• Tables are not created from within the admin script. You must install the schema manually.
• If the schema is not installed, TBValidator will work but will not allow you to save data and send it to Rice University for processing. A message telling you how to enable this is added.

Annoyingly, I still receive the e-mail alerts from the core Orablog comments processing engine. On our local install, I have patched the Orablog software to not send notifications for trackback comments and have added a notification to TBValidator when it finds a valid trackback. I’ll try to figure out how to include this configuration as default but at the moment you’ll have to update items manually. The lines you need to change follow.

Line 121 of trackback_validator.php, add inside the if block below the update:

wp_notify_postauthor($comment_ID, $tb_info['comment_type']); Line 64 of wp-includes/comment-functions.php, change:

if ( '0' == $commentdata['comment_approved'] ) to:

if ( '0' == $commentdata['comment_approved'] && $commentdata['comment_type'] != 'trackback') If you have a fix that let’s comments through when TBValidator is active but stops them when it’s not, please let me know and we’ll add it to Subversion.

We have been using the Orablog software on a number of projects from our company website to personal blogs. For over two months the software has been running without any problems, or any new fixes or patches to be added. The software has been downloaded over 180 times since the launch of the project with few issues and bugs raised. In fact no bugs have been reported since the release of 0.3. Due to this we will soon be releasing version 1.0 of Orablog.

Looking to the future and version 2 of Orablog. A decision has to be made on the compatibility of Orablog and Wordpress. We would like to change the database model to be more Oracle friendly by adding relations, adding more useful keys, removing many of the unused auto number fields and pushing of most of the core queries into store procedures. However these changes would break the compatibility and reduce the number of plug-ins that nearly work out of the box.

We look forward to a discussion on the future.

This version contains a number of fixes. Including a fix to the commenting system to disable the adding of slashes and a new option named ’securesiteurl’ that is used for accessing login, registration and profile pages.

The new option ’securesiteurl’ can be managed through the general options page within the administration site. This options allows the ability to use a https connection for login, registration and profile changes.

To upgrade a previous version of Orablog follow the instructions contained within UPGRADE.txt which can be found in the new distribution.

The installation of Orablog will round off a demonstration of best practices for installing and configuring a complete PHP and Oracle development environment by Oracle Developers.

What a great way to start blogging with Orablog!

Update: The Oracle Installfest took longer than anticipated so they didn’t get to the Orablog demonstration. We did get a nice mention during the PHP Performance tuning presentation, however.  Thanks!

Additional Plug-ins

• Fold Page List
• Google Sitemaps

New Orablog Logos

The new logos have been added to bring Orablog inline with other Fife Ventures branding and to also move away from Wordpress branding.

Fixes include:

• Bug: 1588342. Removed non 7-bit characters from the install-mysql-oracle-functions.sql file.
• Fixed formatting output for posts and pages that contain SPAN tags
• Changed the way that the log4php configuration file is located

Upgrade Instructions

Unpack the tgz file and copy the files within the htdocs directory over the top of your current installation.

There are no database or configuration changes in this release.

This release is available for general use and is used to power the http://www.orablog.org/ and http://www.lamp2lapo.com/ web sites. We have included the Kubrick2 (K2) theme in our distribution and made it the default. Orablog 0.1 also includes the Filosofo Homepage Control, Hello Dolly, Obfuscate E-mail and WordPress Reports plugins. The majority of Orablog’s database queries now use prepared statements with bind variables for improved security and performance. On our development machine, we regularly see a 10-20% performance advantage to Orablog over WordPress/MYSQL. More performance gains will be made once we tune the Oracle database tables.

As part of our porting effort we have created Oracle stored procedures that mimic some MySQL functionality. The current list of functions is currently NOW, IS_INTERVAL, UNIX_TIMESTAMP, MONTH, YEAR, MONTHNAME, MICROSECOND, HOUR, MINUTE, SECOND, DAYOFMONTH, DAY, DAYNAME, DAYOFWEEK and DAYOFYEAR.

In theory this was a good idea. However in three cases Wordpress used mixed case column names (ID, cat_ID and comment_ID). Initially all the instances of these column names were lowercased to be consistent with the rest of the code.

This caused an issue with using plug-ins that were also referencing these mixed case column names. The fix was to add the columns (id, cat_id, and comment_id) as both the lowercase names and the mixed case names to the returned objects.
This fix will allow the use of more Wordpress plug-ins without the need to change any plug-in code.

Any reports on plug-ins that work seamlessly are very welcome!

For those who can not wait for the release. You can get Orablog via subversion. Information on how to access subversion is available  from the Orablog project page at Sourceforge