I downloaded Wordpress 2.7.1 today at work with the intention of using it as a collaborative tool for my team to track development plan items for discussion. We have our own renegade web server with a LAMP stack installed, so it only took me about 5 minutes to put the whole thing together. Wordpress is so stinking simple to install as long as you have easy access to your database.

So by the end of the day, I had a running copy working on our production portal and had user accounts assigned to the 5 of my team members along with a welcome post to kick off the conversation. I’ll update you later as to the success of this experiment. I have a feeling it will go over pretty well since the team is pretty tech savvy and really strive to get more Web 2.0 tools into the company.

We are also toying around with the notion of building a wiki to store all of our documents and processes. TWiki and MediaWiki are the two that we’re working with at the moment. Are there any others that we should be considering? Since we’re a small group, just about any tool will be easy for us to install. I’m interested in your feedback, so let me know your results from testing both blogs and wikis in the enterprise.

Are you testing a new Wordpress theme or plugin that you don’t want to release to the world until you’re completely ready?  Test your Wordpress blog offline by setting up a simple test site using actual content from your live blog site using the import and export features of Wordpress.

Setup

If you aren’t familiar with the process of setting up your own offline webserver with PHP and mySQL, you can check out some free resources on XAMPP, which according to the website:

“XAMPP is an easy to install Apache distribution containing MySQL, PHP and Perl. XAMPP is really very easy to install and to use – just download, extract and start.”

Find the XAMPP software at: http://www.apachefriends.org/en/xampp.html

Export Your Live Blog Posts

Your Wordpress blog (version 2.x) has a built-in feature that allows you to export your entire list of posts into an XML format that can then be read into another blog, which you will already have running offline.

On your live blog site:

• Open the Tools menu
• Click on “Export”
• Click the “Download Export File” button and save the XML file

Import Your Exported Blog Posts

Now, log into your offline site and import the file:

• Open the Tools menu
• Click on “Import”

You will see a list of options like the following (click to view full size):

To work with the above exported file, choose “Wordpress” from the list and continue below:

• Browse for the location of your exported file from the export steps above.
• You will have the option to download and import all of the linked images as well, which is a good thing to do ONLY if you have a small set of posts that you’re importing, otherwise this step could take quite a while to complete.

That’s it! Hopefully, you will now have a copy of your production blogs posts in a non-production blog site running on your local PC or laptop which you can then use to try out new code and themes without affecting the users who are currently on your site.  Happy Blogging!!!

My first official Wordpress plugin is complete and ready for distribution.  Named “Twitter Visual Stats”, this plugin is a “widget” that adds a visual Flash-based graph to your site to show visitors your increase in the number of Twitter followers over time.  There are several basic configuration parameters that you can set once the plugin is activated, so you can customize it for your site.

I have just submitted the plugin to the Wordpress.org site for approval and upload to their CVS repository.  Until then, I have made the plugin available on my blog through the following download link.

Download link: http://blog.4minds.com/downloads/twitter-visual-stats/

Installation instructions are included on the page link above as well as in the ZIP file as “readme.txt”.

Feedback

I need it, please.  Tell me what you think of this plugin. Be brutal if necessary, but please give me feedback.  If you have suggestions for improvement, I’ll take them into consideration.  Leave your comments on this post below.

Let it snow!

The holidays are rapidly approaching, which means a nice break from work is also just around the corner for most.  Nothing puts me in the holiday shopping spirit like a bit of snow in the air and on the ground.

So to help spread a little bit of my holiday spirit, I’ve added some snow to my site.  Yes, that’s right, snow!

Hey wait, who put THAT image there?

Ah, now that’s better, REAL snow!  Wordpress users were treated to this special addition by simply enabling it in their dashboards.  A couple of enterprising individuals quickly whipped up a plugin for the rest of us self-hosting bloggers.  It’s called “Let It Snow” and it’s available in the Wordpress plugins site at the following URL:

http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/let-it-snow/

Thanks to a quick-posting Rachel Baker (twitter.com/rachelbaker), I was alerted to an upcoming upgrade to Wordpress 2.7 that is being pushed to users of their blog site tonight at 5pm PST.  Unfortunately, the personally hosted version is not slated for availability for another month, the release candidate 1 is available for download now at http://wordpress.org/development/2008/12/wordpress-27-release-candidate-1/.

The upgrade took me only minutes to perform.  Try it out for yourself (offline first, of course):
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