bioneural.net » wordpress

Customizing WordPress feed content

Bruce — Sun, 13 Apr 2008 20:38:12 +0000

When I last looked at customizing feeds in WordPress, it was all to do with being able to offer a summary and full text feed simultaneously—making use of WordPress' flexible feed URL syntax and a .htaccess file. In this post I look at modifying the actual contents of the feed using a functions.php file (which may already exist as part of your current theme). Just as WordPress provides a number of hooks for adding or removing actions in your theme header (see here), so to do the core files that generate your feeds. Editing the core files is however discouraged (it makes upgrading a pain), and although you can build your own replacement feed templates an easy alternative is adding a few lines to your theme's functions.php file. As a perpetual PHP beginner I feel obliged to warn you that use of the following code is at your own risk. If there are any PHP/ WordPress experts reading this who can improve on my code please make yourself known ;-) Removing WP version info Somewhere, a while back, I read a tip about not including the WordPress version you are running in your template header—potentially allowing hackers to identify you as a target if you haven't kept up-to-date. It's easy to remove if present. For example, in the K2 theme just delete the following line from header.php: From bioneural.net:Mac-based web developers...]]> ... http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/2.5/ Rendered in a feed reader humans will see this: The Creative Commons icon is hopefully recognisable and links to the correct license; the link to bioneural.net ...

Pages and searching in WordPress 2.5

Bruce — Fri, 04 Apr 2008 17:07:34 +0000

From bioneural.net:

WordPress 2.5 lets you search across pages (non-blog entries) as well as posts. This is undoubtedly a good thing, but if your pages are liable to turn up in site searches you might want to make a couple of changes to stop page content from swamping your results screen and improve appearances if you use category icons. In WordPress search results post content is displayed up to the  tag: The rest of the post continues, but when viewed on the non-single/non-permalink web page such as archives, categories, front page, and searches, the post is shown as an excerpt to the more point. Pages don't usually have a more tag, because there is no excerpt or "teaser" destined for use in a feed. Thus when a page appears in a search results it will display in its entirety. Furthermore, because I'm using the Category Icons plugin, post titles will display alongside the category icon for ease of identification. Since pages don't usually have a category, they will show indented with no icon. Here is a search for "architect", showing an iconless page result occupying the screen: With the addition of  to the top of each page, and the use of an icon for Uncategorized content (assuming all posts are categorised) we get this: Much more usable and informative.

Mapping fun with GeoRSS and geo-discovery

Bruce — Sun, 09 Mar 2008 00:26:26 +0000

From bioneural.net:

Continuing the recent geo-fixation trend evident on this site, this article shares the results of a slightly deeper delve into GeoRSS and looks at a great browser add-on that offers auto-discovery of geotagged content in webpages and in some feeds. What is GeoRSS? Wikipedia describes GeoRSS as "an emerging standard for encoding location as part of an RSS feed." It also encodes location in Atom feeds, and rather than the singular "standard" there are actually two variations (GeoRSS-Simple and the more advanced GeoRSS-GML). A third encoding, W3C Basic Geo, is depreciated but still in use (e.g. by Flickr; see below). I happen to use the Geo Mashup plugin for WordPress to geotag articles on this site. As well as adding appropriate metadata tags into the head of location-specific posts, the plugin automatically adds GeoRSS-Simple encoding to my feeds. The GeoRSS-Simple feeds are identified with this namespace declaration in the header: xmlns:georss="http://www.georss.org/georss" Each item in the feed will be marked-up with a coordinate pair separated by a whitespace and enclosed in a point tag. For example: 50.185676 8.464943 And that's it. So what can you do with it? GeoRSS in your blog feed In WordPress you can create a feed for any category or any tag just by putting /feed/ at the end of the URL. This is ideal if you have a dedicated category or tag for geotagged content. In my case I had geotagged content spanning several categories, so I decided to go back and add the tag "geotag" to all my geotagged articles across all categories. This ...

bioneural.net site preference panel revisited

Bruce — Tue, 22 Jan 2008 20:06:51 +0000

From bioneural.net:

