Phillip Pearson - web + electronics notes

One guy reporting that SB doesn't go on his Windows box pointed me at WAMP, a PHP5+Apache+MySQL distribution for Windows. Looks good - I wasn't looking forward to installing all the bits and pieces separately on my Windows box. Let's just hope it has a decent uninstaller as well, for once I'm done :-)

Downloading now... 23 megabytes. Getting 65 kB/sec through the office's DSL line. To think that ten (twelve?) years ago I balked at downloading FrontDoor, which, at 800k or so, took an hour at 2400 bps.

Heh, in the time it took me to write that and look up a link to FidoNet, the download finished.

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Update: I've released the v1.0pre11 Structured Blogging code, which now will work if you have short_open_tags=Off on your PHP install, so now it should work OK on Windows. If you were getting an error like Parse error: parse error, unexpected $end in c:\www\wordpress\wp-content\plugins\structuredblogging.php on line 344 before, v1.0pre11 should work better for you.

I've been setting up some Debian instances (separate chrooted copies of differen versions of the OS) so I can run different versions of PHP and hopefully debug some of the issues people have been having with the Structured Blogging Wordpress plugin on their systems.

The feedback I have from people so far is:

• PHP pre 4.3.0 doesn't work due to html_entities_decode() not being present.
• PHP 5 on Windows doesn't work as it requires <?php rather than just <?. (And possibly for other reasons.)
• Some versions (not sure which) result in a loop that makes PHP run into its memory limit. (This may actually be an interaction with other plugins.)

So today I'm testing what I can right now:

• Debian Woody - WP 1.5.2 on PHP 4.1.2 on Apache 1.3.26. This gives me the expected error about html_entity_decode().
• Debian Sarge - WP 1.5.2 PHP 4.3.10 on Apache 1.3.33. This seems to work OK.

And I've already tested on:

• Debian Sarge+PHP5 - WP 1.5.2 on PHP 5.1.1 on Apache 1.3.33. Works fine.

The next one to set up and test is PHP 5 on Windows. I haven't managed to replicate any of the stranger errors - the memory limit one, for example.

BTW if you're coming to this post via Google to figure out why your SB install isn't working, and can't use your Wordpress install at all at the moment, just delete the structuredblogging.php file to disable the plugin and get WP going. Then drop me a line (click on the envelope: ) to make sure I know about your particular case.

I've been sitting on a bunch of bzero updates for ages (it's been over two years since the 0.18 release!), and figured that now is as good a time as any to release them.

So now 0.19 is the current released version - get it here:

bzero 0.19 - download

Enjoy!