Category: Kev’s Blog

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Adding the WordPress Multisite feature to an existing site

I’ve had this site as my main blog site for a number of years now, but I also keep another site for past projects that I’ve worked on. It’s been a static HTML site for a number of years and gone through a number of revisions, but I wanted to move it to WordPress to make it easier to edit changes directly on the site instead of the normal editing HTML and FTP’ing to the site workflow.

Since this site is already using WordPress, I thought I’d take a look at the Multisite feature to avoid having multiple installs on my Apache server. Turns out starting this late into the evening was probably not the best idea, but after a few hours I finally got it all fixed up. Here’s some key resources:

Key things that I learnt:

  • If you have an existing site, saw www.example.com and you follow all the steps in the above articles, using the subdomain approach you’ll end up with your existing domain as example.com and other sites as subdomain1.example.com, subdomain2.example.com etc. Not wanting to break existing links to my existing site at www.example.com, you could either put in place Apache rewriting, or the  approach I took was to copy my previous posts across to a new subdomain mapped as the original URL, www.example.com
  • To set up the above:
    • export the existing posts using Tools/Export
    • Create a new site and map it to www.example.com
    • Import your exported data into the new site
    • You can now delete the original posts in the original site that’s now mapped to exmaple.com. If it makes sense, create new content for this top site.
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Red Hat release OpenShift PaaS as opensource, and ability to run your own PaaS with OpenShift Origin

Yesterday Red Hat announced at the Open Cloud Conference in Sunnyvale, CA, the release of OpenShift as open source, and the ability to take OpenShift and use it to run your own PaaS.

What does this mean? Firstly, you can take the source for OpenShift and view or modify it (under the Apache 2 license) as you please. Secondly, if you have a need to run your systems using a private cloud model locally or hosted using your own hosting provider, you can take OpenShift and deploy it where ever you need, and still take advantage of the ability to dynamically provision/deploy apps and services using the OpenShift toolset.

This is very similar to the approach VMWare have taken with Micro Cloud Foundry, which is also open source, and also available so you can run the PaaS yourself.

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Oracle v Google court case started this week: in my own words, here’s a summary of the proceedings so far

If you haven’t been following, Oracle’s lawsuit against Google and their allegations that they ‘stole’ Java to develop Android is in court this week. Groklaw as usual are doing a stellar job to report on the proceedings (Monday, Tuesday, & Wednesday), although nothing earth shattering has happened so far.

Here’s the summary, wording is entirely my own, somewhat loosely based on my understanding of the facts 🙂

Ellison: you stole Java

Page: no we didn't

Ellison: ok, then you didn't license it

Page: we didn't license it because we couldn't come to an
agreement on the terms with Sun, so we developed our own
version based on Apache Harmony

Judge: did Apache Harmony license Java?

Page: no, because they didn't agree to Sun's
licensing terms either, in particular the 'field 
of use' restrictions that limited what types of 
devices a particular version (SE vs ME) of the JVM can run on, that
limits SE for example to only run on desktops and
not on mobile devices

Ellison: but the fact is, to develop your own version
of Java, you should have licensed the TCK to verify
that this was/is a valid version of Java

Page: but it's not Java, its Dalvik. We've
never said it is Java or is called Java

Ellison: ok, then you should have licensed Java to build
a new version of the language using the Java API spec

Page: is there a license for the API spec? The Java
language API is freely available without a license, is it not?

Silence.

Ok. In a nutshell this is my understanding of where the discussions are so far. There seems to be a disagreement whether a license is required or even available to take the API spec for Java and develop your own version of the language. Based on the summaries from the Groklaw site, I get the impression Ellison’s team are accusing Page of things that they’re not sure of themselves – is a license available and/or required to use/read the Java language API spec? I’m not sure, but this is what seems to be the current discussion point.

Also if you build something that is functionally similar to Java, but you don’t call it Java and you don’t pretend to even call it Java, is it Java? If you haven’t blatantly copied copyright code, you rewrote the code again yourself in a cleanroom environment, then have you broken the law? Stay tuned as the court case continues in the coming days (weeks… months….)

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