What started out as a test site, then a means of writing about and providing plugins and tips for the WordPress (MU) platform recently became a ghost town of broken links and removed plugins. I tried to keep ranting posts from encroaching but as I had become increasingly bitter towards the platform, I was finding it harder and harder to write nice things.

When you don’t support or agree with the ideology of the creators of a piece of software, it becomes difficult to get excited about the software itself. It becomes a tool upon which to build great things, and WordPress is a fantastic tool to build even greater systems. Forget about it being a blogging platform or a CMS, it’s not, it’s a framework. On its own it provides very (extremely) basic functionality, the power comes from the plugins and themes built on top of it.

Unfortunately the creators of this particular framework (and their staff) feel the need to butt in at any opportunity and bitch about how I’m working. Leave snide comments and remarks on their blogs and basically make themselves (in my opinion) look like complete prats. I have no respect for prats.

It probably comes as no surprise that I disagree completely with the vision they are trying to push. It appears that my politics and theirs just don’t mesh. That was fine, however, when we were all left to our own devices.

Those early visitors probably noticed that I had a lot of free plugins available, I wrote a lot of tutorials right here on this site and I spent a lot of time in the forums helping other people in this mythical thing called a “community”. I gladly did that, I believed in it, I enjoyed it but unfortunately this post changed my opinion forever (a week later, this tweet confirmed that I had made the correct choice).

It turns out that GPL isn’t good enough (wasn’t Matts argument that as long as it was GPL it was fine). Oh no, now I’m expected to work all the hours I have available and give my code away for free as well. But wait, that’s not what theme creators are doing, they have exactly the same system (you pay for compulsory support to get the code) and they are promoted directly by Automattic and Matt. I smell a rat here, and a rather huge one.

I’m not a designer, I’ve never been graphically inclined so I leave that to others. No, I’m a programmer and database geek. That is what I am good at, so that is what I do. Turns out though, that if I could work out how to use Photoshop I would be accepted by Automattic, and even promoted on the wordpress.org site as a premium theme developer. But no, I am only a lowly plugin developer. I have zero worth and thus am not allowed to profit from my toil in the eyes of our “glorious” leader and his minions. To them, it appears, a plugin is no more than a twitter interface or something to correct the capitalisation of WordPress. They are blind to the complex plugins out there, deliberately so I think.

10 minutes after reading the post I linked to above, and the response to my comment on it, I pulled all my plugins from my site and the WordPress extend repository, and that was the start of the end of this site.

I will happily provide free plugins and support whilst I believe it is for the good of a group of people, but when there is an expectation that I HAVE to do so, then I’m sorry, that just stinks.

Here endeth my rant, I have no doubt that we’ll bump into each other again at some point down the line (hell, I still have a plugin or 3 to release yet), until then have a good one.

So here we go:

cafespain.com, which has been sitting around for a few years now, waiting for an exciting project, finally has a purpose. I have handed over the domain to a good (and extremely talented) friend to take forward. Because of this, I have ceased to be cafespain online, so any (and all) cafespain accounts have been closed, made dormant or handed over (including the wp.org / mu.wp.org profile and forums account).

I hate the staypress name, so that’s likely to change prior to release. Why hasn’t it been released yet? Well for the past week I’ve been running a property management company so have been a bit tied up with that and my other workload, so to speak. An advantage being, the staff in the office have been hammering the beta build all week and apart from a few little things, it’s holding up quite well.

The other reason is, after a few chats with an influential someone, I’m delaying the release until a particular new site is launched in the very near future. Oooh mysterious, you betcha. Game changing? You bet your life it is.

I’ve had the clearskys.net domain since 2005, back when it was a property rental site built from scratch by your good self. It then became a holding page, blog, development wiki, forum and is now a sort of half-blog, half-abandoned mess of broken links. It still manages to retain it’s PR4 ranking despite my best efforts to destroy it.

Through the years it has proven it’s worth, being responsible for me acquiring at least 2 full time jobs and countless contracts and little development projects. It even made some money from advertising last year, but I removed the ads because, frankly, I think they are ugly.

However, the end is here. I just don’t have the time to go through the site and fix everything. I have even less time to write on it. If I did, I wouldn’t know what to write anyway, as the audience and readers that remain (a few thousand of you) are all here for different things (as evidenced by my rapidly fluctuating Feed statistics when a post is made).

So, the only way forward is to clear out and move on… so by the end of next week clearskys.net will be no more.

