What I Did Over Labor Day Weekend

A vacation? Noooo. A long weekend means I close myself off to the rest of the world and crank away at some website maintenance. Most of my weekend was spent playing around with WordPress. I am a pretty loyal Movable Type user, so you know it was a last resort to even entertain the idea of switching. The main reason I wanted to give it a chance was because I am looking for an easy registration system. I want people to be able to register to be an author of a site and have an automated system to set them up. WordPress has this as a standard feature and there isn’t even a plugin for MT. To complicate things, I wanted the WordPress blog to be private. In other words, I only only want registered users to be able to view the site. The solution came in the form of a plugin called “Registered Only” and a small tweak to prevented it from hiding the registration page. Needless to say, learning WordPress and figuring out the plugin took up a good chunk of the weekend.

I also installed a shopping cart using an open source application called “ClosedShop.” It was surprisingly simple to install and get up and running. I have dreaded the day I would have to learn how to implement a shopping cart, but it turned out to be pretty painless. I only linked it to a PayPal account, so maybe processing credit cards will be harder. Check out ClosedShop if you ever have to tackle that beast.

I also played around with Amazon’s new associate option called astore. I am not sure if I will use it, but it is an easy way to set up an Amazon store. Perfect for a landing page if you own a great domain name.

Time to sign off and call it a weekend. Happy labor day.