Voice of the DBA

Tag: wordpress

  • Data Cleanup for WordPress Tags without a Plugin

    Over the years I’ve had this blog, I’ve added lots of tags. In 15 years and 4,600+ posts, you can guess that I’ve made some typos and mistakes. I’ve also changed how I classify posts, or names of products/technologies have changed.

    Recently I wanted to do some tag cleanup as I discovered I had an “administration” tag and an “adminstration” one (missing an i). Apparently there is no easy way to do this in the EAV structure of WordPress, though there is a plugin that will help.

    Unfortunately, I use wordpress.com for my blog and they don’t allow plugins without a business (and much more expensive) plan. Makes sense, I understand, and I’m not complaining, but how can I clean up tags?

    Slowly

    The way to do this is manual, and slow. I am surprised that the WordPress base package doesn’t allow for this, but I also think they made some poor database decisions they’re living with and this means I must as well.

    If I look at tags, I’ll see things like this:

    2020-07-23 08_47_17-Window

    ReadyRoll has been renamed, and this tag is really obsolete. Some of the posts still make sense, and I don’t want to delete them. I do want to get rid of this tag. I’ve already started using “SQL Change Automation”, which is the new name, so what I want to do is fix tags.

    If I click Edit above, I only get a few choices.

    2020-07-23 08_47_21-Window

    Nothing here to merge. If I rename this tag, I’ll have two tags with the same name, which is another whole issue. However, over on the right side, I can see how many posts have this tag.

    2020-07-23 10_50_42-Window

    If I click the “””3”, I go to a page with those posts.

    2020-07-23 10_51_25-Window

    For this set of posts, they’re already dual tagged. I think I added the SQL Change Automation tag when the product changed.

    Now I can quick edit each of these, and remove the tag for ReadyRoll. When I complete that, I go back to the tag and I see there isn’t anything using this.

    2020-07-23 08_52_31-Window

    Now I can just delete the tag.

    A Chore

    This isn’t easy, simple, and it is incredibly manual. I don’t have a ton of tags that I need to change, but I did find 4 or 5 that were typos and I have worked on those across a few days, as I need a break from other work.

    I also have a number of tags with 1-2 posts, so I have been thinking about consolidating those, or re-tagging with something else, but I haven’t decided.

    Data cleanup is a pain, and not being able to do this in a lookup table in a database and quickly fix things is annoying. It’s not an enjoyable chore, but it also gives me perspective as someone that has built software for the tooling that users would like to see, as well as the struggles when we don’t account for tasks they will perform, like consolidating tags.

  • Porting SQLServerCentral

    Like a few of you, I’ve been working with WordPress as a blogging platform. Over the years I’ve tried a few different pieces of blogging software, but I really like WordPress. I’m not alone as there are estimates that 20-30% of all websites run on this platform, including a few you might not expect. I thought UpperCup and Krispy Kreme UK are sites that don’t really look like they’re powered by WordPress. Those make my own blog and T-SQL Tuesday look pretty bland. Maybe I’ll do a little design work at some point on those. That’s after SQLServerCentral moves over to the platform.

    SQLServerCentral started as a custom ASP site many years ago, then upgraded to ASP.NET at some point. This was a joint effort from the founders to build in new functionality and features as we needed them, purchasing components (like the forums) where we found a suitable product. This first evolution of the site lasted for many years until Redgate Software acquired the property. We then underwent a second platform shift to NHibernate, which has been underpinning the site for a decade. We now move forward with our third evolution.

    We have a project underway that is porting our site to WordPress, for a variety of reasons. Like many of you, I struggle to get resources assigned from my employer for the projects that I’m passionate about if they don’t rise in importance above other things being worked on. There are only so many resources available, and they must be shared by the company. While Redgate values SQLServerCentral, we have a site that works well, and has worked well for many years. Thus, it’s not the same priority as some of the other projects in the company. Since we have some requirements around better mobile support thanks to Google, we had to move in some direction.

    We have struggled with skillsets over the years as most of our web developers aren’t well versed in NHibernate as we’ve moved many of our other web projects to WordPress or more basic technologies like React. Building all the various features from scratch would be a big project, not to mention a constant maintenance headache, so after reviewing some responses to our RFP, we decided to go with WordPress, under Project Nami. This is an open source project that replaces MySQL with SQL Server. While I run MySQL on T-SQL Tuesday, one of our key requirements was that we use SQL Server as a database, and Project Nami allows us to do this. Since there are numerous people with WordPress skills, and lots of plugins that can be easily added (or removed), our view is that WordPress will allow us to grow and change the site over time with fewer resource constraints.

    The last few months have been a long, drawn out project as we needed a number of custom plugins written, or existing ones adapter for some of the functions on the site. At its heart, SQLServerCentral is a rather unique publishing platform, and we needed to preserve much of this functionality. As with most projects, we’ve run over time and budget a bit, but we’re now getting close. I don’t have a date yet, but I anticipate we’ll add more user testing in January and then make a switch sometime later in the month.

    I hope that you’ll find the new platform to be very similar to what we have now. Our goal was to change relatively little in terms of functionality and minimize the look and feel changes. There are some, but I don’t think they are too disruptive. However, we will be looking for feedback and make decisions on what things we’d like to change or adapt for the future. Keep an eye out for more announcements and fingers crossed that everything goes smoothly during the deployment.

    Steve Jones

    The Voice of the DBA Podcast

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