phpWordPress 3.0.1 and its AJAX features (December 2005)

On 8 December 2005, phpWordPress staff announced that “a set of AJAX powered features” had been added to the bundle. They listed two. The first was rotation of headlines on the home page, controlled through Preferences, including the speed of rotation, the number of headline articles in rotation and the characters shown per article. The second was improved search, which auto-completes articles and news directly as you type in the search box. The features shipped in version 3.0.1, and staff added that new AJAX features were on the way.

phpWordPress was a commercial PHP article manager from Spoonlabs, renamed Vivvo in 2006 and unrelated to WordPress. See the release history for where 3.0.1 fits.

What was AJAX in 2005?

The term had only just become common. It described using JavaScript in the browser to fetch data from a server and update part of a page, without loading a new one. For a publisher, that meant a page could change while the reader looked at it.

The archived features page flagged it as new, listing “AJAX powered rotation of headlines, and search” with a NEW! label.

What did it give a publishing site?

Rotating headlines let a home page show more stories in the same space. The preference settings suggest an editor, not a developer, was meant to tune them. Auto-complete in search let readers see matching article titles before pressing enter, which shortens the route to a story.

The product kept going in this direction. The 3.2 announcement of 8 May 2006 described a “desktop-like experience” in article administration, using AJAX to update page elements without reloading the whole page. The changelog records live editing in the Preferences section on 2 April 2006, and an AJAX calendar in version 3.25 on 17 May 2006.

What went wrong, or could?

One record in the changelog shows the cost of the approach. On 17 May 2006 a fix was logged for rotating headlines failing when the author or date fields were turned off. A feature that depends on several settings has more combinations to test.

We can add general considerations that apply to any such feature, though the archive does not discuss them:

• Content hidden from non-script visitors. Rotating content shows only one headline at a time, so readers who skip it may not see the others.
• Speed. Every added script costs loading time on the home page.
• Reading and accessibility. Moving content can be hard for some readers to follow, and some people cannot pause it.

How is the same need met today?

Current CMS themes include sliders, live search and in-page editing, usually through a block editor, a theme option or a plugin. The decisions are less about whether the feature exists and more about whether you should use it. Many publishers now prefer a static list of top stories to a carousel, because the list is faster and shows everything at once.

When you evaluate a system, ask which interactive features load by default, whether they can be switched off, and what they do to page speed. The guides cover how to test this on a demo site. The Product Updates board holds the surrounding announcements, including the 3.0 launch and the 3.2 release.