The first version of my site preference panel for WordPress needed lots of JavaScript for the toggle (Proto.aculo.us), more JavaScript to switch styles, and still more JavaScript to change text size. Version 2 still uses JavaScript for the toggle effect—but no additional load—since jQuery is already utilised by K2. The rest is accomplished using server-side PHP, and the revised 3-column panel layout makes use of more recent CSS know-how. I've tried to modularize the preferences panel as much as possible, but some simple template editing is still required (at 4 points). It is optimised for K2 (tested using RC3 and RC4) and although I haven't tested it with other themes (that's your job!) I don't see why it couldn't be used (*Some tweaking may be required. Batteries not included.) Get the files Let's get it done, then come back to the how and why if you're interested. Download the files to create your own preference panel as siteprefs.zip, available here. Expand the archive and upload the folder "siteprefs" into your K2 main directory: /wp-content/themes/k2/siteprefs/ At this point you may also want to download and activate the Theme Switcher plugin if you plan on allowing your audience to change the WordPress theme they see on a per-user basis (storing their preference in a cookie). Support for the plugin is built into the preference panel (see features, below). It's yours to play with and customise; all I ask is that you retain the little "i" icon with it's link back to these instructions. Feedback and suggestions for ...

Stop WordPress character replacements

Bruce — Fri, 18 Jan 2008 17:08:06 +0000

From bioneural.net:

Is WordPress altering your punctuation behind your back e.g. converting typewriter quotes (") to smart quotes (“ & ”)? It's down to the on-by-default wptexturize function. You can disable this by adding the following to your theme's functions.php file: remove_filter('the_content', 'wptexturize'); (for posts) and remove_filter('comment_text', 'wptexturize'); (for comments). Or, use a plugin.

Spring clean your WordPress options

Bruce — Fri, 18 Jan 2008 14:22:47 +0000

From bioneural.net:

Having cleaned up your head, you might also like to de-clutter you WordPress options table. Sure, it won't alter the look or performance of your site—but it's what's on the inside that counts right? Unfortunately deactivating a plugin or deleting it from wp-content/plugins will most often not clear out the data it saved to wp-options. How do I know what options are stored? If you are currently logged in as site administrator you can see all the options stored in your wp-options table by visiting /wp-admin/options.php. Although you can change these options, you can't remove them: How do I remove obsolete options? Firstly, some well-beahaved plugins will actually do this for you. For example, Quoter offers to tidy up its own mess: Unfortunately such graces do not appear to be commonplace. Secondly, there is a plugin in beta as of this writing called Clean Options. Sadly when I ran this it didn't identify any of the options left behind by long-disused plugins. Thirdly, you can use phpMyAdmin. Say you deleted Ultimate Tag Warrior from your plugins folder after migrating to the WordPress built-in tagging system. To remove UTW's leftovers from your options table, use the following SQL syntax: DELETE FROM wp_options WHERE option_name LIKE 'utw_%'; The % is a wildcard, so it will remove all 24 UTW-related rows in wp-options. After spring cleaning my options table went from 469 to 205 rows—evidence of my experiments with all sorts of plugins when I was a WordPress newbie.

Spring clean your WordPress head

Bruce — Sat, 12 Jan 2008 08:00:42 +0000

From bioneural.net:

If you had viewed the source of my WordPress-generated pages a while ago you'd have noticed that my head elements were a real mess. Now they've been spring cleaned, arranged neatly into related groupings and the needless clutter disposed of. Plugins that use the wp_head hook distribute junk all over the show, offending any sense of order. Luckily your WordPress theme is the key to taking control of your head, through a combination of edits to functions.php and header.php. Removing actions using a functions file Your theme may already include a file called functions.php. If it doesn't you can create one using the functions file found in the default theme directory (which is a bit busy), or copy-and-paste mine (with the K2 bits stripped out for clarity): The real advantage here is avoiding the need to hack any plugins or core WordPress files (an upgrader's nightmare). Let's go through the removal actions in sequence. Really Simple Discovery helps client software discover things about your blog. If you don't use a client and manage your posts directly in WordPress, you don't need to offer such help. The PHP script: remove_action('wp_head', 'rsd_link'); will remove a line from your head that looks something like this: Windows Live Writer is one such desktop blogging client, but supporting it needs yet another line in your head. The script: remove_action('wp_head', 'wlwmanifest_link'); will remove a line from your head that looks something like this: The Quoter plugin defaults to inserting comments, JavaScript, and CSS into your head: .commentlist blockquote cite { /* Fix for Kubrik theme */ display: inline; } You ...

