Unfortunately there has been little news from the e107 camp regarding the 0.8 release. A release date stills seem unlikely any time soon, next year perhaps? Of course I know all to well the time pressures of life so I don’t mean this in a bad way – but as a fan of the CMS I can’t help be disappointed. Still – I’d rather they took the time and got it right!
WordPress Blogs
So in the meantime I have been playing around some more with WordPress. My WordPress Affiliate Plugin is now in use on a couple of sites and seems to be working well. I do want to add the ability to place Amazon products into the end of a post and have been testing a few ways to do this. News to follow!
WordPress Thesis Theme
The wordpress theme Thesis is well known in the WP community – mostly because of its generous affiliate scheme (no im not a member of the scheme – yet!). And I finally decided to buy it. As I knew I would use it on many of my sites I went for the developer edition which allows multiple installs as long as I own the sites.
And I have to say I am very pleased with the results. By having all the customisation options stored in the database it allows me to rapidly deploy sites based on a template and then I can make minor tweaks from the admin panel. In the past I had to rely on uploading different versions of themes depending on my customisation requirements.
As discussed in the past on this site, all of my WP blogs run off one installation thus making it much easier to manage. Each site has its own database but shares the same WP code. You can read more about running blogs from single wordpress installs.
New Affiliate Site
So to have a go at setting up a new template using the Thesis theme I have created a subdomain for Retro Kitchen Scales. Yes I know that Kitchen equipment isn’t the most profitable area but I wanted a quick idea to see if I could make it work. Hopefully the site will evolve over the coming months and I’ll report back on any progress.
Good stuff on the WP man! Unfortunately e107 is taking waaaaaaaay too long without any clues as to when its going to be ready – I’m getting quite angry about that, but that’s another story! (I’ve been holding off expressing my real feelings in a blog post for a while now!)
The Thesis theme is amazing and I would love to have something similar at Xen. I’m currently still getting to grips with WP and I’ve almost got the new Xen Themes finished on WP.
I’m actually looking for some development help. I want to create a Xen theme framework for WP but it’s over my ability – so if your ever interested in teaming up then let me know 😉
It’s sad to see that my frustrations with e107 are shared by two of the people I see as having had the potential to be very influential and valued coders / themers for the CMS
I’m almost considering switching the main e107 CMS pages to WordPress on NSNO at the moment too…
I think I would go with a WP “blog” too if I were to start moving, then think about the forum.
I’d want a way to map all the old posts to new ones though, then 301 redirect them. Shouldn’t be impossible. Could be straightforward if the new forum software stores forums and threads at the same level of granularity.
I’m in no rush to port over SammyNetbook.com but I keep considering it.
Am still hoping 0.8 will arrive and will be good.