Hawkix Blog

Time for some news about PG4WP.

Hawkix Blog is now running WordPress 2.9.1 using PG4WP 1.1.0rc2

I’ve tagged a 1.1.0rc2 release because I didn’t get much feedback until now.
‘RC’ means it is a Release Candidate, I feel confident about it being stable enough for production use, but it still needs testing.

Please note : error logging is active in this release, but you can disable it in ‘db.php’ that you have to copy in ‘wp-content’.

The ‘readme.txt’ file is up to date about installation, don’t forget to read it.

[UPDATE] Some people asked me were to download this release, so here is the direct link to the zip file in the wordpress plugins directory

The developpement Version of PG4WP has initial support for WordPress 2.9.1 fresh installs, you can test it and give your feedback as a comment to this post (please give some informations about your setup).

You can download this version in the plugin directory (in the “Other Versions” section).

As always, don’t forget to make complete backups before testing a development version.

Note : upgrading from WP 2.8.x is not ready yet (it works, but generates errors about indexes that may make your setup unusable after upgrade), I have some more work and testing before I put this part into the development version.

Wow ! Time is going so fast …

WordPress 2.9 seems to break compatibility with PG4WP 1.0.0, which is unsurprising.
Whereas I’m watching new releases of WordPress, I’ll wait some days after the bugfix release (version 2.9.1) before I start to work on updating PG4WP to make it work with WordPress 2.9.

While I’m working on this new release that will be numbered “1.1.0″, please note that 2 patches were developped by users of PG4WP (thank you for your work guys) :

• Stéphane Mariel : http://www.mariel.fr/docs/driver_pgsql.diff
• balrog-kun : http://www.openstreetmap.pl/balrog/wordpress-pg4wp-update-2.9.1.patch

There is not much work, but I want to test as much as possible before I publish the next release of PG4WP.

Here are the main goals for this planned 1.1.0 release :

1. Should work with at least WordPress 2.8.4 (existing installation)
2. Should work with WordPress 2.9.1 (fresh install)
3. Should upgrade smoothly from 2.8.4 to 2.9.1

PG4WP is now present in the plugins directory at WordPress.Org, allowing for a direct access to the latest versions and the changelog.

Yes ! PostgreSQL for WordPress 1.0.0 is out

This means I think the code is stable enough to be used in the real world

I optimized a bit the code, mainly to have often used code reached faster.

Another big change is in the size of ‘db.php’ that cuts down from about 32kB to less than 1kB.
It was initially a copy of WordPress’ ‘wp-db.php’ with some changes in it, now it loads up the file from your WordPress installation making any needed change “on the fly”.
The main advantage is that I don’t have to keep my version in sync with WordPress’ one.
Please be warned that this new method requires PHP 4.3+ to work, so this becomes the minimal requirement (anyway you shouldn’t use an older version of PHP).

I’ve also changed the directory structure, so that the ‘pg4wp’ directory goes directly in ‘wp-content’ instead of going into the ‘wp-content/plugins’ subdir.
This is because PG4WP is not really a plugin, you need it to be installed and running before any plugin can be loaded.

If you enable debug logging, the log files are now written into ‘pg4wp’.

A ‘readme.txt’ file is included in the zip, describing PG4WP for the plugin directory at WordPress.Org
I’m still waiting for my account there to put PG4WP.

I use PG4WP to run this blog since I opened it, and encountered no real problem with it (only “not working features” that I corrected since then).

If you use PG4WP to run your blog (in fact this is true even if you don’t use PG4WP), don’t forget to make regular backups (and verify that you’ll be able to restore them in case anything goes wrong), ‘pg_dump’ is your friend if you are running PostgreSQL

If you installed any previous version, don’t forget to remove the ‘pg4wp’ directory from your ‘wp-content/plugins’ directory as this one is no more used.

Download :

PG4WP 1.0.0

This looks like a major release as there are important improvements :

• Wordpress upgrade process support (mainly MySQL ‘DESCRIBE’ and ‘SHOW INDEX’ emulation)
• Full indexes support when installing (they were simply ignored in previous versions)
• Some code cleanup and optimizations
• When debug is on, one file is generated for each query type
• Tested successfully with WP 2.5.1, 2.6.5, 2.7.1, installation and upgrading to WP 2.8 both work OK

I really need feedback now, I’ll focus on code optimization to release version 1.0.0 soon.

Download :

PG4WP 0.9.11

Time for a new release, with the following improvements :

• Ignore errors about non existing table “wp_options” while installing WordPress when debugging is on
• SQL_CALC_FOUND_ROWS emulation, to have correct posts paging
• Introduced support for the ZdMultilang plugin

I’ll soon rework my blog’s translation, using this great plugin.

SQL_CALC_FOUND_ROWS emulation gives correct paging, so PG4WP can be used on post-intensive blog now.

My next work will be on support for WordPress’ upgrade process.

I tested upgrading from WP 2.7.1 to WP 2.8 and this works OK, but generates some errors.
If you intend to upgrade your WordPress soon after installation, don’t forget to backup everything before you run the upgrade.

Download :

PG4WP 0.9.10

This new release contains the following changes :

• Comments deletion now works
• Most specific global variables renamed to have ‘pg4wp’ in their name

This version was tested with WordPress 2.8, and also works well with version 2.7.1

I’ll test upgrading from WordPress 2.7.1 to version 2.8 in a while.

Download :

PG4WP 0.9.9

Here is version 0.9.8, with these improvements :

• Searches are now case insensitive
• WXR file import tested and works

I think PostgreSQL support is complete now, I’ll just make some code optimizations for 1.0.0 release.
What I am missing now is feedback to confirm that PG4WP is stable and ready.

Tests and development are done with WordPress 2.8 codebase, but if someone needs support for an older version I can test it.

Download :

PG4WP 0.9.8

Changes in this version :

• Improved some regular expressions to limit unwanted changes in SQL
• Wordpress’ export feature didn’t work in previous versions
  Note : I’ve not tested the import feature yet

Download :

PG4WP 0.9.7