Temporary Disruption
A couple of weeks ago our host made some changes to our website that left our entire blogging platform completely disabled. They lowered the permissions on some file settings to prevent unauthorized access (read: hacking) into our site as well as other sites on the shared server. I can’t disagree with this move; in the end it is a necessary inconvenience that adds an additional layer of protection but requires that I move blogging platforms and recode the vast majority of the site.
Until now I have happily relied on Movable Type as my blogging CMS of choice. MT provides all of the features I need; namely the ability to host multiple users with their own individual blogs on an easy-to-use platform with scalability and multiple plugins. On the down side, MT is written in Perl and is extremely resource intensive, taking a long time to do just about anything. When making a single blog post this isn’t so bad, but when making lots of template changes this can be very frustrating. A bigger issue is MT’s requirement to access files at CHMOD 777 permissions levels in order to generate content.
For those with an insatiable curiosity, CHMOD stands for “change mode”. The three numbers stand for “Owner,” “Group,” and “Everyone” in a UNIX file permissions hierarchy as to who can read, write and execute files on your site. 777 is the highest level of permissions, allowing global file permissions access and considered to be a security risk. MT requires 777 on many files and folders.
My search for a new blogging platform didn’t take long, as I had already been considering WordPress when I last refreshed the site. WordPress is a great blogging CMS that is easy to use, creates dynamic content using PHP and therefore fast, has a ton of available plugins, is extremely popular and well supported, and doesn’t require 777 perms. It’s not without its imperfections, however. It is designed exclusively for the single blog environment, an issue that doesn’t bode well for a multi-user family website. Sure, you can argue the availability of WordPress MU (Multi-User), but MU is a hacked-up hybrid of WP that isn’t easily installed and doesn’t provide all of the plugins written for regular WP which make it so attractive in the first place.
So what to do? Well, I have chosen to go the vanilla WP route and add additional authors to the single blog while creating some of my own widgets and hacking some of the templates to create a multi-user envirnoment. Since a large portion of the site will need to be rewritten, this will take several weeks. We appreciate your patience during the process.
