LightPress

Wordpress 2.1 has finally been released. Here's a pick from the list of new features:

You can go grab the update at wordpress.org but beware: Lightpress won't work with Wordpress > 2.0.x yet! Mainly this is because of the changes to the posts-table and the link-categories.

The posts-table now has a column named "post_type" (which can take 'post' or 'page') and one named 'post_status' which is the usual 'publish', 'draft' or 'private'. The link-categories have been merged into the global categories-table (PLUS, old link-categories get a new id!) and there is a new table called 'link2cat' linking between the two tables.

I'm working on a patch (since my site is already working with wp2.1RC2 and lp2 nightly) and i hope it won't be long.

Fresh from two weeks of holidays in beautiful Lanzarote, I tried to tackle the WP pages problem I outlined in my previous post. The result is a 150 lines patch for

, which brings rendering time down from 18 seconds to less than 1 second in my test blog with 200 pages. The patch is also available as a drop-in php file, but remember to backup the original WP file in case you run into problems later.

As much as I like the concept of WP "pages", which should enable the use of WP as a lightweight CMS with built-in blogging, I do not think it is currently usable for anything more than very small personal sites. The problem is (again) in the liberal use that WP does of MySQL resources, and in the bad design of its DB layout.

I just finished inserting a couple of hundred pages in the db to move a site which is currently using a custom CMS to WP+LP, and imagine my surprise when trying to access "Manage Pages" in the WP admin console PHP exited with a

error. I raised

to 24M, restarted Apache, and......waited 25 seconds for the page to load!
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