Category Archives: WordPress

I’ve just installed Kitten’s Spaminator on this site. Go into your Plugins page and activate it there.
Kitten’s plugin “combines the best of Tar Pit & Three Strikes” as she says on her blog. It’s a great idea, scoring comments based on spam words and links. Unfortunately there’s a bug in the plugin running on her site so I can’t comment on her blog. Kitten – please change $this->strike_cnt = 10; to $this->strike_cnt = 0;
All comments get trapped otherwise!
I’m playing around with the rules, I added a check on the URL, the plugin goes through all the rules regardless of wether referer and link count checks return true or not. It’s fairly benign unless you actively teach WordPress about your comment spam. Next time you get spam copy the URL, first 3 number from the IP, and email into your spam words textarea in Options->discussion. This post will probably be updated throughout the day.
13:50 – if no email entered then automatically notch up one strike.

As this post will appear there, I won’t make a big deal of it, but WordPress development can be followed at WordPress Planet, an aggregator collecting posts from here and other WP developer’s sites!

Yay! I finally got around to fixing it! I noticed a while back that paging of categories didn’t work, but then got swept off by some other problem before I could fix it. Anyway, it’s a simple fix to your wp-inst/.htaccess file. Open that file up in your favourite editor, and add the following after the first line:
RewriteRule ^category/(.*)/page/(.*)/ BASE/wp-inst/index.php?category_name=$1&paged=$2 [QSA]
Change “BASE” to wherever your installation lives, ie. http://domain/wpmu/ will have a BASE of “/wpmu”.

WordPress 1.3 has much better anti-spam features than previous releases. It’s still relatively simple however but despite the existence of third-party hacks and plugins to catch spam here’s how I configured my site:

• Disable email notifaction when comments are held for moderation
• Before a comment appears, the comment author must have a previously approved comment
• Hold comments if they have more than 1 link
• Fill the spam words textarea with words, urls, emails, IP address, etc that you want blocked.

You’ll catch just about all the spam that gets posted to your blog this way!
Later… Feck ya spammer! None of yer crap got through! 🙂

Working away at a new site design. I also made a few changes to the WordPress MU index.php and added a counter. With that you can do nifty things like adding a photo of the day after the first post, or whatever. In my post.html I put the following:
{if $count == '0'}
    {photoblog msg='' randmsg=''}
{/if}

I really need somewhere to put my “pic of the day”. It’s annoying putting it in-between posts. More reworking of code later possibly.
Anyway, after yet-another-aborted-attempt at another design for this site, I’m drooling over the designs at zengarden. Someone slap me!

Ryan’s explanation of the is_* functions in WordPress 1.3 is an excellent summary of some of the new functions in this version of WP.
In WPMU, it should be possible(I haven’t tried yet!) to do the following from your Smarty template:
{if is_search()}
    <b>The Results of Your Search:</b>
{/if}
It’ll display the message “The Results of Your Search:” when a search is performed on your site.

Matt reports that another user has discovered that WordPress supports enclosures! That’s great, but others have legimate concerns about it.

I’m experimenting with inline WordPress comments. If you leave a comment on this or other posts the comment will display on the blog, under the post. I need to make it optional however and smarten up it a bit!
You’ll probably notice a few changes here over the next few hours as I play with it. It wasn’t too hard to do, but I decided to create a new template and not overload the original comments template file.

I finally got around to creating a release script so I can quickly bang out WPMU tarballs and zip files.
Releases won’t come every day but when I make major changes to the system I’ll upload a new version and announce it here.
Here’s the download page.
Note: I haven’t as yet tested this version. It was created in a completely different way to past releases so it may not work quite as planned!
2004-10-22 Changes:

• Enclosures created by scanning blog posts.
• Lots of WordPress Core changes.
• Photoblog plugin displays links to posts where they exist.
• More than one enclosure now handled.

The Previous Page, Next Page function works again in WPMU. Not sure what fixed it but it was likely some WordPress core change, probably the upgrade to the CVS version did it.
Anyway, to get it working, administrators should edit their wp-inst/.htaccess and add the following line (somewhere in the middle,I don’t think it really matters where!)

RewriteRule ^page/?([0-9]+)?/?$ /wp-inst/index.php?paged=$1 [QSA]

Now, edit your index.html template and add the following at the end of your content section, or wherever you want the links to appear:

{posts_nav_link}

That’s it! Refresh your browser and the links should appear! Oh, and you may notice I updated the photoblog plugin – it now links to the blog post about the photo, even when displaying random photos. So, feel free to comment, I love to hear what people think of my photos!