Ekto gammit

Quick look at WordPress issues in May:

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WordPress 2.0.3 was released June 1 (I know, I know, it's not May but I'm including it anyway). If you get it, make sure you read about the "Are you sure?" tuneup Mark released.


On May 24th, a new version of Akismet appeared!

Basically it just cleans up the formatting of the spam page a bit, adds a delete button to the bottom of the page, and gives you a view post link so you know what post a comment is on. Also if you hover over the "View Post" link it'll tell you the title of the post.

The goal is to keep the plugin as simple as possible, and hopefully these small changes make the Akismet experience a little more elegant for WordPress users. 

 Find Akismet v1.15 here .


Admin Autumn by Andy Staines is my favorite Admin Theme (it also includes his Admin drop-down menus built-in!). It was updated to 1.1 on May 4th and you can find it here .


The guys at Fresh Pursuits are plugging away at Canvas (heh, just re-read that). Since I have my wordpress install in a sub-directory (see the codex about this) things break. Most is addressed in 1.1.3c except for a wee bit which can be addressed by following instructions found here , or waiting for the next release…


Dashboard Options 1.4.1 by Chris Behm is having a few issues (with my installation, at least) with my 2.0.3 WordPress upgrade. I just got an email from him and he said he is looking at, and hopes to address any issues before his vacation, AND he reminded me that since 2.0.3 overwrites the wp-admin/index.php and I hadn't re-edited or replaced it, the hooks were missing AND OF COURSE IT WOULD BREAK!… Vacation? VACATION? You don't get no steenkin' vacashun! Just kidding Chris… Have fun ;')


EditorMonkey by Raj Prasad has a new beta, released on May 27th.

EditorMonkey v3.0beta has been released. It calls itself v2.6, but that's just due to the way builds are tracked internally. TinyMCE has been upgraded to v2.0.6.1, the backend code for EM has been cleaned up for easier hacking, and EM now fully supports skinning of TinyMCE and all that jazz. Upload support has been moved from EditorMonkey to the forthcoming UploadMonkey plugin. FCKeditor is not supported in this beta release, and due to changes in FCK 2.3beta to the core FCK code, FCKeditor will no longer be supported
by this plugin. It will be supported in the forthcoming FCKMonkey plugin, but this new plugin will only replace the built-in rich editor with FCK; configuration and customization will require hacking.


Although it was released in late April, I wanted to remark about Trevor Creech's Translate plugin. This is a nice plugin that adds a simple way for non-english readers to read your site. I noticed some validation complaints concerning a lack of width/height that concerned me because without width/height parameters a page has to wait until an image is loaded to 'format' the rest of the page. I changed the following in wp-content/plugins/translate.php:

Line 101:

echo " \"$langname\"";

Line 117:

echo "\"$langname\"" ?>');

And line 135:

echo "

";

All I did was add the width and height parameters for the images, and the div's on line 135 for xhtml-strict validity.


Rice University's Computer Security Lab released v0.7.1 of their Trackback Validator plugin on May 21st. Great for preventing trackback 'spam':

Legitimate TrackBacks are sent by people commenting on your weblog, accompanied by a URL that points to that commentary. Spam TrackBacks are accompanied by a URL that points to a pay-per-click affiliate website or other irrelevant material. The Validator exploits this key difference:

  1. When a TrackBack is received, the plugin retrieves the Web page located at the URL included in the TrackBack.
  2. If the page contains a link to your weblog, the TrackBack is approved.
  3. If the page does not link to your weblog, the TrackBack is flagged as spam and rejected.

Paypal Widgets R2.0 by Patrick Chia was released May 27th.


On May 17th Pedro Valente (and Dreamhost) shared this regarding wp-cache:

My wordpress blog is hosted with Dreamhost and I found this in their support wiki:

If you have "blank pages" in WordPress with wp-cache turned on after you upgrage to PHP 5.1.2 – there is simple fix to solve the problem:-

1. Open wp-cache-phase2.php file* in your favourite text editor
2. Find out wp_cache_ob_end function
3. then inside that function find out line with: ob_end_clean(); (it should be line 219 or about)
4. and finally replace that line with: ob_end_flush();

I had already turned off wp-cache, but this solved my problem of a blank screen on every first load.


I used to use Tiger Style Administration but it seemed to break with the install of the May release of sidebar widgets . After noticing that Tiger Style hadn't been changed/upgraded in over six months I switched to Admin Autumn and have been very happy with it…


Category Replacement Widget saw some changes in May… Latest version is 0.5.

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Posted in Computers, Things, WordPress

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