If you use something on this site as a reference, maybe a bit of code or information, then I suggest you grab it now. You have my permission to repost on your own site any tutorials, code snippets, guides, nonsense that you want. Just do it quickly.

I was thinking of moving it, and the content, over to Tumblr, but you can’t import into the Tumblr system. So without the content, I’d still be stuck with a silly domain name so it’s best to be rid of it entirely. Though if you find a liking for it and want to take it on and move things forward, then get in touch.

And now, and end to all of this misery and sadness. It is time for me to return to my sofa and attempt to fight off this flu.

Unfortunately, I am in a position that I never thought would occur. It kills me to have to turn away interesting work, but I fear that my current workload is already on the limit of what I can handle with the level of care and attention I like to put into projects.

So, for the moment, if you are looking for experienced, and really rather good, WordPress or WordPress MU developers then I can recommend Incsub (I may even end up working on your project via them).

Alternatively a message on the WPMUDEV jobs board usually receives a number of responses.

For standard PHP (inc. Codeigniter), OS X and iPhone development, I’m afraid I don’t know that many people around that take freelance work, though I’m sure some of them will shout over and remind me (I’ll update this post to reflect shouts).

I’ve just checked in the changes to the development code and run through it for a quick screencast. Look ok?

So let me tell you where I am with regards to sites and domains and then maybe those with still functioning creative lobes can help me make some progress. Warning this next part will read like a ramble.

Current domains

Whilst I like (liked) the StayPress.com and StayPress.org domain names, they aren’t really suitable for this new site / approach as they are related more with the technology and backend software, but let me tell you my dream set up.

• staypress.org – This domain will host the development blog, the free self hosted plugins and anything else (nudge nudge wink wink) related.
• staypress.com – This domain will be / is hosting the hosted version of the system. So users without their own web host / install can sign up and use the plugins as a service, each with their own front end site. Like wordpress.com for property sites.

And now for the next step

newdomain.something – This is the biggie, the next big step leading us to world domination (insert evil laugh and picture baddie of choice). This is primarily a front end site, an aggregator if you will. Envisage a few hundred / thousand little StayPress sites owners all dutifully filling in property and booking details and managing their businesses / rentals. All trying to increase their traffic and make their way up the search engine ranks.

Now picture the StayPress API sitting in the background automatically sending their updates to a central server (The API has to be activated and enabled separately, so don’t worry about privacy, it is very much a download, activate, configure and opt-in thing – think Akismet) .

Wouldn’t it be useful if, as a community, we have a way of promoting all of these properties in one location? Yes, it’s a rental portal drowning in a see of other rental portals, but it’s one, as an owner, you don’t need to visit, don’t need to update, don’t even need to worry about.

Your updates and booking calendar are automatically kept in sync, and enquiries through the portal are automatically sent down to your own site. It is purely a marketing tool for the rest of us.

Sound interesting? I hope so. But what to call it? What domain name? and numerous other questions.

This is were I ask for suggestions and ideas. If you think your suggestion is so good, that it shouldn’t be in the public domain, then put NOT FOR PUBLIC at the top of your comment below and I will keep it private.

For those worried that this is but another distraction that will yet again delay things, fear not… The server side API is already written and the framework is available for download. The plugins are already “portal” ready and are capable or running many such portal sites out of the box (I spent an inordinate amount of time making sure the database structure was capable of this level of use). You can even run your own mini-portals (group sites) with a WPMU installation.

The best suggestions I’ll put together for a public vote, and I’ll look into providing some sort of prize(s) for the exceptional.

Update: Thanks for all the wonderful comments, it was a lot to digest and go through. In light of this, I’m going to revise a few things and plots. More soon.

Rather than creating an Insert or Update SQL statement yourself, simply pass in the table name and a key / value array and WordPress will build and sanitise the SQL for you.

Recently, however, I found myself needing (wanting) to use the INSERT ON DUPLICATE UPDATE statement in a project, but didn’t want to have to build, what is a relatively complex query over and over.

So I give you the insertonduplicate function. Usage is simple, pass the table name as the first parameter and a key / value array of fields and data as the second parameter. It is reliant on primary keys and / or unique indexes on mysql server to determine if it should perform an insert or update.

An example of use would be a last visited system with a database table holding the IP address of the visitor and the date of their last visit. By making a unique index of the IP address you can leave it to the server to determine if it should insert a record for a new users visit, or update the record of an already visited IP.

It is available for download from here.

Note: This version is only for WordPress / WordPress MU version 2.8+ as the menu order changed with that version.

Update: Version 0.3.1 has been tagged which is a location independent version of this plugin.