In this sleepy edition of WordPress Weekly, (since I was awake for 20+hours) I had a chat with Joseph Cefoli who is the guy in charge of The FairFieldMirror.com and Daniel Bachhuber of CoPress, a company specializing in the migration from College Publisher while also providing managed hosting. During the interview, we discussed a number of topics including the trials and tribulations of migrating 7,000+ articles from College Publisher into WordPress, the manual labor involved, the various plugins in use on the site and much more. I find the stories of migrations such as these to be interesting since they usually consist of painful experiences that were overcome.
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WordPress Tavern Listener Poll:
This Weeks Poll Question Is: Should WordPress Change The Blog Nomenclature Within The Backend?
Picks Of The Week:
Jeff – WPWorldMap.net – WPWorldMap.net is a cool website where WordPress users from all across the world can register an account and place a marker above their general location since the site is made up of an embedded google map. It’s a great way to see if their are any awesome WordPress folks in your neighborhood.
This Weeks Trivia Question
Which forum software was the first to use CSS based layouts rather than tables?
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Wow, Jeffro stumped me on this one, I’m not really sure which forum software was first. bbPress is almost table-free, but not quite. I remember struggling with tables in a phpBB 2.0 theme I think, and 3.0 is table-free, so I’m going to have to guess that phpBB was the first…
This was an interesting episode, that sounded like one epic struggle of a migration! Makes me glad that most platforms are a lot easier than to migrate to WordPress, but I’m sure it was a real weight lifted off of their shoulders once they made the switch.
I hope that more colleges follow suit and switch to WordPress or another Open Source platform. I taught at a community college for a bit, and their web situation was pretty much the same as the college that I went to: old, outdated, overpriced, and underwhelming. It’s too bad, with all of that free brainpower and software, schools should be up on the latest ideas, especially in a media or technology department, but I found out that institutional monoliths are hard to budge.
I’m a bit stumped as well, but I’m going to take a stab at the trivia question as well.
I think the first forum software to use a css-based layout rather than tables was Vanilla.
@Kim – Yeah, I thought Vanilla would be a good guess too, Mark has been a busy beaver lately, Vanilla is looking pretty sharp.
“CSS layout” needs defined before anyone can properly answer this.
Since it’s a vague question I’m going to give a vague answer :p
AFAIK the first forum default theme to not have any non-semantical tabels was bbPress. It does use tables, but they’re semantical tables. So the answer you are looking for is probably bbPress I’m guessing … but then perhaps not if you are defining “CSS layout” as something which has no tables.
phpBB3 was the first software to provide a default theme which used no tables at all. But just because something uses a table to define tabular data, does not mean that the layout is not defined by CSS, therefore being a “CSS layout”.
However there is also a third option in that I’m sure there must have been a third party forum theme out there which used no tables at all long before bbPress, phpBB3 or Vanilla released their semantically optomised default themes. I have no idea what the first one of those would have been though.
And there is a fourth option … themes which used convoluted nested tables on the interior content of their pages but use semantical non-table based layouts to control the actual layout of the page as a whole, but not for the nitty gritty stuff like positioning off avatars, posts, signatures etc.
If I had to pick just one option, I’d go for bbPress since AFAIK it was the first forum software to provide a semanticaly optomised theme by default.
@Ryan – Yeah, I wasn’t sure if he meant the first forum to not “misuse” tables, or the first to not use tables at all, so I went with the latter. But it is a pretty tricky question, lots of right answers ;)
I’ve got no clue..
Going with a complete guess- SMF
:)
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Being this is WordPress related trivia, I thought this would be easy question to answer or at least guess. Based on my readings of an interview as well as some wikipedia entries, the correct answer is bbPress. If you want, I can link to the material where I got the answer from.
@Jeffro – What can I say, we were thinking too hard, thought you were throwing a curveball ;)