Elliott C. Back: Internet & Technology

With the release of their latest version of Wordpress, 2.5, the official Wordpress site has undergone a redesign by Happy Cog studios:

The main page has been refreshed in boring, pastel colours, and prominent links to their Wordpress for Dummies book via Amazon affiliate link and their hosting affiliate suggestions have been added. I’m honestly not impressed with the redesign, which has included work on the administrative interface:

It’s as if they took the strong ideas and colors of Wordpress past, watered them down, spaced them out, and made sure everything looks sufficiently web 2.0 without actually adding a substantial improvement. Every administrative screen now looks different and inconsistent with the others. If I upgrade, I’m definitely going to miss the old theme. On the other hand, no work had been done since Wordpress 1.5 on the administrative look and feel, so any work, regardless of how it feels, is welcome. Perhaps this is just a stepping stone to a truly better admin panel?

The WP 2.5 release notes blog post indicates some other nice changes:

• Multi-file upload with progress bar
• EXIF extraction (the photobloggers will love this)
• Password strength meter
• Few-click plugin upgrades (I am expecting some 0day exploits here)
• Built-in galleries
• A new Shortcode API (Isn’t this just BBCode ripped off?)

I’ll probably end up installing this with the next release of my own blogs and themes, as the features look promising.

Techcrunch has a hilarious exchange of fire between Wordpress founder Matt Mullenweg and Six Apart’s evangelist Anil Dash over the relative merits of Wordpress and MovableType:

Anil Dash: “WordPress 2.5 is about to be released, and we wanted to encourage WordPress users to upgrade. To Movable Type.”

Matt Mullenweg: “Six apart is getting desperate, and dirty.”

Anil Dash: “Desperation is resorting to name-calling and slander instead of substance — if there’s a factual error, i’m glad to fix it.”

I’ve written before about how I personally prefer Wordpress to Movable Type because it offers me an unprecedented open source experience, tons of community support, and easy hackability. It’s also pretty damn fast, so I don’t worry about my server crashing or overloading.

However, it’s also totally ok in the competitive marketplace of free blogging software for one manufacturer to directly tote its own features in comparison to another piece of software. What’s wrong with saying that Movable Type has features x, y, and z that Wordpress is still dreaming of?

Update: Mullenweg, of Wordpress, has followed up his Twitter with a post Wordpress Is Open Source, in which he says “I had held off criticizing [MovableType and Six Apart] after they went OS and before they decided to start an all-out confrontation because that’s not generally what OS projects do to each other.”

Taking Paul’s great article How To: Bulletproof Server Backups with Amazon S3 a step farther here’s an easy way to automate your Wordpress database backups. First, follow all the steps to get ruby and the s3sync client installed. Once that is setup, create a text file somewhere with the databases you’re interested in. I called mine s3backup-db.txt:

[root s3sync]# cat s3backup-db.txt
db-one
db-one-user
db-one-pass
db-two
db-two-user
db-two-pass

Then you’ll need to make a folder for your backups, which I put in /home/s3backup/. The shell script that does the backups is as follows:

#!/bin/bash

BUCKET=your-bucket-here
BACKUP=/home/s3backup/
ROOT=/root/s3sync/
NOW=$(date +%m%d%y)

if [ $(($# % 3)) -ne 0 ]
then
	echo "Wrong number of arguments!!"
	exit
fi

i=0
while [ $# -gt 0 ]
do
	DBNAME=$1; shift
	DBUSER=$1; shift
	DBPWD=$1; shift

	echo "Backing up MySQL db '$DBNAME' with '$DBUSER:$DBPWD'"
	nice mysqldump -u $DBUSER -p$DBPWD -C -q $DBNAME | gzip -9 > $BACKUP$DBNAME.$NOW.sql.gz

	cd $BACKUP
	tar -r -f backup.$NOW.tar $DBNAME.$NOW.sql.gz
	rm -f $DBNAME.$NOW.sql.gz
	cd $ROOT

	i=$(( $i + 3 ))
done

nice ruby ${ROOT}s3sync.rb -r --ssl --progress ${BACKUP} $BUCKET:
rm -f ${BACKUP}backup.$NOW.tar

This will dump a file called backup.040506.tar in the Amazon bucket you picked earlier containing the full database backups of the arguments you specified. You can run the script like this, and it will produce a little bit nicer output than Paul’s bare-bones backup:

[root s3sync]# cat s3backup-db.txt | xargs /root/s3sync/s3backup-db.sh
Backing up MySQL db '*****' with '****:****'
Backing up MySQL db '*****' with '****:****'
Update node backup.080507.tar

The next step is just to set it up with cron to run every night at midnight:

[root s3sync]# crontab -e
crontab: installing new crontab
[root s3sync]# crontab -l
0       0       *       *       *       cat /root/s3sync/s3backup-db.txt | xargs /root/s3sync/s3backup-db.sh

If you want an easier way to backup all your databases than specifying some of them, just use your MySQL administrative password and username with mysqldump’s –all-databases parameter. However, on my host there are things like Plesk databases I’m not particularily interested in backing up, so this works better for me. Just make sure you make s3backup-db.txt u=rw so that no one but root can see those passwords:

-rw------- 1 root root   148 Aug  5 13:40 s3backup-db.txt