Introduction & General Apologies...

[Marcus Pope]

Ok, first I'd like to apologize for any and all rudeness I expressed
in my email discussion on wp-hackers. It was wrong of me and though I
did apologize there, I feel it is necessary to repeat that point
here. I was interpreting some statements from Otto as offensive, and
regardless of whether it was a misunderstanding on my part, or actual
offense on his, it does not justify responding in kind.

That aside, I agree with the many people who pointed out that the
debate had gotten side-tracked. It did, and so a true discussion
about the merits of both perspectives became washed out. Proof of
such was the repeated topics that kept coming up days later, despite
deep down in the thread they had already been answered.

So this is my attempt to let those who care, discuss it here, and keep
the wp-hackers list from being hijacked by a discussion that validly
only applies to a minority of the wordpress community. I'm not here
to start fights and I assure you I will not let what happened to me
yesterday happen again here. If I do please feel free to call me out
on it, and I will do my best to clarify my intent or as seen before
completely apologize for any such behavior. It is not acceptable in a
civilized world, and I do consider the internet to be such a place.

I hope that from this discussion we can improve the knowledge of
everyone involved all while ensuring the quality of the wordpress
platform is indeed heading in the best direction. I will be the first
to admin that if absolute URL's prove to be the more viable option
that I will concede that point, and I hope a practical discussion can
develop around the different aspects of the problem so as to
facilitate that understanding.

Consider this post as me accepting that I don't know everying, and
want to learn why absolute urls are the design choice of the wordpress
platform.

Thanks,
Marcus Pope

[Sam Auciello]

Thanks for doing this. As mostly a bystander, I was simultaneously
happy and sad about the recent debate.

I actually joined the wp-hackers list recently for a self taught class
about open-source software. As such, I felt obligated to read through
the 12 eight-message long digest emails that showed up in my inbox on
Friday. This turned out to be quite a time suck. It was also quite
educational as I had never encountered this issue before. I'm excited
to learn more about this issue and glad that it is no longer polluting
the main wp-hackers list.

I really appreciate your attempt to refocus the debate and hope that
this new forum will generate a more civilized informative discussion.

Peace
~Sam

[Marcus Pope]

Thanks Sam, we'll have to see if it continues here at all. I'm not
sure that Mike Little or Otto are willing to continue the discussion
here and they are the only vocal proponents that I have met. Perhaps
Andrew Nacin could offer his opinion as I know he feels strongly about
the position too. Sure other's agree with the decision, but they tend
to not care about alternatives because the process works for them. If
the discussion doesn't continue I'll be sure to write a synopsis of my
perspective, one that is edited for clarity and conciseness versus
verbosely written off the cuff, so that at least people can see both
halves of the debate. And perhaps I'll do some system profiling to
chart the differences in performance and function call counts so we
can see a difinitive difference between both approaches.

It was certainly a lengthy thread on wp-hackers, something my sore
wrists have been hating me for all weekend :D

Thanks!
-Marcus

[Mike Schinkel]

On Oct 31, 2011, at 12:04 AM, Marcus Pope wrote:

Sure other's agree with the decision, but they tend
to not care about alternatives because the process works for them.

My experience, with WordPress and in other mature open-source projects is that the lead people are often happy with the existing solution which is perfectly fine for them to feel that way. But what's maddening is they often have an intense unwillingness to even consider that someone else may have a valid use-case for which the status quo does not handle well.  When these issues come up where we are asking for them to consider another viewpoint it feels like they respond as it we are asking them to denounce their God and switch to a new religion; they are that entrenched and unwilling to consider other viewpoints.  

Being someone who always tries to consider the circumstances of another (or at least I think I do) I find it especially frustrating because I think I'll give the benefit of the doubt but rarely feel they are willing to do the same.  FWIW. 

-Mike

P.S. Just venting, since I can't really do it on the wp-hackers list without being a jerk. :-)

[Marcus Pope]

Yeah Mike, I'll say that I still haven't found a valid solution to
testing a local wordpress installation via my iPhone. My home's wifi
router doesn't allow me to change network dns settings. I suppose I
could setup a dns server on the local subnet (a pain on windows,) or
setup my site with my computer's name for the site_url. But that goes
against the recommendation to use the public domain name as the site
address and modify my hosts file mapping to keep the urls matching in
production. Switching between the two depending on what I'm doing
ultimately leaves my database with multiple variations of the URL, and
me switching site config settings each time I want to test each
device. And that violates the premise that I'm to keep each url the
same length between dev and production environments, unless I rename
my computer every time I test a new site. I've heard of a lot of
hacks to make the system work for developers, but the universal means
of solving this problem in all cases, at least how I view it, is
relative root urls.

I've even read that you should just publish your development
environment to a publicly hosted url when you're ready to test, which
seems like a lengthy process to test, tweak and test again, especially
when you're dealing with quirky iphone / android compatibility issues.

Hopefully we can figure out answers to these problems here.

On Oct 31, 12:15 am, Mike Schinkel <mikeschin...@newclarity.net>
wrote:

[Mike Schinkel]

On Oct 31, 2011, at 11:08 PM, Marcus Pope wrote:
> I still haven't found a valid solution to
> testing a local wordpress installation via my iPhone.

I've probably not come across this issue, so I don't follow this. Can you elaborate on what exactly is the problem?

-Mike

[Marcus Pope]

When I have a local installation, that uses the hosts map file
solution for content urls, I cannot access the installation from my
iPhone. So I can't view the site. Using a relative url plugin, that
will work for vanilla installs. But the admin login page for a multi-
site install will test the domain name of the url you use to access
the login page against the database, and if they don't match it will
literally redirect you to what's in the database. Let's say I use
subdomain installs. site1.mydomain.com, site2.mydomain.com etc.
There is no way I can fool the iPhone into looking at 192.168.0.1 when
I put site1.mydomain.com in my iPhone browser. And if I try to access
a multi-site install from 192.168.0.1 or http://mycomputername/ I will
be redirected to the login page on www.mydomain.com.

I *can* access a vanilla install from http://mycomputername/ from the
iPhone but only if I temporarily change the site_url to http://mycomputername/
in the admin (so it's either iPhone access with corrupt urls are no
access at all.) On a multi-site install this is not an option because
I have to specify the real domain name in the network admin.

There are solutions to viewing the front end with an iPhone without
changing the domain (a plugin existed before mine, and now mine) but
before mine you could not access the admin section to test any admin
feature or content posting via the admin portal.

PITA.

On Oct 31, 10:40 pm, Mike Schinkel <mikeschin...@newclarity.net>
wrote:

[Mike Schinkel]

Hi Marcus,

I've read the following 3 times, twice last night and now once again this morning but I still can't follow it (maybe because I don't work on multisite projects?)

Anyway, not important that I do; those who have the issues (you, maybe Dagan, hopefully others) will put your head together to solve it and maybe I'll be able to understand it as I watch this one from the sidelines.

So, back to my current(ly late) project...

-Mike

[Dagan Henderson]

You could always Jailbreak the iPhone an edit /etc/hosts. :-)