Downloaded and compiled the source for the WordPress for IPhone application. Running it in the simulator. We’ll see if this post works!

I’ve been poking at WordPress plugins to see what I can do with one. (Hence the proliferation of sidebar gizmos.) I want to write something that will use the Splunk REST API to show interesting things about my server in a widget on the blog. The handy-dandy new PHP SDK will help a lot here. So that much is all good.

But in the process of checking out a bunch of different WP plugins, I have noticed an annoying habit of hiding the configuration pages all over the map. Sometimes there’s a link in the Plugin Management page. Or maybe it’s a tab on the Settings page. Some of the widgets are configured on the Widgets page, itself buried under the Design tab. Ok, I know they were written by different people, and for different versions of WordPress. Which radically changes the administration UI with each new major release. But boy is it a pain to go and hunt down where the settings went this time just to see if this thing I downloaded actually does something interesting.

Move along, nothing to see here.

Finally the blog is up and running. I had it all working nicely last night and then somehow apache decided it liked “500 Internal Server Error” more than WordPress. The problem was that it wouldn’t allow access to either index.html or index.php, which I thought I had already taken care of with DirectoryIndex.

After mucking about with the conf files, I finally went back to Server Admin and did it from the GUI. Which, frankly, I still don’t really trust. Sure, the new Leopard version doesn’t totally eat my configuration any time it touches it, but it still does weird things I don’t understand. DirectoryIndex “index.php” “New”? Well, if it somehow decides to break later, I still have the backup copy of the configuration.

Spoke too soon. The damn thing changed AllowOverride for every single one of my sites, causing WordPress permalinks to break. I should file a bug, but I don’t feel like setting up a test server to reproduce and document.