Last month, after calling what seemed like hundreds of venues, we found a place to have WordCamp Seattle. Adobe has offered to let us use their campus in Fremont. I have been there one time before and it should be a great venue.

Anyway, I wanted to write this post to say that organizing the conference is one thing I’ll be working hard at over the next few months. The event will take place on September 26. I expect a log of hard work and long hours. I don’t think I really knew what I was getting myself into.

Please let me know if you are interested in helping out. We need more volunteers.

I didn’t realize the amount of work it would create to maintain it.

The thing is, there are many plugin developers donating their time for plugins that I am using. So I don’t mind doing it.

In fact, releasing the plugin was actually the best thing I could do. A few users found bugs and even sent a patch to fix the bug. That’s how it should be.

Anyway, the first update to the New User Approve Plugin was released last night. No new features. Just some bug fixes and code cleanup. Here are the details.

• correctly display error message if registration is empty
• clean up code
• style updates
• if a user is created through the admin interface, set the status as approved instead of pending
• add avatars to user management admin page
• improvements to SQL
• verify the user does not already exist before the process is started
• add nonces to approve and deny actions
• temporary fix for pagination bug if more the 50 users are present in the WP database

If you are a user of the plugin, please let me know if you find any more issues or your thoughts in general on the plugin. And don’t forget to donate if you find this plugin useful.

• Making money with WordPress MU – the Edublogs story (so far)
  How edublogs has experimented with the idea of making money. Very good read.
• Infrastructure for Modern Web Sites « random($foo)
  It would be great if a framework was released with the features outlined here.
• Easier Theme Development with Sample WordPress Content — WPCandy — WordPress Themes, Plugins, Tips, and Tricks
  I've been looking for something like this for a while. I was actually close to creating something similar.
• Lessons Learned: Sharding for startups
  Good readup on database sharding.

Here were my requirements going into this:

1. Limit the search to the sites I want. I give them a list and it only searches those sites. The list would need to be updated dynamically or via an API.
2. Allows me to modify the search results in any order I want or mixing it with other data.
3. Allows me to format the search results how I please.
4. I want the results in a multiple formats to allow for flexibility when and where the results are displayed.
5. I would love to try to monetize the search engine however I want.

Searching for what I needed led me to discover many cool technologies.

I first looked at possibly the most obvious: Google Custom Search Engine. Google CSE is a cool product but it didn’t suit my needs at all. The terms of service don’t allow you to modify the results. I also looked at Google AJAX Search API. Again, doesn’t fit the requirements. I may find a need for the AJAX Search API in the near future though.

Other technologies deserved some attention as well. Products such as CouchDB and Lucene required too much so I didn’t spend much time looking into these.

I had looked at Yahoo BOSS (build your own search service). Initially, it didn’t look like it would suit my needs. After revisiting BOSS, looking at code samples and the API, it was exactly what I was looking for. Easy, fast, reliable. Fits exactly my requirements. Awesome.

Since the site I am building was based on WordPress (like all my sites), I decided to put my work it into a WordPress plugin to allow a WordPress site to easily add a real search engine to the site just by defining some simple options. The first version will be very limited in what can be done but I have a lot of features that I will be adding to it very soon.

I just need to get it ready to release. Soon I hope.

You must use SVN to make this happen. To upgrade all you have to do is change the version number. If you want to run trunk, all you have to do is update the library by running a simple command. You can also add your plugins and themes to update using SVN.

I actually had been trying to do this for a few months. The part I was missing was putting the WordPress software in it’s own directory. The detailed instructions can be found on Joseph Scott’s blog.