Ian Lewis' Blog

Recently I read an article on gyaku that says that Japan is pushing forward with passing laws to regulate open communications. It seems to be targeted at protecting young people from public online sites and mobile content but the nature of the law means that the regulations will extend to blogging and to online sites such as 2channel. This looks like something me and my fellow bloggers in Japan will need to follow closely.

It may come as a disappointment to some of the b2evolution developers since they seemed to like the plugins I wrote for b2evo, but I've pretty much decided that I am going to defect and convert my blog to wordpress. With b2evolution I have had to write and have to maintain plugins to get features that already exist in wordpress plugins that integrate with gallery2 and show images using lightbox. I have also had to hack b2evo quite a bit to achieve the multi-language features that I wanted because a plugin isn't possible given the limited plugin API in b2evo. Basically maintaining my b2evo blog has been a pain especially when it comes to upgrading since my site contains a non-trivially modified version of b2evo. All of those changes need to be merged with new versions when they come out.

So I decided I will convert to wordpress since I can get gallery2 integration in a plugin, multiple langage posts/translations in a plugin, and I also will get the wordpress features like widgets that the b2evo folks have been coding for the next version to play catch up with wordpress.

Though it sounds nice it's still not as easy as it sounds as gengo, which supports the multi-language features in wordpress, has a developer who seems to have been absent since around May and it isn't compatible with the newest version of wordpress which came out on Tuesday. So either I have to install the previous version of wordpress and wait until gengo can get it's act together or hack gengo to work on wordpress 2.3.