with the lack up updates it doesn’t look like things were going to get better any time soon.

So, with a bit of work I’ve moved my site to Wordpress. It [currently] lacks some of features that I had at my old site, but nothing that cannot be replaced in time. One thing that I’m very happy about is with this migration, I was able to import the old posts and comments from my old Blogger.com Blog. Getting those archived posts back into my site was something that I’ve wanted for a long time.

So, what all has changed? Well… (more…)

Changing Things Around (Again)

Wednesday, May 23rd, 2007

After several weeks with the previous layout, I’ve switched back to the more normal three column layout. But that’s not all I’ve changed! Oh no, while it may look like I just switched the sections around, there is actually far more to it. In fact, I’ve pretty well re-written and cleaned up the entire theme that I was using, with the only thing remaining for the most part is the style sheet, but it had some edits as well.

What else has changed this time?

  • You can now click the d3bruts1d.com logo to return back to the main page. Not sure why e107 doesn’t do this by default.
  • The (news) archive sections now use the e107 News Archive System that I created rather than the clunky default e107 system. If I could figure out how to completely disable the one e107 has, I’d do it, but it’s really not that important.
  • The d3bruts1d.com Forums have returned. Feel free to drop me a line, or to talk about whatever.
  • The “About” pages have been moved and cleaned up. You’ll find them on the menu to the left.

As always, let me know if something doesn’t work or is just totally frakked.

d3bruts1d's e107 News Archive Page v2.0 Released

Thursday, May 3rd, 2007

I’ve finally had some time to sit down and revisit my News Archive Page, and I’ve got a new version available for use.

First off, let me say that this is not a normal e107 plugin, which is why I try not to call it that. There is no configuration to be done through the e107 Admin control. Instead any change that you want to make needs to be done directly to the code. This is as close to a true plugin as I’ll probably take this. Don’t worry, I hope I’ve commented the code enough for everyone to understand.

Previously, I had 4 different “versions” of the news archive, each with a different display. That is no more, as I have combined the code for everything into one nice little file. Sure, it could have probably been done better, but this works for now.

Here is what each “version” looks like:
- Version A
- Version B
- Version C
- Version D

You can switch which version is displayed by editing the $archversion variable in the code. Default is “B” which is what I am using.

Based on feedback, I’ve also added the ability to display archive items per news category (example). The last addition was the ability to switch the look of the Next / Previous navigation, this was done to allow users to make it fit better into their theme. You can see the two examples of the P/N here.

So, how do I install it?
Installing this page is simple. Simply create a file (e.g. archive.php) and copy this code into it. Save the file and upload it to the e107 root/base directory. Hint: It’s the same directory where news.php and class2.php can be found.Do not try and put the file in the e107_plugins directory! This is not a plugin, and it will not work in there!

Please note, the e107 News Archive Page was tested with e107 v0.7.8 only. I cannot guarantee that it will work with any earlier version, though there isn’t really any reason for it not to.

Woah! What Changed?

Tuesday, May 1st, 2007

As you have probably already noticed, I’ve made some changes to my site. The big thing that most people will notice is that both menu’s are now on the right side of the screen. Yes, it’s odd. But I like it…. granted, it did take some getting use to.

The reason for this change? For starters, I wanted something a bit different. I had been using the same theme (ranyart) for a while now, and this theme is based heavily (95%?) on that. The other reason for the change is this allowed me to play a bit more with the e107 theme system and gain a better understanding of it.

What’s this mean for you? Probably nothing…. other than you may see different themes appear on the site here and there.