That Not So Fresh Feeling

I figured I’d log what I did when I upgraded my blog to WordPress 2.5.

First, I disabled some plugins I figured I wouldn’t necessarily need post-upgrade. The two I disabled were Kramer, which grabs Technorati links back to the blog (newly built into the WordPress dashboard) and SpotMilk, a customized dashboard (which I wasn’t even sure would work).

Then I upgraded.

So far, so good.

Poking around the settings, I decided to turn on the global Gravatar usage, rather than using the Gravatar plugin. That’s a great idea, except my theme doesn’t come with Gravatar support, so I’ll need to use the built in functions.

Then my MacBook crashed for the second time today (I think it’s Twitterrific, but we’ll see). Awesomely, MarsEdit earned its keep by having autosaved my work. So back to it.

After poking around, I got the built-in functionality to work, but since it returns an entire image tag, and not just the URL to the avatar image, it’s actually less useful to me than the plugin is. I turned the plugin back on. Good enough.

Next, I noticed the Mowser plugin had a new version. Perfect chance to try the new built-in plugin updating. Clicked the link and that was pretty much it — the plugin was up-to-date. Nifty. You can see the Mowser-fied version of my site here. Not perfect, but pretty good work from a one … two person company.

Took this as the opportunity to clean up my plugins page. Gone are the aforementioned Kramer and SpotMilk, along with the Hello Dolly and WP-flv plugin I’d installed a while ago.

Now, I wanted to turn some of my hard-coded plugin links into widget usage, to make switching themes easier. I started adding widgets to my left sidebar, expecting that I’d need to go disable them in the code. Nope! Nice, it must use a different bit of sidebar code when you use widgets. Very cool. This allows me to dump a couple more plugins (MyNetflix and a Last.fm one).

Also, turn off WP-Cache when you’re testing, or you’ll be annoyed out of your mind.

One missing widget: I was previously using the Google Shared Items widget, but now I’ll just use the RSS feed for it. Let’s see how that looks … ugly. But, good enough for now. Maybe there’s a WordPress widget for it. Wow, I’m digging the widgets. They make my life a whole lot easier. I should have tried this a long time ago. Even added a little About Me text widget.

Turning WP-Cache back on.

Finally, testing to see if MarsEdit can still post … huzzah! Success. And with that, I’m done.

So I said I was going to eventually change my theme. I was fixing up some of the other sites I help run (Dewey’s House, Blair Wasdin Project, Chair Chuckers), and I got motivated and decided to start messing with my site.

I was browing the WordPress Community Theme Viewer and came across this one by Lasse Havelund and I was smitten. Not the perfect color scheme, and I need to make a new header image (gotta find out if The Gimp can read PSD files … I think it can!), but damn, it’s nice looking. I’ve been making some small tweaks here and there (changing where the comment text goes, some sidebar rearranging and changing, and the nifty digg! post icon). The big thing will be a new header image.

Of course, I just mucked around with Gimp for a while and it sucks dealing with PSD files (well, with layers), so I’m probably going to have to find someone who’s got Photoshop and actually make some real edits. Or maybe I’ll just go with my craptastic Photoshopping skills.

Thankfully, I know some folks who are good at this sort of thing. Because I suck at the Photoshopping.

A free beer for whomever can come up with a better header image.

I work for a web hosting company, and we’re currently monkeying around with an installer for WordPress. In testing it, I fully expected custom permalink rules to break–I’d heard rumblings from looking through our support queues that it might not work. Sure enough, custom permalink rewrite rules did not work.

WordPress 2.0 does some nifty stuff with rewrite rules. Rather than do what older versions did and generate a big .htaccess file with 50-odd lines, it instead generates a compact, sub-10 line .htaccess file. These rules basically let WordPress handle all of the rewrites internally. In many cases, this is a cool thing (it’s what I use here on my blog). However, it’s not universally compatible–a quick search on Google shows a bunch of people running into a problem with this new system.

I dug around for a bit, trying to find a solution for our customers. And I found one. In the wp-includes/classes.php file, there’s a variable called use_verbose_rules. By default, it is set to false, which triggers WordPress to use the new, compact rules. Setting it to true causes WordPress to generate the old-style big .htaccess file. Sure enough, as these are pretty normal, generic rewrite rules, *everything* *just* *works*.

I’m sure I’m not the first person to stumble upon the solution, but since I didn’t find it mentioned anywhere before, I thought I’d share it. Plus, my memory isn’t what it used to be, so this’ll be helpful in making sure I don’t forget how to fix this, should the need arise again.

I finally bit the bullet and upgraded to WordPress 2.01. I had been hesitating since I hadn’t wanted to reconfigure my plugins/themes/hacks, but figured I needed to do it eventually. My web host recently launched a nifty “you’ve got WP 1.5 installed, click this link and we’ll upgrade everything for you.”

I clicked, it ran, and it just worked. That’s really nifty and a really good hosting feature. It’s also something that now I’m noodling around in my brain figuring out how to implement something like that for some of the features that the company I work for offers.

WordPress 2.01 has a much nicer interface, with a really great text editing box. It’s also got cool AJAX-y fields on the right that let you expand/collapse UI bits you care/don’t care about. And now I can add category fields on the fly, which is fricking awesome. The post preview also gets rendered in your theme, so you know pretty much exactly how it’ll look.

If you see anything that doesn’t work the way it should, drop me a note here.