Plugin has now been live for more than a decade and still works running on the latest WordPress and PHP versions. I believe it was conceived back in the WP 2.x and PHP 3.x days!!

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

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

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!

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.

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!!

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!

Installation – current users

To install, download Wp-Slimstat v.1.0.1, deactivate plugin, overwrite old file in your plugins directory with the new one and activate.

Installation – new users

Grab the code (including instructions) from the author directly. Before activating follow the simple steps as outlined above. This ensures the plugin is 2.5 compatible before activation. However, new users need a few extra files which is not included with the update.

Install and use at your own risk. It worked for me and should for you as well (I hope).

At first glance it would appear I’d have to look somewhere else for alternatives. On the other hand I could dive into the code and try figuring things out myself. I decided on the last option.

Fix – Alex King’s Popularity Contest (v.1.3b3)

Fixing the installation error was far easier than anticipated. This is what you need to do if you experience any difficulties or plan on upgrading:

• If you have an older version deactivate the plugin.
• Download the latest release (link above).
• Open popularity-contest.php and scroll down to line 59. Replace

  require('../../wp-blog-header.php');

  with

  require('../wp-blog-header.php');

• Upload the edited file to your plugins folder (sub directory popularity-contest)
• Reactivate the plugin

I tried posting a comment mentioning the problem, but it went into comment heaven. The issue will most likely be solved with the next release (but I couldn’t wait…).

Update: In case you are doing a fresh install you might also need to create the DB tables manually. More about how to do this here.

Update – Camu’s WP Slimstat (v.0.92)

To avoid repeating myself please see my post “How to view and collect visitor statistics” for a proper solution. This tiny update should keep WP Slimstat working until the WordPress team decides on more DB changes. With any luck this might take awhile…

The “IP to Country database” update is not necessary, and will only apply for new log entries. However, to keep the data more or less correct it is probably a wise decision to have the database more up to date.

Feel free to let me know if you have any difficulties running these updates, or know of other plugins you’d liked “fixed”.

With these 10 plugins you can have your blog turn into a complete Content Management System (CMS) and even use it for smaller e-commerce websites.

Here’s the list as presented on Blueprint Design Studio’s blog on Thursday.

Happy coding!

The ridiculously simple solution came about after some Googleing and it all comes down to the frameBorder attribute being case sensitive. As my code read frameborder IE simply ignored it.

Download Lightbox Media version 1.01

Stay tuned

Update (1.5 hours later)

Except for some FTP trouble (which has nothing to do with WordPress) everything went exceptionally well. All my plugins appear to be working just fine. The only modification I needed to do was to include the “old” quicktags.js from WP 2.1 in order to get my comment quicktag add-on working.

The list of working plugins are the same as before and is listed nicely in my post about my Blogvaria Plugins.

The front plugins page lists the most popular, newest, recently updated plugins along with a featured plugin on top. The sub-section provides easy access to whatever you’re looking for through the neatly organized tag cloud (keywords) sorted by number of available plugins (I think).

Through the WordPress “Dashboard” feed update any developer can now reach millions of people by contributing and keep his/hers plugins updated on regular basis. I believe this is one of the best marketing stunts ever as it really works both ways. The developer gets massive traffic (great for SEO) and WordPress gets even more people involved with their continuously growing blogging platform.

I believe I shall now start creating and contributing my very own plugins…

In order to get the Quicktags add-on displayed above your comment form start by downloading a copy of comment_quicktags.zip, unzip it and upload the 2 files to your theme directory:

Download comment_quicktags version 1.1

Second, (-> WP2.1) add the following to your theme’s header.php:

<!-- Include the Comment Quicktags -->
<script src="<?php echo bloginfo('template_directory') ?>/quicktags.js" type="text/javascript"></script>
<script src="<?php echo bloginfo('template_directory') ?>/comment_quicktags.php" type="text/javascript"></script>

Then replace the existing textarea paragraph in your theme’s comments.php with this:

<p><script type="text/javascript">edToolbar();</script>
<textarea style="width:99%;" name="comment" id="comment" cols="70" rows="10" tabindex="4"></textarea>
<script type="text/javascript">var edCanvas = document.getElementById('comment');</script></p>

Finally, open styles.css in your theme’s folder and add the following lines (anywhere):

/*** QuickTags on Comments (Plugin styling) ***/
#commentform #ed_toolbar input.ed_button { width:auto; }

Enter one of your posts and refresh your browser window. You should now be able to see the Quicktag add-on above the textarea where comments are entered.

• ../yourtheme/css/ (1 file)
• ../yourtheme/images/ (10 files)
• ../yourtheme/js/ (4 files)

Then open up your header.php file in your theme folder and add the following lines somewhere between <head> and </head>:

<!-- Include the Lightbox Magic -->
<link rel="stylesheet" href="<?php echo bloginfo('template_directory') ?>/css/lightbox.css" type="text/css" media="screen" />
<script src="<?php echo bloginfo('template_directory') ?>/js/prototype.js" type="text/javascript"></script>
<script src="<?php echo bloginfo('template_directory') ?>/js/scriptaculous.js?load=effects" type="text/javascript"></script>
<script src="<?php echo bloginfo('template_directory') ?>/js/lightbox.js" type="text/javascript"></script>

Then to apply the magic see my post about the Blogvaria plugins (and add-ons).

You should also open ../yourtheme/js/lightbox.js and look for the following lines (62 and 63):

var fileLoadingImage = "images/loading.gif";
var fileBottomNavCloseImage = "images/closelabel.gif";

To make sure it works with all browsers and various rewrite rules you should edit the URI’s from relative to absolute. In plain English this means that you add http://mysite.com/wp-content/themes/yourtheme/ just before images/… on both occurrences.