Rather than completely dumping the native wpdb class (as most WordPress database adapters appear to do), I have subclassed it, replacing only the methods which use mysql_ functions.

This way, it’s easier to maintain, and more likely to work with plugins and future versions of WordPress. I have also written a cheesy, retroactive test suite for wpdb… I haven’t done a lot of TDD, so I have no idea if it’s any good, but it was helpful during development.

Because Drizzle has removed column types and various bits of syntax that WordPress (and heaps of  plugins) rely on, the adapter does a tiny bit of query munging along the way. For now, the only filters required are for CREATE, ALTER and friends.

Here’s a screenshot of WordPress running on Drizzle. Note that in the sidebar, I’m showing off two plugins which maintain their own tables — WP-PostRatings and Twitter Tools.

To test this bad boy out — because it’s absolutely not for production blogs! — you’ll need the Drizzle server (and its dependencies, naturally), the Drizzle PHP extension, WordPress 2.8 and my adapter. Note that I have yet to test it with WordPress MU, but it shouldn’t require many changes if it doesn’t work already.

If you use Ubuntu and want an easier time of it, you can get almost everything from the following PPAs. The Drizzle server isn’t packaged, but it’s incredibly easy to build and changes so quickly that you’ll probably find you want to keep it up to date from the source anyway.

deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/drizzle-developers/ppa/ubuntu hardy main
deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/jdub/devel/ubuntu hardy main

(I have only built my packages for Ubuntu 8.04, hardy, but you can always just grab the source packages and build them for whatever you’re using.)

Make sure you install the database adapter before you go through the WordPress install process. In every other respect, your test blog should operate in a completely unsurprising manner. Except when Drizzle crashes… but that’s precisely why you’re testing it, right?

On Drizzle

I am incredibly impressed with the Drizzle project. It’s a living case study of Open Source innovation and project renewal.

In response to what could be regarded as the unadventurous maturity of the MySQL project, the Drizzle developers have not simply chosen a new goal and forked the code — they have crafted a mission based on an insightful reading of current and future needs, questioned everything about MySQL without throwing away what they had learned, and thoroughly redefined their expectations and model for community collaboration.

It’s the perfect application of Software Freedom’s most functional of permissions: the freedom to fork. Like other forks built on both technical and social foundations — such as Firefox and, coincidentally, WordPress — I think it will eclipse its predecessor. Yes, even the mighty MySQL.

I hope that what the Drizzle developers have done will teach and inspire other projects to look beyond their own horizon.

Here’s a rocktastic presentation by Brian Aker, “Drizzle: Rethinking MySQL for the Web”, from the recent Open Source Bridge conference:

WordPress 2.7 is an awesome release. The revision of the admin backend, despite being so soon after the changes in 2.5, is fantastic… particularly for “real users”. I enjoyed putting forward my blunt perspective on the issue while Matt and Jane were in the crowd at WordCamp Australia. Developers and contributors don’t hear “you’re doing the right thing” and “thank you” often enough.

So, thank you WordPress hackers for another great release! (And thanks to Donncha for already working on the big merge for WordPress MU 2.7… I’m really looking forward to deploying it on GNOME Blogs.)

Plus, make sure you check out the in-yo-face download counter.

"Wordpress 2.7 is shit-hot" by Halans

• “Launch: Prologue Groups” at 11:05 on Saturday, from Sam Bauers and Jane Wells
• A “Special Presentation” at 13:30 on Saturday, from an undisclosed speaker
• “Launch: Secret Product!” at 10:05 on Sunday, from Alex Shiels
• Certain titles that may or may not suggest other project releases…

Might we see a live WordPress 2.7 release? Perhaps we’ll see some of the goodies previewed in Ranaan Bar-Cohen’s recent “Seven Tips for Virtual Collaboration” presentation… of course, you’ll never-never know if you never-never go.

I will be there. Wearing green.

Bonus: Crikey Blogs is now featured on WordPress Showcase!

WordCamp Australia 2008 will be held in Sydney at the end of the month, right before OSDC… and I intend to celebrate my first WordCamp by giving a talk!

Yes, I will dimly glow next to such bright stars in the universe of WordPress as Matt Mullenweg and Jane Wells (who is kicking butt with the WordPress 2.7 admin redesign), as I present an exclusive, behind-the-scenes look at the recently launched Australian über-blog-network, Crikey Blogs.

WordPress lovers and the blog-curious should come along and join the fun!

Flickr Photo Album makes it easy to use Flickr images in your blog, and the latest version integrates really nicely with the new “add media” user experience in WordPress 2.6 — it adds a Flickr icon to the toolbar, and pops up a great user interface for finding images to use (from your stream, from albums, from search results against those and all CC-BY images, etc).

Now for some celebratory Flickr-inspired imagery as tribute…

Balloons by orphanjones

Update: Boh, looks like the caption shortcode is not working. That’s Balloons by orphanjones (linked), and hopefully the caption will make this comment redundant soon.

• WordPress and WordPress MU (multi-user)

  It’s hard to make recommendations related to WordPress without mentioning the project itself, and its twisted sister, WordPress MU. Both are improving in leaps and bounds, and it’s a pleasure finding all the cool new things as I track their development trunks. WordPress 2.6 is the latest major release, with lots of cool new goodies… Donncha is rapidly catching up to those changes with WordPress MU. I wrote nice things about them on my Projects that make GNOME rock! post, too.

