While it all worked very smoothly, like many others I was horrified by the new look of the iCal and Address Book applications:

What were they thinking of? These new leather style skins look totally out of place on OS/X’s desktop. I just hope they’re not a hint about the future look of the system!

Luckily plenty of other people don’t like them either, so someone has created a new set of image resources to return them to a sane aluminium look, which you can find here on the MacNix blog. The result is much better:

Thank you to Codeus for providing these. Give that man a cigar! (Or put a couple of dollars in his tip jar anyway).

On a related point, for another unknown reason (apparently a Jedi mind trick!) Apple also decided to remove the nice coloured Finder sidebar icons and turn them to bland grey. You can find instructions on that page on what to do to get colour back in your life, but in short you need a SIMBL bundle that puts nice colourful icons back.

Ahh. Much better.

(Luckily all of this is also quite easy to remove if it doesn’t work for you – the SIMBL bundle can just be removed and you can save copies of iCal and Address Book to use if you find a problem with the aluminium skinned ones).

Part of this migration was moving from my old custom PHP/HTML/CSS website to a new WordPress based structure and this meant working out what to do with files that had moved. Like most WordPress based site mine has a custom “404″ page which is used when an unrecognised URL is requested. The problem I had was that links to PDF files for my papers and articles are scattered all over the place embedded in sites like Google, DBLB and Citeseer. All of those files have moved to a new location and displaying a generic error page isn’t that helpful, so the question was how to redirect those requests to the right files?

There are lots of ways to solve this problem in WordPress and PHP, plugins (like Redirection), Apache aliases and custom “404″ pages. In my case, I wanted something simple (which I didn’t need to change once it was done), which didn’t involve messing with the Apache configuration, which was also simple to implement. After quite a lot of Google searches I concluded that there wasn’t a simple solution out there already, so I decided to create something myself.

After some research, the solution proved to be quite simple. The basic code is shown below.

/* Custom WordPress 404.php file */
<?php
    get_header();
    get_sidebar();
    /* Map of old file locations to new ones */
    $movedFileMap = array (
        "old-download-file1.pdf" => "path/to/new-download-file1.pdf",
        "old-download-file2.pdf" => "path/to/new-download-file2.pdf",
        /* ... */
    }
    $fileName=end(explode('/', $_SERVER['REQUEST_URI']));
    $mappedName = $movedFileMap[$fileName] ;
    if ($mappedName != "") {
        $mappedPath = "/media/{$mappedName}" ;
?>
       <h1>File Not Found</h1>
        <p>Your request for <?php echo($fileName);?> has moved to here:
            <?php echo($mappedPath);?>.</p>
<?php
    }
    else
    {
?>
        <!-- HTML here to display useful text when the mapping fails -->
<?php
    }
?>

The implementation probably falls into the “simplest thing possible” category and it is just a PHP array (which is a map in other languages) from the old filename to the new filename. If a URI’s final element is found in the map, a helpful message is displayed to redirect the user to the new file location.

The only clever bit is on line 10 where the incoming URL is split up using explode() and the last element pulled out using end() to work out which file is being requested, so that it can be looked up in the $mappedFile map.

Finally, if the URL’s final element isn’t found then a more general help message (with links to content on the site or a search box) should be displayed.

Hopefully this will help some other people moving their websites to WordPress!

I’m giving a talk on Monday in the Agile track entitled Agile Architecture – How Much is Enough? and one on Thursday in the Enterprise Integration track entitled Integrating Systems with Event Driven Architectures.

I hope to see you there!

I’m giving a talk on unifying software architecture with it’s implementation called Where Did My Architecture Go? Preserving software architecture in its implementation.

If you’re planning to attend the conference and use registration code WOOD100 when you register, then apparently you get a £100 discount!