Mathew was kind enough to send along an invite to create a WordPress.com blog, and I decided to give it a spin, having seen a lot of hoopla about WordPress the CMS on #linux.
The first thing I noticed was how spartan it was in terms of available features. It turned out that the big thing about WordPress the CMS is how customizable it is — if you host it yourself. If you go with the WordPress Multiuser version (which is what WordPress.com showcases) that automatically drastically cuts down on the customizability available. You have a handful of themes to choose from (and you can’t add any, of course); you cannot upload modules (of course); and what you’re left with left me pretty underwhelmed, I’m sorry to say.
The first thing I looked for (and couldn’t find) was some way to consume RSS feeds so I could transfer over my blog posts from my LiveJournal. Searching the Web turned up a number of mods for WordPress-the-CMS which, of course, couldn’t be used with WPMU hosted on WordPress.com. Looking at the source generated, I saw an XHTML DOCTYPE, so I thought I might as well write a Perl script to effectively do a bunch of POST requests with form fields pulled using a few quick XPath requests.
Well, I got as far as logging into WordPress.com using the script — the posting form was ill-formed XML according to a variety of parser-checkers.
What was it dying on? JavaScript.
Oh well. Fortunately, it did parse as HTML using the HTML::TreeBuilder CPAN module, and I found HTML::DOMbo on CPAN that would turn it into an XML::DOM nodetree, which I hoped would be usable with XML::XPath. That didn’t quite work because XML::XPath was expecting a richer set of methods that weren’t present in the generated XML::DOM nodetree, so I just ended up using DOM operations to navigate the tree.
Going from the RSS feed (and later, LiveJournal’s export XML format) to posts on the WordPress.com blog was pretty straightforward once I got the mechanism done. Then I went in and fixed links to previous posts (that were pointing to LiveJournal).
And then I noticed that WordPress.com eats backslashes.
This was supposedly fixed in the development branch of WordPress-the-CMS over a year ago, but WPMU on WordPress.com still hasn’t gotten the fix.
As you might have noticed, I tend to blog a lot of blockquoted code. The idea of having to escape all backslashes in future posts doesn’t appeal to me, so I’m going to stick with LiveJournal for now. Fixing backslashes in a handful of posts was enough to frustrate me.
Oh well. At least LiveJournal works.
