WordPress CMS

Previously, we were using a hacked together “content management system” (CMS) to maintain this site. We had integrated WordPress for blogging, but all the pages were stored in separate files. Keeping things updated was a pain in the ass.

In order to simplify things, we wanted to move the whole site and blog into a unified CMS. We tried Mephisto, and it’s pretty nice, but we didn’t want to be tied to using Ruby on Rails, which Mephisto is built on.

We can run WordPress almost anywhere, easily, and inexpensively. There’s also a ton of info for hacking WordPress on the Web. PHP is pretty weak compared to Python or Ruby, but that doesn’t really matter for this purpose.

The theme for the site is being developed by Wyatt and is available for download via Subversion (you might need to log in with username:password guest:guest):

svn co http://svn.bycycle.org/bycycle.org/wordpress/themes/byCycle/trunk byCycle

We may have introduced some broken links or other problems during this change. If you notice anything, please let us know.

Portland Data Update

A couple days ago we updated the Portland region data. This was like a bug-fix release for software–no major changes were made, but a lot of little things here and there were improved and/or fixed.

Related to this (but still quite separate), we improved (hopefully!) the way routes are found. In particular, we made big changes for when the safer option is selected.

Please let us know what you think.

WordPress Upgrade and K2

Today we upgraded to WordPress 2.0.4. It’s a security release. Upgrading is easy: just copy the new directory over the old (being careful to save any customizations first, although if you created new directories for your custom themes, you won’t have to do anything).

We also moved from the old default theme, Kubrick, to a new version of it called K2. This version makes a lot of things easier, and it looks better out of the box. One day we might customize it.