I first discovered WordPress late in 2003 from Mark Finlay, an Irish GNOME contributor. On December 24th 2003 he posted:

Everyone go look at Wordpress: Seriouslessly sexy blogging Software, looks like it’s gonna kick MT’s ass.

I did, and in the end he was right. Unfortunately he died January 10th 2004. WordPress always reminds me of the three months when we lost Ettore, Chema and Mark.

There were a few scripts around for moving Drupal posts to WordPress but they were all pretty out of date so I took one and updated it. It has a lot of commentary in it. Take a look: drupal-to-wordpress.sql

Anyway, I use Dreamhost which I love for many many reasons (primarilly it’s really cheap and seems to work really well). Unfortunately they don’t build their PHP with BCMath or even GMP, which means my PHP can’t do the hard math that’s required for crypto. Luckily there’s a mode of OpenID that doesn’t require any work on the relaying party side. So I made a small change that allows James’ module to work in this “dumb” mode.

Index: openid.install
===================================================================
RCS file: /cvs/drupal-contrib/contributions/modules/openid/openid.install,v
retrieving revision 1.2
diff -u -p -r1.2 openid.install
--- openid.install      25 Mar 2007 06:38:00 -0000      1.2
+++ openid.install      16 May 2007 22:59:56 -0000
@@ -2,24 +2,6 @@

/**
- * OpenID module requires bcmath
- */
-function openid_requirements($phase) {
-  if ($phase == 'runtime') {
-    $requirements['bcmath']['title'] = t('BCMath');
-    if (function_exists('bcadd')) {
-      $requirements['bcmath']['severity'] = REQUIREMENT_OK;
-      $requirements['bcmath']['value'] = t('Enabled');
-    }
-    else {
-      $requirements['bcmath']['severity'] = REQUIREMENT_ERROR;
-      $requirements['bcmath']['description'] = t('OpenID needs the bcmath extension for encryption.');
-    }
-  }
-  return $requirements;
-}
-
-/**
* Implementation of hook_install
*/
function openid_install() {
Index: openid.module
===================================================================
RCS file: /cvs/drupal-contrib/contributions/modules/openid/openid.module,v
retrieving revision 1.2
diff -u -p -r1.2 openid.module
--- openid.module       25 Mar 2007 06:38:00 -0000      1.2
+++ openid.module       16 May 2007 22:59:56 -0000
@@ -133,10 +133,14 @@ function openid_login_form_submit($formi

$idp_endpoint = $services[0]['uri'];
$_SESSION['openid_idp_endpoint'] = $idp_endpoint;
-  $assoc_handle = openid_association($claimed_id, $idp_endpoint);
-  if (empty($assoc_handle)) {
-    drupal_set_message(t('OpenID Association failed'), 'error');
-    return;
+
+  // if we have BCMath, we should use OpenID smart mode
+  if (function_exists('bcadd')) {
+      $assoc_handle = openid_association($claimed_id, $idp_endpoint);
+      if (empty($assoc_handle)) {
+        drupal_set_message(t('OpenID Association failed'), 'error');
+        return;
+      }
}

Also, I put the patch up on Drupal.org

1. First I set up a FeedBurner account and burned my feed. The feed Drupal produces for me is: http://ianloic.com/rss.xml. Now when I access http://feeds.feedburner.com/ianloic I get the contents of that feed. It’s pretty simple, but so far nobody is going to see that feed.
2. Then I simply told Apache to redirect all requests for that feed, except the ones from the FeedBurner bot to my FeedBurner feed. With the slight of hand magic of mod_rewrite this is pretty straight forward. In the root of every Drupal install there’s an .htaccess file containing a bunch of stuff. I just added a few lines to the mod_rewrite.c block of that file:

     # Rewrite rss.xml to http://feeds.feedburner.com/ianloic
     # unless FeedBurner is requesting the feed
     RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^ianloic\.com$ [NC]
     RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} !FeedBurner.*
     RewriteRule ^rss.xml$ http://feeds.feedburner.com/ianloic [L,R=301]

   This will cause Apache to send a 301 redirect to http://feeds.feedburner.com/ianloic any time anyone requests http://ianloic.com/rss.xml, unless their HTTP User Agent begins with FeedBurner.

   Now I’ve got access to all the FeedBurner statistics and fun features. Since I didn’t actually touch the Drupal configuration I’m pretty sure a similar approach can be taken to applying FeedBurner to any feed.

So I did what was probably the wrong thing and wrote my own. At least I didn’t write it from scratch, I based it largely on codefilter, with some inspiration from the patches to codefilter that add GeSHi support.

I hacked up GeSHi a little as it wants to link keywords of most languages to reference sites. While this sounds like a good idea in theory it was linking HTML keywords off to some random site I didn’t really like and didn’t think was that good, so I disabled that functionality.

Using the module is pretty straightforward. You wrap your source code in tags that look like

<code language="LANGUAGE">...</code>

where LANGUAGE is a supported language. If there’s an enter in your block then it treats it as a block otherwise it renders it inline. Also, some whitespace is trimmed, so you can force a single line to be treated as a block by putting an enter at the start or the end.

Right now it’s being maintained in the same source control as I’m using for my web site, but I’ll move it into Trac and Subversion eventually. For the time being it’s attached.