Wordpress.org release version 2.3 of their blogging software. Lot's of improvements, so time to upgrade.
The upgrade itself was pretty straight forward. First backup everthing. Second, upload the new files and run the upgrade script. After that it was business as usual.... Well not quite.
I needed to alter my theme to allow widgets etc., and that wasn't that easy. Especially since I'm not that familiar with PHP. Finally I got most of my plugins up and running.
The only thing that won't work is the Rich Editor. When I want to create a link the 'window' doesn't appear. Only a white placeholder appears.
UPDATE: Oke, I found the cause of the white placeholder after some deliberation on things I did the last hours. Apart from the upgrade on wordpress I didn't do much. I did however play with OpenID for a couple of minutes, and installed the VeriSign OpenID SeatBelt extension for FireFox. After disabling the extension everything worked just fine.
I wonder if this is an extension, TinyMCE, or a FireFox problem?
I installed
Ultimate Tag Warrior recently, because I liked the tag clouds I saw on other blogs. Unfortunately, the plugin seems to cripple the search capabilities on the website. If the plugin is activated, you can't find any posts with a search query. Disabling the plugin make things work again.
So, I want to humbly apologize to all those people trying to find important stuff on this blog :-)
100Mbps is soooooo
1993, and fully insufficient in copying lot's of Linux images :wink: over my internal network. So, today I upgraded to Gigabit. Even with the purchased el-cheapo hardware (Intel Pro NIC's, and a 3COM 10/100/1000 switch) the speed increase is noticeable (70-80Mbps versus 300-350Mbps).
Too bad that my DSL connection doesn't go that fast :-(
The last couple of weeks my blog was under some sort of spam attack. I got about 50 to 80 spam comments a day. Thankfully,
Askimet intercepted 99% of those messages. But Askimet shouldn't be getting these messages, because my captcha plugin should keep them out... well, it didn't.
Yesterday, I found
Wordpress Hashcash. A plugin which uses crypto to keep automated spammers away. So far it's working.
UPDATE: ever since I installed WP-Hashcash it has been awfully quiet on the spamming front :-)
Never mind... Thankfully Askimet is catching them all (50 per day at this moment)
I've got this blog running for a couple of months now. Even though not many comments are left behind (I don't care), the spammers definitely found my blog. I receive over 30 spam comments a day now. Thanks to the
Askimet Anti-spam plugin for Wordpress, the spam entries are quarantined.
Every spam entry looks the same, and all the links the f*ckers try to leave behind won't work (I must admin that I try some of the links they are leaving behind). So I ask you; What's the point in spamming useless links? If a link won't work, you won't even try a (spammed) link in the future, because it's a waist of time. Same goes for e-mail spam. I receive lots of spam in my inbox, but what is the use in advertising viagra, if the shop is offline.I guess that there are just too many people with too much spare time on there hands. But not enough to create, or host a decent online drugstore :-)
Last night my server went down. There was a 'poof', and then nothing. The status LED on my motherboard was still in the green, so it could be either the motherboard, CPU or the power supply.
This morning I head out to the local computer dealer to get me a new motherboard, CPU, and a power supply. Thankfully, it was just the power supply that died.
This might actually be a good opportunity to upgrade my server to a Mac Mini.
I upgraded my version of Wordpress to version 2.1.2. This went the usual 'problems'.
First of all I 'forgot' to make a recent backup. Second, I used Transmit (an OSX FTP Client) to upload the new pages. Transmit has the possibility to overwrite files. No worries (I thought), I just renamed the files I editted, do I could rename them back when I had uploaded the new files. It seems that I didn't read the warning very well. When I overwrote the directories, Transmit removed them first and uploaded the new files afterwards. This meant that all my uploads, and customized files were gone..... aaaaargh.
Fortunatelly, I had a backup from two weeks ago, so I could get the old files.
This reminds me to make a decent backup before doing anything about my Wordpress installation in the future....
I added a new plugin to Wordpress v2.1. It's called
WP Movie Review Ratings. It enables you to place
movie reviews on you Wordpress blog.
