Improved Post and Page management in WordPress

Managing thousands of posts and dozens of drafts will be much easier in the upcoming WordPress 2.3 thanks to some revamped backend code and admin interfaces.

First, the interface changes. In Manage -> Posts you can currently look for posts by search term, or browse by month or category, but only one of these things at a time.

In WordPress 2.3 (or currently on WordPress.com), you’ll be able to filter by search term, post type (draft, private, scheduled for future publishing, or published), author, month published, and category. You’ll also be able to combine any or all of those filters and do them all at once:

so you’ll be able to ask for all published posts written by Lion-O during May of 2007, filed in the “cartoons from the eighties” category, and matching the phrase “Mumm-Ra, the Ever-Living”. That was a hard list of posts to come by until 2.3.

Manage -> Pages will be getting a similar face lift; you’ll be able to filter by search term, author and page type (draft, private, or published).

Better draft management, in particular, has consistently been one of the most frequently requested improvements in WordPress, and these changes are a big piece of that.

Neat huh?

Secondly, the back end changes. The WP_Query class can now select posts by post_status (draft, future, private, publish). This makes it trivial to use query_posts() and wp() for such queries; no more need for kludgey filters and hacks.

WordPress 2.3 comin’, at you soon. Be there!

Hitting WordPress Attachment Handling

In debugging some stuff here on WordPress.com, I dived (once more) into the image handling guts of WordPress.

A while ago, I revamped WordPress’ inline uploading functionality to be more pluggable, cacheable, maintainable and (hopefully) intuitive. A hundred bugs later, it seems to be working pretty well.

This time around, the issue was not how WP displayed the data, but how it stores it.

In trying to make things leaner and meaner on WordPress.com, we reworked some of the behind-the-scenes directory structures on our servers. This should have been totally transparent to the user, but, of course, it wasn’t. It broke our image handling.

Each file uploaded to WordPress is stored as a special type of post called an “attachment”. In the post and postmeta tables, WordPress stores things like file URL, file path on the server, image dimensions, image thumbnail info, etc. So to figure out anything we want about an uploaded file, all we have to do is essentially get_post() and a few get_post_meta()s. Sounds great.

It’s not.

Two reasons:

1. To answer a question like “Where is this file located on the server”, we have to get_post_meta() every time for the answer. With such a generic function, it’s impossible for plugins to filter that data on the fly even for this really simple question.
2. WordPress stores the data in a really inconvenient way; everything is absolute: paths, urls, you name it.

Because of the absolute paths, lack of API, and the aforementioned directory restructuring, we had hardcoded into our DB tens of thousands (a blind guess) of incorrect file locations and no way to filter them. Doing DB updates across hundreds of thousands of tables (not a blind guess) replicated on dozens of servers was not an option.

Partial solution (now implemented in WordPress core): Write a basic API for getting and putting the data. wp_get_attachment_metadata(), wp_update_attachment_metadata(), get_attached_file(), update_attached_file() (the lack of parallelism between function names, and the ambiguity in those names is an historical artifact) are all nicely filterable.

Improvements that still could be made: Don’t store absolute data. This is better for portability too. (Exceptition: guid - but don’t use it for the URL).

Related improvements that could be made:

• wp_get_attachment_url()
• wp_get_thumbnail_file()
• wp_get_thumbnail_url()
• wp_attachment_is_image()
• wp_mime_type_icon()
• Rework get_attachment_icon() given the above
• Kill reliance on or rework get_attachment_innerHTML() (see above)

Vaguely related improvements that could be made:

• wp_handle_upload() is a little awkward (but nice and robust!). Maybe wrap it? That might be silly.
• wp_generate_thumbnail_filename()
• Make thumbnail creation hookable and provide above convenience function

Update: All of the “related improvements” noted above have been made in the recently released WordPress 2.1. Of the “vaguely related improvements” suggested, 2.1 offers hookable thumbnail creation.

bbPress + AJAX = “oooh… pretty…”

bbPress has been getting an extreme AJAX makeover, and things are looking pretty good.

We’re still working on the best user interface, particularly for posting new posts. Firas mentioned the possibility of including a cute spinner à la Technorati. Perhaps a spinner over the post textbox would be best. Something like Owen’s CanaryComment.

WordPress.com invites.

WordPress.com is free as in beer, the software behind it is free as in speech, but my invite ain’t. It’ll cost you a pretty penny: twenty-five of them, to be exact.

Go forth and multiply.

Update: The news keeps on spreading. And if auctions aren’t your thing, try a guessing game!

Stylesheets

I’ll be looking around eventually for people with installs to check out their CSS. I’ve contacted one site already about the possibility of including its stylesheet with bbPress as the default. Please feel free to leave your or others’ site(s) here.

You can count on bbPress

The only problem is bbPress can’t count just yet. There’s a few issues we’re working on re: pagination. To know the total number of pages a particular topic spans, for example, you have to know the total number of posts. But how do you define “total”. With things like deleted and bozoed posts in the mix, counting gets tricky depending on what view you’re working with at the moment. And by “tricky” I mean impossible without extra queries.

We’ll need to add some more info into the DB to handle this. topicmeta can handle the number of deleted and bozoed posts, but where to put the number of sticky topics or the number of no-replied, untagged or unresolved topics? Those last queries could use a little benchmarking; maybe we can get away with grabbing them dynamically. But for stickies… would forummeta be useful anywhere else?

I may need to delete you

Thus saith matt about my precious real ultimate waffe.

Well, it all seems to be square now. Rock on WordPress.com. Rock on.