One Good Port

So as i’ve gotten more into writing the blog, I’ve ran into some snags that have kept me from doing as much as I’d like to with the blog. A big one that trackbacks and pings don’t seem to work properly, which really puts a damper on making a blog into the powerful communication and collaboration tool that it should be. Now a week or so back Devrim [http://pgblog.gunduz.org//index.php?m=04&y=05&d=28 made a post] asking for people to help out with bolstering [http://wordpress-pg.sourceforge.net/ wordpress-pg], and given that this blog runs on wordpress-pg, it’s something that certainly is on my radar. This actually lead to a little bit of a conundrum. I’m inclined to spend some time fixing the trackback/ping issues in the 1.3 version of the software just to get that going, but I also think I might be better off helping to get the new port of the 1.5 up to speed to gain not only the trackback/ping functionality, but [http://wordpress.org/development/2005/02/strayhorn/ all the other whizbang stuff] too. The problem I had was, as I looked into things more, I really couldn’t get a read on what the current long term plan is for wordpress-pg. I might have thought the plan was to do a port of 1.3 as a proof-of-concept, and then go about getting full support in the mainline code. However, if you look at the wordpress project, I don’t see any desire from them to support postgresql in the mainline code. Add to that the [http://www.carrel.org/category/computing/wordpress-pg/ ethics questioning] that befell some of thier developers and you wonder if its worth it to persue folding back into the main project. On the other hand, if you’re not going to try to fold back in, then whats the plan? Wait for new versions of Wordpress to come out and then port them to [http://www.postgresql.org pg] every time? This seems less than fullfilling (for me at least) and means you’re kind of stuck in someone elses development path. Maybe the answer is to fork the 1.5 code (which has pretty much been done) and then, instead of getting it to work with postgresql, get it to work with an abstraction layer that will allow it to run on postgresql and [http://sql-info.de/mysql/gotchas.html my$ql] (and whatever else people want). This would give it some purpose and also greatly expand the developer pool to all those my$ql folks who could help develop the app and aren’t happy with how the wordpress guys are running things. The problem with that scheme is that it’s a lot of work, especially in the face of [http://s9y.org Serendipity]. Serendipity is php based blogging software that seems extremely popular among the php developers. Whats more important, it already supports postgresql, so its something that you could get involved in without all the overhead of wordpress/pg, or you could “just use” if you wanted to go that route. Now sure it isn’t without it’s problems (I noticed when I installed it that it doesnt tell you to create the db first which causes an error in the install) but by and large its pretty slick software. I guess it’s just a matter of priorities. Some folks just want one piece of really good blog software that runs on postgresql, others want every piece of blog software to support postgresql. While I’m not against the latter, I don’t see much reason to fall in with the latter. Especially when both pieces of software are php based. So how bout it Devrim, is it time to make a switch?