WordPress and SharePoint architecture similarities and … who moved my blog?

Other than WordPress and SharePoint sharing similar a capitalization strategy I noticed some other similarities…

When I left MS just over a year ago I decided that I would move from my older (and far more popular) MSDN blog. It was on an old blog engine that wasn’t great and didn’t offer the stuff the new cool kids were doing.  So I started looselytyped.net and hosted it on wordpress.com.  It was super simple to set up and wordpress.com did a lot of it for me.

WordPress.com is like SharePoint Online in many respects. It’s a hosted version of WordPress and because it is hosted there are things that the hoster lets you fiddle with and things they don’t let you fiddle with. Much like in SharePoint Online you don’t get to poke around under the covers of SharePoint like you can with SharePoint on-prem.

WordPress Plugins … aka full trust solutions

WordPress has a concept of plugins.  In SharePoint land this is the equivalent of full trust solutions being installed on your farm.  Obviously (like SharePoint Online) WordPress.com doesn’t let you add these since they could do anything to the server they like and effect other customers. SharePoint Online is the same, Microsoft want to preserve the stability and security of the system for everyone hosted there.

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See the similarities between WordPress and SharePoint now? 🙂

Where SharePoint is evolving is in how we get around this limitation of not being able to add functionality in a pluggable but secure and manageable manner.

Step 1: A more secure plugin model … aka Sandboxed Solutions

In SharePoint 2010 Sandboxed Solutions were introduced to offer a sandboxed execution environment for your code. This was far more limited in what you could do in there, but at least it offered some form of online friendly pluggable system.  I was working on the team that owned Sandboxed Solutions in the SharePoint 2010 release & at the time it seemed like a great solution. Remember this was before Azure existed. This was 2.5 years prior to 2010 releasing and “the cloud” was still being called “servers in a datacenter” by most people.

Step 2: An even more secure and flexible plugin model … aka SharePoint Apps

Hindsight is a wonderful thing and looking back Sandboxed Solutions is the wrong model long term. Hosting other peoples code is hard and there are better places to do that than in SharePoint i.e. Azure.

The new SharePoint App model offering remotely hosted code is a far better model going forward in my opinion.  It’s not that I am deeply into “apps” as such … it’s more that this new model offers interesting new plumbing and APIs that developers can use (see SharePoint’s new Plumbing, great for developer).

Where to from here?

Back to WordPress … it doesn’t yet offer a solutions like this (AFAIK). Plugins are full trust solutions that are installed.  In a similar vein Microsoft CRM offers a sandbox where code can run etc…

I wonder when we will see more products like WordPress and MS CRM move to the same architectural model as SharePoint 2013 for custom code and plugins?

I expect to see the new SharePoint App model, or more correctly, the plumbing and APIs that support the app model to evolve in the coming releases fairly rapidly. Allowing us to do more than is possible today and build solutions that integrate with SharePoint in new and interesting ways. The Sandbox has turned out to be a dead end and the new way forward is getting code out of the host process and into better suited places like Azure.

So what is your point Chris?

Oh … well I started writing this post to fill you in on my blog moving. Its still WordPress … but I decided I wanted plugins and all the stuff WordPress.com doesn’t offer.

So I moved my blog to run on WordPress on Azure Web Sites.

Yes I know this sounds like I am advocating for full trust solutions in SharePoint … really I’m not 🙂 SharePoint has a better long term solution for those now 🙂

I wanted the ability to add plugins and get at features in WordPress not offered in the WordPress.com hosted option.

+ I am a big Azure fan … keep up the great work @ScottGu

I won’t regurgitate all the steps to get WP running in Azure … but will point to a couple of helpful posts from John Papa who recently did a similar move.

http://www.johnpapa.net/wordpress-on-azure/
http://www.johnpapa.net/azurecleardbmysql/

One thing I will mention is that I had a hard time getting Azure configured to serve my site on both looselytyped.net and www.looselytyped.net.  Azure Web Sites recently added support for “naked domains” aka… domains without the “www” on the front.  I found it a wee bit tricky to set up due to the requirement to set up a dummy CNAME DNS record so that Azure can check the DNS settings … so in case you are wondering how to do this I have a few screen shots below.

My DNS is hosted with GoDaddy … and the first thing you need to do is add a special CNAME DNS record that Azure checks for.