At this time it's fairly empty, but I'll try to migrate my
older existing movie database to this one, so it'll be filled soon (I hope).
B.t.w. many thanks to the developer
Paul Goscicki in assisting me in getting it to work. Seemed that I had a small misconfiguration in my PHP config.
The highly anticipated version
Wordpress v2.1 has been released today.
This meant upgrading my older version (v2.05). The upgrading itself was quite easy (if you follow the
upgrade instructions to the letter).
I also upgraded my
hacked TinyMCE Wordpress Editor with an '
official' upgrade....
Let the posting begin
Update: 'unhacked' it again because of erratic behaviour of the editor, and manipulated the original included TinyMCE editor (see the end of my earlier
post regarding this).
The default TinyMCE rich editor for WordPress lacks a lot of functionality (IMO). I wanted to use other fonts, and be able to change font sizes in posts.
At first I started to look for an alternative rich text editor for WordPress, but I didn't find any usefull alternatives. Most of them are suitable for older WordPress versions, and are not compatible with the latest WordPress releases.
While I was developing my former blog in Coldfusion, I used FCKEditor. This editor had the possibility to add extra functionality by editting the source files. So I started digging through the sources of the WordPress files, and found the file where the TinyMCE configuration was stored.
Although the changes are not that hard, it would be nice to have a more user friendly interface for changing the capabilities of the rich text editor. The following paragraphs explain the changes I made to add fonts and font sizes to the editor.
The file for displaying the editor is called "
tiny_mce_gzip.php" (located in
wp-includes/js/tinymce/). Open this file in a texteditor (BBEdit/Notepad/UltraEdit), or a HTML editor (I used Macromedia Dreamweaver).
Find the string "mce_buttons" (without the quotes). It's located near the end of the file. The line that holds the string also defines the buttons / options for the TinyMCE editor. The default line is:
$mce_buttons = apply_filters('mce_buttons', array('bold', 'italic', 'strikethrough', 'separator', 'bullist', 'numlist', 'outdent', 'indent', 'separator', 'justifyleft', 'justifycenter', 'justifyright' ,'separator', 'link', 'unlink', 'image', 'wordpress', 'separator', 'undo', 'redo', 'code', 'wphelp'));
This line can be editted, to add extra functionality. The problem is that the file doesn't mention all possible options, so I had to do some reseach on the
TinyMCE editor itself. On the website are some examples showing the capabilities of the editor. The
TinyMCE website has an overview of the available buttons / options which can be used with the editor.
Note that not all options may work with WordPress.
I added "
fontselect", "
fontsizeselect", and "
forecolor" to the editor;
$mce_buttons = apply_filters('mce_buttons', array('bold', 'italic', 'strikethrough', 'fontselect', 'fontsizeselect', 'forecolor', 'separator', 'bullist', 'numlist', 'outdent', 'indent', 'separator', 'justifyleft', 'justifycenter', 'justifyright' ,'separator', 'link', 'unlink', 'image', 'wordpress', 'separator', 'undo', 'redo', 'code', 'wphelp'));
After editting the file, save it and launch the WordPress admin page and start creating posts with the newly added functionality.
UPDATE: it seems that the added functionality removes the TinyMCE functions if you use Safari as a browser :( (this is probably a "feature"). No problemo if you use FireFox
UPDATE 2: This won't work with Wordpress 2.1 :(. You have to do the following if you want extra functionality in Wordpress 2.1:
- Open the tiny_mce_config.php (located in wp-includes/js/tinymce/).
- Find the line that starts with $mce_buttons_2 = apply_filters (around line 34)
- Add extra functions on that line
Example: $mce_buttons_2 = apply_filters('mce_buttons_2', array('formatselect', 'fontselect', 'fontsizeselect', 'styleselect', 'separator', 'forecolor', 'backcolor'));
This adds the ability to change fonts and use colors in your blogs. There is also a third line you can use to add other stuff, but you got to figure that one out for yourself.
