This is just a quick note to inform you all that my incredibly popular “Today’s Comic” widget has been updated so all comics shows (if published that is). Take a peak yourself to the far right and catch up on the funniest ones from today.

If you have any comments or cartoon requests please feel free to leave a comment

Recently I’ve been building various custom form plugins for WordPress. And even if it all seemed to work properly I would get an “404 page not found” error instead of my “thank you page”. I know I’m not the only one as this has been reported before.

The reason this happens is basically due to the fact that some form values should NOT be used as they will cause a conflict with the variables passed by WordPress itself. Among them are values like: name, day, year etc.

So, if you are running in to this issue/bug yourself you can isolate the “forbidden” values by simply filling in one value on the form after another and performing a quick submit between each and every one. As soon as you get the 404 error you will know you’ve found one (of potentially several) values you will have to rename.

What you need to do then is give your form field (e.g. text input, textarea or select box) a new name. A field named “year” could then be passed on as “dyear” or similar. Nothing more to it actually.

Please feel free to comment should I’ve left something out, or leave a thank you if I saved you some headaches and time

Happy coding!

I’ve currently been working on an update for one of the companies websites. The whole site runs on WordPress, my “new” favourite CMS. However, before going live the site is running on a different location than when ready. I noticed that the import/export feature doesn’t change the URI’s inside the posts and pages. Concequently I needed something to make the “move” as quick and automatic as possible.

Inspired by Alex King’s “Shortcut Macros” plugin I decided to make something similar that would convert any root URI references with a macro, ##root to be specific. To illustrate lets say your domain is http://www.example.com. So whenever you write or update a page/post the following will happen ;

http://www.example.com/link/to/page_or_post -> ##root/link/to/page_or_post

When viewing the page the plugin will automatically reconvert #root to your blogs URI as defined by get_option(‘home’). This way your internal links will always be uptodate wherever you move your blog.

Grab the code and instructions from the download page.

As announced on Weblog Tools Collection and on the WordPress Plugin Competition Blog itself I just thought I’d help spread the word about the upcoming WordPress 2.5 Plugin Competition. And besides the fame and glory there’s already some cash and goodies in the pot for the winner(s).

You can read all about what, where and how on the above mentioned pages. In short “all” you need to do is write a plugin that is:

1. Original (new) and useful
2. Well documented
3. Supported

I’d love to participate, but workload has been somewhat keeping me busy 9 days a week lately. If you’re joining please leave a comment so we can follow your work from here – and not to forget, Good Luck!!

WordPress 2.5 adds tons of new features, but some disappeared as well. One of them is gzip compression that you could enable/disable from the control panel. On the other hand 2.5 introduced “a few” new features, among them a secret key for “salting password” and the possibility to increase memory allocated to PHP.

I’ve just finished tweaking my new WordPress 2.5 installation and thought I’d share a few pointers with the rest of you.

The secret key

Released with Version 2.5, this new, optional entry, called SECRET_KEY, causes better encryption of user passwords in the database. The secret key is a unique phrase.

define('SECRET_KEY', 'put your unique phrase here'); // Change this to a unique phrase.

More allocated memory

Also released with Version 2.5, the WP_MEMORY_LIMIT option allows you to specify the maximum amount of memory that can be consumed by PHP. This setting may be necessary in the event you receive a message such as “Allowed memory size of xxxxxx bytes exhausted”.

By default WP is allocating (trying to – depends on host) 32MB, you can increase this amount by adding e.g.

define('WP_MEMORY_LIMIT', '64MB');

in the wp-settings.php file in your WP root directory.

Activate Cache

Similar to above you can activate page caching;

define('WP_CACHE', true);

If the WP_CACHE setting is set to true, the WP developers states that it will include the wp-content/advanced-cache.php script, when executing wp-settings.php. I for one does not see how this is done as I’m missing the included file, so if you know how this works please let me know!

GZip Compression

I believe a bug/malfunction in respect to the visual editor caused the removal of the gzip feature from the latest version. However a plugin is available that will re-enable this feature and save precious bandwidth. It simply takes advantage of PHP’s ob_gzhandler function.

I’d love to hear about more tweaks and rabbits, please feel free to share!