From Proto.aculo.us to jQuery

Bruce — Sun, 06 Jan 2008 18:31:03 +0000

From bioneural.net:

As I recently noted, both WordPress and K2 have migrated from using Prototype plus script.aculo.us to using the jQuery JavaScript library. Prototype is a JavaScript framework, including a library of functions used to build Ajax applications. It's best buddies with script.aculo.us, an add-on JavaScript effects library that extends the capabilities of the former. So where does jQuery fit in? The winds of change WordPress hasn't altogether dropped either Prototype or script.aculo.us. As of version 2.3.2 they're still bundled in wp-includes/js/, but the Codex notes that since version 2.2: Switched to jQuery for core JS, which is lighter and faster. I'm no programmer, but I do understand that loading a smaller function library is kinder on your bandwidth and browser, and that writing fewer lines of script to call those functions is kinder on web developers. K2, on the other hand, stopped bundling Prototype and script.aculo.us as of revision 382. This popular WordPress theme now does all its Ajax magic—Live Search, Rolling Archives, and Live Comments—via jQuery. Loosing weight As of this writing Prototype (1.6.0.1) weighs in at 121 KB. The six core files that make up script.aculo.us 1.8.1 (sound.js and unittest.js are optional) also happen to total 121 KB, making a combined size of 242 KB. If I could therefore use jQuery 1.2.1 (at 45 KB) to achieve the same JavaScript-mediated effects, I'd be using around one fifth of the code libraries I was previously loading. But it's worse than that, because if I retained Proto.aculo.us for custom effects and loaded jQuery for K2, I'd be wasting ...

A Xmas spent upgrading bioneural.net

Bruce — Thu, 27 Dec 2007 17:08:26 +0000

From bioneural.net:

It's amazing how much detritus accumulates in your server directories and MySQL tables over the years. Add to the mix a propensity to hack core files to the point where you dare not upgrade your packages, and you have yourself a fine mess. I hope it wasn't too obvious, but bioneural.net had developed Diogenes syndrome. It was time for a clear-out and makeover. If you're thinking that sounds like work, it is. What follows is not riveting reading, but if you're contemplating doing the same, perusing what this involved for me might help you judge how many days to set aside—and maybe bug-fix your own migration. Why upgrade? There were multiple reasons why I felt a major overhaul was called for: My host (mt) told me I needed to upgrade from my (ss) product to the (gs) product that had superseded it, and that if I took no action I would "loose the benefit of choosing [my] own migration timeline"; The (ss) product was stuck at MySQL 3.23.58 and PHP 4.4.1, whereas the (gs) upgrade offered MySQL 4.1.11 and PHP 4.4.7 or 5.2.2; Such upgrades would bring security fixes, as would upgrading Gallery from 2.1.2 to 2.2.4; WordPress 2.3.1 (current as of this writing) requires MySQL 4.0 or greater, so I was stuck on WordPress 2.0.11; I wanted to configure ecto 3 to work with WordPress's new integral tagging system (ecto 2 did work with UTW and some hacks to xmlrpc.php); I made a number of hacks to core WordPress files (xmlrpc.php, wp_rss2.php, etc.) which makes updating a ...

Repairing MySQL accidents

Bruce — Sun, 21 Oct 2007 17:34:34 +0000

From bioneural.net:

Herewith a short cautionary tale concerning the dangers of editing your MySQL database in phpMyAdmin when you don't have much idea what you're doing. Note to self: do your research before—not after—trying something new. For my future benefit (should I ignore the aforementioned note) here's a record detailing how I dug myself out of a hole. Step 1 Backup. At least I got that part right. In WordPress the easiest way to do this is from the Dashboard via Manage > Backup. Updating an author e-mail The author e-mail in WordPress is the one that gets notified when someone comments on the post. It can also be used to indicate when a particular comment belongs to the author of the post (e.g. on this blog, author comments are currently styled with a grey hash). If you change your e-mail address in WordPress this association will be lost, so any comments made when you logged in with your old e-mail address will no longer be attributed to the blog administrator. In order to turn off a heavily-spammed admin e-mail address, I therefore needed to re-associate author comments with my new address. The author e-mail data resides in the comment_author_email field in WordPress, inside the wp_comments table. To effect a search-and-replace, open phpMyAdmin and select the database to edit, then click on the SQL tab to reveal a text entry box: In this box type the following, then click Go (substituting the correct e-mail addresses): UPDATE wp_comments SET comment_author_email = REPLACE ( comment_author_email, 'old_email@domain.com', 'new_email@domain.com'); It worked for me, but you can ...