Archive for December, 2007

Got WordPress? Get SVN! (Oh, and happy holidays)

Posted by Jason Birch in General on December 30th, 2007

Before my last major upgrade (2.0 to 2.3… I think) updating was always a long process involving multiple diffs, backups, manually merging my plugins and changed files, etc. Not any more…

What changed? I decided to use the instructions in the codex to convert to an svn-based installation. This process might look a bit arcane, but the benefits are outstanding. This time, my update only required two steps:

  • svn switch http://svn.automattic.com/wordpress/tags/2.3.2/
  • Visit the upgrade page under wp-admin/upgrade.php (which didn’t actually do anything this time around)

There are some caveats (disable plugins and test on a development site before a major upgrade, take backups, cross your toes, etc) but all of the grunt work has been removed. I whole-heartedly recommend this process to anyone who isn’t scared off by the command line.

-J

P.S. Happy New Years, Merry Christmas (belated), etc to all. I like this time of year, it makes my sporadic blogging seem more normal :)

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MapGuide Open Source: More Fusion, Less Confusion

Posted by Jason Birch in MapGuide, Open Source on December 19th, 2007

Fusion is incredibly flexible and cool technology for building web mapping applications. It is also very new technology with limited documentation, leaving more than a few people wondering how to figure it out.

Not to worry, help is on the way! :)

With the MapGuide Open Source 2.0 Beta2 release, a bit of documentation for Fusion was quietly placed in the MapGuide section of the OSGeo download server.

These docs are still a bit “beta” (ie. incomplete), but there is some good information in there for anyone looking to get their feet wet with Fusion. I would suggest ignoring the “Installing and Configuring” doc. Start with “Introduction” (briefly), go on to “Generic Web Mapping Application Components”, then “Widget Concepts”, and finally “Create A Basic Web Mapping Application”.

Apart from the documentation, there is also a new template called “learn” included in the Beta2 installer. Look familiar?

New Fusion Template: Learn

That’s right, this looks a LOT like the existing “AJAX” viewer. Although it isn’t as fancy as the fusion templates that I posted about previously, it does have a lot of functionality. Fortunately, it is absolutely riddled with comments, and is a lot easier to reverse-engineer. It is a good starting point for beginning to understand some of the more involved Jx layout capabilities, advanced widgets, etc. You can find it in the MapGuide install directory, under

WebServerExtensions/www/fusion/templates/mapguide/learn/.

If you are looking for something more bite-sized to get started with, you might also find this small code sample useful:

http://trac.osgeo.org/mapguide/wiki/CodeSamples/Fusion/SuperSimple

This gives you an _extremely_ basic application that uses a few lines of straight HTML/CSS/XML and no JavaScript other than what Fusion loads itself. I obviously didn’t take too much time to make it look pretty:

Super Simple Fusion App

I have high hopes that the Fusion documentation will be considerably more complete before MapGuide Open Source 2.0 is released, but now early adopters have something to play with.

If you haven’t downloaded the latest beta, please help us to make it better by trying it out and reporting any problems.

-J

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