Category: Wordpress

WordPress 2.7 RC1 update and a few tips

Today I upgraded Tech Gremlin to WordPress 2.7, it was pain free and I love what they have done with the admin section. I was expecting to have a bit of a learning curve with finding where everything is now however I am fairly surprised that everything is where I expect it to be.

A few issues of note, the Blogging Tips plugin is now situated in a spot that doesn’t look right, needs to be about 20 pixels lower.

Tip #1
If you are using the Google Sitemaps plugin and you experience php errors uploading the new sitemaps files after upgrading your WordPress version, this is a permissions issue and is fixed by deleting sitemaps.xml and the gzipped version of the file if you also use that and refreshing the page, posting the data you attempted to post before.

Tip #2
Try to just use the html version of the post add/editor as graphical post editors make a general mess of the html and make editing it later a slow and tortuous experience.

Tip #3
I know this seems pretty obvious to some however it is important to try to get a host situated physically closer to you, due to the latency it may take as much as an hour more to upgrade your blog via ftp than it would with a host that is situated in your country as each file is small, yet needs to be negotiated for on the connection each time, this ends up taking it much longer to upload than just one file of the same size, it is highly affected by latency. If however you cannot get around having a host a fair way away, uploading the wordpress zip file and using their admin panel (or the shell if you are familiar with it) to extract it into place is much faster even than the previous example, however not all hosts support this.

Site Issues

Starting this afternoon I’ve been experiencing a few issues between some WordPress code and using PHP5. It seems when I use PHP5, my default version for some time, I experience a rather large error that according to WordPress.org seems to be possibly related to Magic Quotes or a rogue plugin, however it is occurring on my theme test site as well so I’m not so sure about plugins being the cause. So in an effort to get some stability I have reverted to PHP4 and I’m about to upgrade WordPress and see if I can sort out this problem.

Problem Solved
As I have been noticing it appears to be related to magic quotes, I attempted to turn it off in .htaccess but this appeared to just make it angry, however adding

ini_set('magic_quotes_runtime','off');

to my wp-config.php file fixed the problem.

By the way if you have this problem do not copy my code listed above as the quotes will turn into invalid characters, you’ll have to type it out yourself.

First WordPress Theme

I decided that I would give a go at writing an ambitious WordPress theme that hopefully will be much different from most WordPress themes, the general layout is familiar, but with little twists so I hope to bring something different to the WordPress community.

I have hit many snags along the way but so far it is W3C compliant and works in IE 7 and 8, FF and Safari/Chrome, however it looks shocking in IE6 using IE NetRenderer

I started writing this post 3 days ago and forgot what else to write about.

The site design is a bit over the place still, it’ll be cleaned up over the next few days after it has been finished.

Changing Domains

Tuesday night I set about purchasing a new domain name for the blog, firstly it was tough simply finding one that could serve the purpose. .com domains that actually mean anything are starting to be in very short supply and even though many interesting companies have come up with words that at the time didn’t mean anything, a blog is suited to words that make sense from day 1.

After choosing my domain and delegating the name servers (surprisingly fast nowadays) I was able to start the difficult task of moving an establishing blog to a new domain while the previous one was still running.

To move a WordPress blog, you must have the contents of the site’s folder (ie public_html) and saved sql file, once you’ve done that, upload the wordpress files to the new site, upload the sql files to the new database and change the details in wp-config.php file, once you’ve done that you must change the domain listed in the sql table wp_options from your old one to your new one. Then run this sql command:

UPDATE wp_posts SET guid = REPLACE (guid, 'http://exampleoldsiteurl.com', 'http://examplenewsiteurl.com');

This is assuming you have the default names for wp_posts and guid, change the first url to your old domain, change the second url to your new domain.

This was fairly straight forward, however it seems that every link in every post and page’s links are hard coded with the url of the old domain, so I went through using a similar command to the previous one to change every instance in every post to the new address

There were also some references to the absolute address for the site, which changed completely, they didn’t seem to be causing problems, but I changed them just to be sure.

Once I had done that the site was active, I just needed to change a few minor things and it was almost ready.

Firstly I redirected beejay.perthmatrix.com/* to www.techgremlin.com/*, this is to ensure that anywhere that I haven’t updated my address and anywhere that has a link to beejay.perthmatrix.com is still able to access the area requested as the server automatically redirects, for example if you go to http://beejay.perthmatrix.com/2008/09/17/the-digital-downloads-delusion/ you’ll find that you have just arrived at https://www.techgremlin.com/2008/09/17/the-digital-downloads-delusion/ without having to update the link, it also works for image links.

If you are running cpanel this is quite easy, on the redirection page add your old address to the first field and add your new domain to the field underneath titled ‘redirect to’ and check the box labelled wild card redirect, then click add.

This also helps me as my site works well for it’s SEO abilities and considering I don’t know what I’m doing in that area half the time. Allowing the old domain to stay open, while redirecting people who have found the old site through a search engine allows the new domain time to be indexed by the same search engines.

WordPress.com accounts are tricky, it seems that if you create a username for use with the WordPress Stats Plugin for a site, it is linked to it forever, further more you can’t add any more, so I instead created a new account for this domain.

WordPress 2.6.1 and 2.6.2 are out

A little late on the news here but I have upgraded to 2.6.2. Grab it here. View their blogs here for 2.6.1 and here for 2.6.2.

Both upgrades are not too necessary, but don’t break anything if you do intend to get them, it’s always good to check to see if you really need any upgrades anyway, just in case something does break.

2.6.1:
The admin styling has been improved for people with right-to-left writing languages.
A gettext pug with certain PHP configurations was fixed.
Fixed a few issues with permalinks for IIS hosted blogs.
Image insertion problems for IE users using ‘Press This’ were fixed.
Small performance improvements with blogs that have many plugins in the admin section.
There’s over 60 more, check them out here.

2.6.2:
The main fix in this one is due to a vulnerability in MySQL that can allow someone to reset passwords on websites (WordPress based websites included) and reset passwords provided they have an open registration system.
There’s a few more fixes, check them out here.

Firefox crashes, WordPress flash uploader and new host

Firefox has locked up again

Firefox has crashed again, I can always tell because It’s closed, in fact I probably closed it an hour ago, but it’s been slowly sitting there in the background hoping I won’t notice it, it does this occasionally when I close it, sometimes after I have used it for some time, sometimes when I only have it open for a short time, it doesn’t seem to matter, it just does it, further more I haven’t found anybody with a similar problem, except some sources that insist it might be the plugins causing it.

The WordPress flash based picture uploader has been giving me grief ever since I changed hosting providers recently, HTTP error was all I was given when trying to upload a file, using the browser based uploader worked fine so I used that instead, but it got annoying for me so I did a bit of googling and found out that the reason it wasn’t working is because on some providers you must have this directive in your .htaccess file:

<IfModule mod_security.c>
SecFilterEngine Off
SecFilterScanPOST Off
</IfModule>

Now flashed based uploading works fine.

UPDATE: James at The Theme Blog has experienced a similar error and has posted another workaround here, if this doesn’t work out try that one.

I have been a member of Aussiehost for over 6 months now, however this site has stayed specifically on Servage up until a few days ago when I realised this website is a little slow on Servage for my liking, the latency is shocking. The changeover was seamless and I’m very happy with the performance so far.