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Posted On November 4, 2011
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Written By Masen Marshall
Analytic Woes
On my second day of using Chyrp I’ve decided to spend some time getting analytics set up for this site. At first glance there seems to be two options as extensions go: Google Analytics and Clicky.
My first attempt was with GA, I got an account and installed the extension just fine. However when I then tried to go to my admin page to enable and set it up, I was met with a nasty error 500. This as it turns out was due to the use of some tabs in the comments in info.yaml, I fixed this and my admin pages started showing up again. Past that enabling the extension seemed to work, but no GA code was getting generated on my site and stats were not showing up in the GA panel. I emailed the dev with the tab issue but have yet to pursue that further.
I then moved on to create a clicky account and install that plugin. This also had problems during the install phase, the clicky page on the admin panel did not exist. I fixed this by copying the clicky.twig file into admin/default/pages/analytics.php which is what it seemed to be looking for. After this everything worked fine and a view source even looks like it’s loading the js for clicky. I assume I’ll have to give it some time to see if the stats are working correctly, and I’d rather be using GA, but at least something is working.
I’m not a developer but I do hope to help the devs of these plugins get them functioning. I’ll add posts to this series as the issues progress further.
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Posted On November 3, 2011
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Written By Masen Marshall
When I set out to build this blog I made a conscious decision not to use WordPress. Not because it couldn’t do the job, rather I just wanted to see what else was out there. That is how I found Chyrp.
Chyrp is what this blog is currently run on, you can check out their project page over here : chyrp.net
I have a serious thing for lieghtweight software, and that combined with nice looks is what made me give Chyrp a try. As I’m currently two posts and an install into using it I can’t really say I have that worthwhile of a review, but I’ll try and give some initial impressions.
The Install
The install for Chyrp was pretty bog standard, and not dissimilar at all to what a longtime wordpress user expects. It involves downloading the php code in an archive, extracting it, chmoding the includes directory to allow writes to it from the web server, setting up a mysql DB, and finally running a familiar /install.php script.
This all went off without a hitch and it seems to be functioning quite well. I was mildly concerned it would biff writing to my .htaccess file as wordpress is known to do, but there were no problems there.
First Impressions
My first impression of Chyrp is that it’s very easy to navigate for a former WordPress user. I’ve been able to add themes and enable them without problems or referring to any documentation ( there’s a “themes” folder, imagine that ), and write my first two posts.
The lack of themes on the Chyrp site is a little disappointing, and I think i’ll have to go search for further options there, but what they do have looks pretty nice.
The post editor is very lightweight and doesn’t offer as much as the huge bloated WordPress one, but that is the goal here. Overall I’ve found using it to be very pleasant.
On the topic of the post editor however I am still a little lost on how to get back to a saved post for editing in the nice looking Write screen. As I type this I am stuck in a much smaller box on a tiny popup screen that shows up when Edit is clicked on a saved post. It could be a case of PEBKAC but I’m not seeing any other way around it.
Inconclusive Conclusion
These are just my initial thoughts on the software and I’ll be sticking a few more parts on this series as I try out all the options that exist for it. So far it seems like a powerful and minimal platform. I’m not going to pass any judgement on it until I spend some more time using it.
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Thoughts on Chyrp: Part 1