• Sandbox

  I am a minimalist at heart, but with a fondness for cleverly expressive minimalism, so the Sandbox theme blows my mind. If you just look at the theme on the surface, it seems like a very boring, no-frills blob of unstyled HTML. But the genius lays waiting beneath the surface, in the highly evolved markup. Cunningly generated classes deliver extraordinary flexibility to a designer working with CSS. Just look at the body and div.post tags to get a good idea of what you can do. Be the signal is 100% Sandbox + custom CSS, with no added ingredients… and it changes colour every hour!

• Akismet & Bad Behavior

  The one-two punch in my anti-blog-spam regime. Bad Behavior protects against abusive hosts and patterns of use, while Akismet does content filtering. As such, with an MTA analogy, they’re like a great combo of solid Postfix policy as front-line defense, plus DSPAM content filtering. Like my mailservers, I might not run both in every situation, but it’s great that they’re both available to protect the innocent.

• Twitter Tools

  Keeps my tweeps up to date with my blog, and lets my blog readers (bleeps?) know that I use Twitter and what I’m up to. I don’t use the daily blog archive feature, but lots of people enjoy that… despite it being one of the latest controversial content issues on Planets. I really ought to add identi.ca (or most likely “generic Twitter-style API”) support and see if Alex accepts the patch…

• OpenID

  It’s great that companies and sites like Sun, AOL and MySpace are becoming OpenID providers, but the web really needs more consumers. So pretty much every WordPress blog I set up has Will Norris’ WP-OpenID plugin installed. A while back I hacked it up to work with WordPress MU (always on, in mu-plugins), which was great for GNOME Blogs. I need to update that to the latest versions and see if Will might accept a nicer patch than the last one.

• Typogrify

  As a card-carrying Font Fascist, it delights me that so many folks are working hard to improve typography on the web. I know that sounds a bit like “folks are working hard to improve oxygen on the moon”, but we’ll get there. Typogrify filters your posts to provide some cute ways of draining your own swamp, such as adding helpful markup to improve styleability of things like allcaps words, initial quotes, etc.

• My own cheesy plugins

  I’ve only managed to upload a few of my custom plugins to the WordPress Extend repository (which is a fantastic way to manage plugins for a widely-used platform, by the way), and thus far they’re kinda simple and cheesy.

  • @reply automagically adds Twitter-style replying to your comments.
  • Bug Links adds stylish links to common FOSS bug tracking systems — this was mainly written for GNOME Blogs, so I’m particularly happy that Thomas uses it regularly for his very cool metacity blog.
  • OpenSearch* adds OpenSearch discovery to your WordPress site, so users can add your site to their search dropdown (in, say, Firefox). I need to improve it further to support the whole OpenSearch specification.
  • Tango Smilies makes your emoticons not look like arse!

Thanks, of course, to all of the developers and contributors to these projects.

With my GNOME Foundation hat on I thought that, rather than taking the easy way out by plugging a bunch of our rocking applications, it might be cool to show off some of the projects that make GNOME rock:

• WordPress and WordPress MU (multi-user)

  Blogs and planet sites have had a huge impact on communication in the FLOSS world. GNOME and WordPress share many of the same philosophies about usability and development, so it’s not surprising that heaps of GNOME contributors use WordPress — and we’ve recently deployed WordPress MU on blogs.gnome.org. WordPress rocks.

• Bugzilla

  Perpetually overlooked as one of the most important FLOSS apps, even though it is absolutely crucial to the development of so many: Mozilla, GNOME, Apache, Eclipse, OpenOffice.org… the list goes on — even NASA uses it! Bugzilla makes GNOME rock harder.

• One Laptop Per Child

  Using GNOME technologies throughout, the OLPC project has created an amazing user interface for kids, and contributed some great technologies to the FLOSS world along the way — coming soon to GNOME! The best bit is that OLPC will take Software Freedom to millions, if not billions of kids around the world.

• Cairo

  One of the classic ‘behind the scenes’ projects that has contributed to so many advances throughout the FLOSS world. It lies deep in the core of GNOME’s rendering technologies, not only delivering beautiful graphics, but a totally delicious API for software developers as well.

• Evolution

  Okay, okay, I have to plug at least one GNOME application! Evo might not be the newest or sexiest GNOME app, but it is indispensible as one of our core communications tools, and its features help many users shift to FLOSS platforms – particularly in corporate environments. The next release will even have Google Calendar and Exchange MAPI support — sweet!

Check out the article for plenty of rocking Open Source projects suggested by other FLOSS industry and community folks.

After quite a bit of work, WP-OpenID is now ready for WPMU! Always wanted your WPMU install to consume OpenID for logins and comments? Now it can!

I am already running this modified version on blogs.gnome.org and perkypants.org (WPMU and WPSO respectively), in order to test the changes in both environments.

To try it out, download the WP-OpenID plugin, and follow the directions in the bug^Wpatch report. It’s a work-in-progress, but definitely ready to test.

Once GNOME bug #446524 is fixed for Blogo, I’ll try to push the changes upstream. OpenID is for everybody, including WPMU admins and users!