Adrian's Blog

Tag: wordpress

  • WordPress 2.7.1 auto upgrade fix

    I discovered last night that the auto-upgrade function to take WordPress 2.7 to 2.7.1 failed – or rather it sat at the “downloading wordpress-2.7.1.zip” message indefinitely.

    At the auto-upgrade is a new feature of 2.7, I had never been able to test this functionality, although I had high expectations of it since the plugin upgrade has worked so well.

    After searching the forums and Google for a while I found bassmadrigal’s solution – modify .htaccess for the WordPress installation in question and add:

    AddType x-mapp-php5 .php

    Works fine, and the auto upgrade of plugins stills works too.

    The science bit

    Using 1and1 as a host requires this directive in .htaccess as detailed in the WordPress codex. It forces the 1and1 server to parse .php files as php5 files (instead of, presumably, php4).

    I had this before my upgrade to 2.7 (OK, technically a re-installation) and unfortunately the baby got thrown out with the bathwater.

  • WordPress 2.3 – Canonical URLs and “/page/1”

    Well, the motiveAuto website is up and is based on WordPress – and because WordPress 2.3 is now on GA I thought it would be a good idea to upgrade before the launch. Big mistake; yes, it is a good idea to be on the current release, but not without  some serious integration testing.

    The biggest problem arises from the tidying up of URLs used to access posts, Canonical URLs. The author of these changes Mark Jaquith blogs the background to these changes and makes a good case for them. The first problem is that www.motiveauto.com/page/1 is no longer a valid URL; this is unfortunate because this is a commonly used method of accessing the posts from a static home page (see using WordPress as a CMS). The correct (i.e. valid) URL is now www.motiveauto.com/?page=1

    OK, lesson learnt, but it is a pity that it took four hours to find the cause of the problem – WordPress documentation is – shall we say – “loose”.

    The next problem relates to the “share this” plugin; this encourages linking to he social bookmarking sites and also emailing a page to a friend. The CSS form doesn’t seem to work (possibly because of a new version of prototype.js) but should degrade gracefully to a web page. Unfortunately this doesn’t work if the source is a WordPress static page rather than a post. URL rewriting again? Looks like it, but I can’t quite put my finger on the cause.

  • UTW URL rewrite problem

    Various solutions to this problem are discussed on the UTW forum.

  • UTW performance fix

    Aparently UTW suffers from an expensive query – this site has a fix:

    http://ocaoimh.ie/2006/09/27/simple-utw-performance-boost/

  • Expanding (folding) category lists

    I really must get around to implementing these plug-ins to stop clutter in the WordPress category and page lists.

    See also here.

    Consider the following JavaScript:
    // Toggle Show/Hide

    function toggle(name) {

    if (document.getElementById(name).style.display == "block") {

    document.getElementById(name).style.display = "none";

    } else {

    document.getElementById(name).style.display = "block";

    }

    }