Darice de Cuba

After over more then a year of switching CMS from a Ruby on Rails system back to PHP, back and forth, I hope I have finally settled down. While working Froggy Studio I choose Wordpress for the backend moving away from Textpattern. Since Wordpress overhauled their back-end I have come to like it better then before. The automatic updates makes it so much easier then manually updating each time.

So once I got started with Wordpress I decided to take all my old weblog content from 2003 till now and arrange them in Wordpress format and import then in Wordpress. After some PHP coding due that my oldest content had different date/time. After some code hacking I managed to get 5 years of content in Wordpress. Only the category assignment is a pain. I used a batch plugin but it’s not working good.

So most content is uncategorized till I figure out a easy way. Meanwhile the other ones are categorized under “Oldies”. And off course internal links in those old post are broken. Images are still there, so it’s word browsing the old content. It felt weird reading stuff from 2003, so much has happened and changed.

Finally I have yet to import my latest weblog design into Wordpress template, so meanwhile the universal Kubrick theme will have to do. My current design is back on the Photoshop board to expand it a bit to accomodate categories, comments, etc. I hope to have it done soon.

So there you go, darice.org content is available form the beginnings till present!

So I got everything up and running, except for the contact form. I installed the latest version, Chyrp v2.0 Beta 3. I added a couple of modules(plug-ins) like comments, tags, contact form and Markdown.

Chyrp is a very simple and lightweight weblog application. Lots of people compare it with Tumblr or even Twitter. An app to add quick posts. Now I haven’t ever used Tumblr, I do visit websites that use it and also I use Twitter. Chyrp version 2 is more then that. It’s not comparable with Wordpress and Textpattern but for an application that only exist a few months it’s pretty good and extensive.

Getting started

The install is a breeze, you are up and running in no time. The default template is nice. To make your own design into the template it takes a bit of learning how Chyrps template system, Twig, works. All the time I spend this week-end was learning and working with the template. The one thing lacking is a more clear resource with the available custom tags for Twig. For example, all images in my design I had to hard code the whole path because I could not find the custom tag to link to an image. That is if there is one.

When I started using Simplelog I had to dive in the core files to find out what custom tags there are so that I could customize my template. But that is very time consuming, it would be easier if they where listed online along with a small example on how to implement them. This way people with less coding experience are able to use Chyrp more efficiently and make customization from the default template.

Right now for running a small to medium weblog Chyrp is ideal. I don’t keep all my content in one database as I’m weblogging since 2003. I started out with a very basic hand coded system, last year I switched to Simplelog and now Chyrp. Eventually I will code a small system to display all old content in a more organized way then I do now. Making all the content consistent and archived by year/month/day.

How does it add up?

Chyrp is in beta version right now and constantly in progress. It’s creator, Alex, is very active on developing Chyrp. It’s user base is still small, but currently Alex himself is very active on the forum. He helped me solve the javascript issue I was having in no time.

Chyrp is just as simple as Simplelog, one is in PHP the later in Rails. Also Chyrp has modules and feathers capability whilst Simplelog only provides posting entries and comments. Obviously for most people Chyrp is the easier way to go with a very user friendly install. Simplelog is for the people more familiar with server side code and the unix command line.

Also Another thing of Chyrp is that is has a user system. You can have visitors register and become member of your site, creating groups with different permission, like a group may only post comments but not use contact form. You can give permission to edit their comments or to let them add content. For example you let people register specifically to contribute posting photos.

This can also be tricky, when you install the contact and comments module you have to remember to edit the ‘Admin’ group to add permission to use these modules, same thing for your Guest group which consist of all visitors. It took me a minute to realize I had to do that, I kept getting a blank page instead of comments and contact form.

Finally

If you like to try new things out I would give Chyrp a try out, starting a new weblog or if you are like me and don’t mind taking a risk switching to a beta application. Although I must say I didn’t experience anything up until now that remembered me that it is a beta application. Now that install and setup are done up to the next trial phase: everyday use.