You need to create an alias for “awverify” and point it at “awverify.<your azure name>.azurewebsites.net … see below…

image

Then in the Azure management portal click the manage domains button to map domain names to your web site

image

Here is my setup…

image

In order for Azure to allow me to add www.looselytyped.net I needed to set up a CNAME record that pointed at looselytyped.azurewebsites.net

In the same vein … Azure would only allow me to add the “naked domain” (looselytyped.net) once I had added the CNAME for “awverify” and point it at “awverify.<your azure name>.azurewebsites.net.

Anyway … I hope this helps the next person who gets stuck trying to get their Azure web site running on a root “naked” domain.  It stumped me for a while and the documentation wasn’t 100% clear.

Thanks,

-CJ.

12 thoughts on “WordPress and SharePoint architecture similarities and … who moved my blog?

  1. Tom Resing

    What plugins did you need that you didn’t have? I’m curious because it’s hard to keep track of what’s in wordpress vs themes vs plugins to a hobbyist. I’ve created wordpress sites on wordpress.com and other providers but over many years and the technology keeps changing.

    Reply
  2. Chris Johnson Post author

    Hey Tom!

    The very first one I wanted when i first set up my WP.com site was something that would let me use google analytics. Couldnt figure out a way to do it without a plugin. Probably because WP.com had their own (lame) stats system.

    Next thing i missed was the inability to add javascript to in posts and pages. It stripped it all out. That meant not being able to add various widgets etc.. from Facebook, Twitter etc… PITA.

    Those were the things i noticed in the first couple of days of my new blog on WP.com. There might be a way … but i couldnt see how.

    -CJ.

    Reply
    1. Tom Resing

      Hi Chris,

      That’s good to know. I like the idea of being able to use the official twitter widget and javascript in general. Also, Google analytics can provide a wealth of information. I love having great statistics available. Missing it on my current blog. I may have to move to WordPress some day. If I do, I’ll probably try the Rackspace Cloud Sites model since I have a Cloud Site available to me to use.

      Tom

      Reply
    1. Chris Johnson Post author

      Dear #8 (that’s you Jeremy – top 25 position if you didnt get the reference 🙂

      I needed the “awverify” CNAME (e.g. awverify.looselytyped.net) DNS entry pointing to awverify.looselytyped.azurewebsites.net in order to get azure to let me add looselytyped.net as a managed domain on the site. Once i did that … i was golden.

      Yours faithfully … #? 🙂

      Reply
      1. Jeremy Thake

        You’re number one in my heart mate 😉

        I have added that verify thing as it wouldn’t let me have http://www.jeremythake.com without it. But for some reason I get an error on “jeremythake.com”. Exteremely frustrating! What entries do you have in ANAME?
        The error is:
        “DNS record for ‘jeremythake.com’ that points to ‘jeremythake.azurewebsites.net’ could not be located. If you want to configure an A record, you must first create a CNAME record with your DNS provider for ‘awverify.jeremythake.com’ that points to ‘awverify.jeremythake.azurewebsites.net’. First allow the resource record to propagate, and then create the A record.”

        Reply
        1. Chris Johnson Post author

          When I do a DNS lookup on your domain I don’t see a record for:

          awverify.jeremythake.net pointing at (CNAME) -> awverify.jeremythake.azurewebsites.net

          Here are my entries in DNS:
          A RECORD: @ -> 168.62.20.37
          CNAME: awverify -> awverify.looselytyped.azurewebsites.net

          That IP above is the one that Azure gives you … yours looks to be set up correctly already by the looks of the DNS records

          Reply
          1. Jeremy Thake

            DUDE legend! Just realized looking more closely that I had
            awverify.www -> awverify.blah
            and not
            awverify -> awverifiy.blah
            That then validated in Windows Azure portal. Thanks a lot mate!

            You migrating your SharePoint posts to WordPress? I am writing a quick C# console app to do it and export all attachments and then just FTP all the files up and rewrite the references in post body HTML to fix. Then do an import WordML file including comments.

  3. Jeremy Thake

    So I’m on a 3 month trial and originally had it set up as “Shared” for “web site mode”. But I hit the limits quickly and had to change to “Reserved”. Little nervous on the costs once the trial is over and disappointed that I can’t see a preview of what it would cost me too. I’m only on a small instance with 1 core and its running fine. Clearly as World stardom is reached, I may need to add another core 😉

    Reply
    1. Roland

      I believe you can set a spending cap to eliminate the cost worry. During the free preview it’s set to $0 by default.

      Good luck and thanks for the great article.

      Regards,

      Roland

      Reply
  4. Pingback: Moved my WordPress blog to Windows Azure - Thomas Vochten

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