Tag Archives: WordPress

WordPressMU uses symlinks to do the multi-blog thing. Blogs names are linked to in a “blogs” directory (avoids having the root directory writeable by the webserver!) which makes life easier on me writing mod_rewrite rules for various reasons.
Unfortunately, that requirement means that PHP has to be able to symlink directories which isn’t possible all the time due to security settings on servers. Therefore, here’s two htaccess.dist files that you can drop into your WPMU installation, then run your installation again (delete the existing .htaccess files)
Put this htacess.dist in the root directory: http://blogs.linux.ie/download/htaccess.dist
(If you’ve downloaded this file already, grab it again. I updated it so wp-login.php works, and wp-images show in the backend!)

Rename this and copy it to wp-inst/htaccess.dist: http://blogs.linux.ie/download/wp-inst-htaccess.dist

Delete the existing .htaccess and wp-inst/.htaccess and the install will run when you visit the root URL of your blog. You can delete the “blogs” directory too if you like! (Make a backup first though!)

New snapshot of WPMU is now available. It fixes a number of bugs. If you’re running a WPMU site with untrusted users you should really download and install this version!
Go to the download page to find out more, or download either wpmu-2004-11-22.tar.gz or wpmu-2004-11-22.zip and unzip over your existing WPMU install.
(Backup your data first of course!)

This anti-spam plugin for WordPress is something I’m going to look at for use here.
Kitten’s excellent Spaminator is filtering all the spam here already but the surbl.org feature of John’s plugin is something I’d like to add to Kitten’s work!

You can now download the November 10th snapshot of WordPress MU. Go check the download page for links to tarballs and zip files!
Changes:

• Added Kitten’s Spaminator plugin.
• Added “Hide internal links” and “Hide direct links” options to referer listing.
• Added Inline comments. You’ll need to add “blog-comments.html” to your template directory to enable it though.
• Fixed paging of categories.
• Misc bug fixes and WP upgrades.

I just installed the WYSIWYG plugin for WordPress and it’s nice. I don’t think I’d use it myself but it could be very useful for newbies, especially by using the Image Manager to insert images into posts! It took only a small amount of hacking to get it to recognise the WPMU directory structure!
Problems – in Moz FF I couldn’t paste into the textarea as I got a "security error" popup. Inserting a link was problematic too – I had to get out of html view and add the <a href=""></a> bit myself!

Shelley wrote an impressive review of WordPress a few days ago and as she mentioned an entry here I noticed a few hits. It’s a long piece with lots of comments and interesting. I changed the method by which enclosures are created – from a text field to scanning the post for URLs. Many of the comments aren’t very positive about that change. Which is better?

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!