So while there is material out there to get more information on the the inner working of WordPress, reading books about this topic is a great way of expanding your knowledge.

So I was looking for a book on this subject and I happen to know that one book is currently in the works and will be out in early 2010. This book will surely provide a good deal of information and insight.

You can already pre-order the book, here are links to the German Amazon store: http://www.amazon.de/Professional-Wordpress-Hal-Stern/dp/0470560541 and to the US Amazon store: http://www.amazon.com/Professional-WordPress-Hal-Stern/dp/0470560541

Now, you might be wondering what the content of the book will be and it so happens that there is a bit more available: see below image.

As soon as the book is out and/or more information is available, I’m surely will be happy to tell you more about it. I’m really looking forward to it.

I’ve worked on a new blog entry today (which is about installation and setup of a develop and deployment environment for developers on MacBook, using OpenSolaris, VirtualBox, Glassfish, MySQL and Netbeans).

Wanted to add a screenshot to the post and got an error: Unable to create directory /www/htdocs/…./wp-content/uploads/2009/03. Is its parent directory writable by the server?

Searching the web I was first directed to check the settings:
using the Admin section of Wordpress, go to Settings -> Miscellaneous and see if the first of the entries (called: “Store uploads in this folder“) on the resulting page is a full path or rather (as it should be) just reads  “wp-content/uploads”

However, for my installation this looked fine so I was wondering what was wrong. Further search revealed that Wordpress expects high permission levels specifically for the wp-content directory. So to resolve the issue, this is what helps:

• using an ftp client, connect to your Wordpress ftp directory
• select the “wp-content” directory and have it changed to 777 permissions (Read, Write and Execute set for Owner, Group and Others)
• make sure that you have the ftp-client apply this recursively to all sub-directories of wp-content
  (I first only did the change to wp-content itself and this is not sufficient)

Having done that change, media and other uploads work (or at least seem to work) smoothly now.

Well, specifically in IT, this word has special meanings. And it seems that specifically those of us in the IT world who follow the security topics might get caught in a way they don’t expect:

When an application asks you to pass on the username and password for operating on it’s own on your website, most of us would be very cautious. So was I when WordPress asked me to perform the upgradde to the latest version automatically. I created an ftp-user and allowed it to access only the directory (and sub-directories) where WordPress is installed. The upgrade did not work. Thought it was a configuration error in the wp-config.php file but it wasn’t.

Turns out that WordPress expects to be trusted and then performs its action only in it’s own installation directory. So once I gave the ftp-user full path access, all worked well with the upgrade.

In summary, while we should be aware of and know about security, sometimes we should allow ourselves to trust an application

As is obvious, I went for Wordpress. And up to now, it seems the decision was a good one. The installation was smooth and easy and it worked right from the start.

I decided to do a fresh install though my hoster (all-inkl.com) offers a one-click install. Wanted to experience myself how easy or difficult this is and it is really not difficult. There are great documents that help (I used this one here on the Wordpress site) and the install goes smoothly. Only additional part on my side was to add a specific page with an Impressum so we are ok from a legal point of view.

Further I found that the default theme was not really appealing to me. However, I’m reading another blog: Snowman on Fire and that theme seemed just right (that blog by the way is a great one, talks about hockey). So I tried to find out how to install and activate another theme for my blog and again, this proved to be an easy task. So I’m using the F2 Theme which has several widgets and it does a great job.

Well, so much for the infrastructure, let’s see to get further thoughts compiled and published on and in this environment.