David Currie » WordPress

WordPress upgrade

Dave — Fri, 09 Jan 2009 20:23:38 +0000

I’ve finally had a chance to upgrade to WordPress 2.7. It’s relatively painless since I’ve switched to updating via Subversion. The only problem I hit was with text widgets. I was seeing an error along the lines of “Warning: array_keys() [function.array-keys]: The first argument should be an array in wp-includes/widgets.php on line 1044″ which, if you Google it, currently appears at the top of a whole host of other people’s blogs. Deleting all (three) of my text widgets and recreating them seemed to fix the problem. It’s good to see that threaded comments have finally made it in to the base product. I’ve previously experimented with a couple of plugins but never turned them live for users as I’ve never been entirely happy with the way they’ve been implemented. (As a consequence though you’ll see that some historical posts already have threaded responses from me.) I have to say that, right now I’m not a big fan of the revamped admin pages but that may be just lack of familiarity…

OpenID support

Dave — Wed, 13 Feb 2008 11:59:50 +0000

The observant visitor to this site may already have noticed the addition of OpenID support for logon and commenting on this site. This is easy to achieve with the WP-OpenID plugin. For now I have enabled the option to auto-approve comments submitted with an OpenID. I know having an OpenID doesn’t necessarily make you a good person but, at least for now, its more effort than your average spammer is prepared to go to.

Whilst I was at it, I added the WP-Yadis plugin so that I could delegate from the URL for this site to an OpenID server. My original intention was to set up my own server using phpMyID but in the end I decided that I preferred the richer functionality provided by my existing myOpenID account (in particular, the ability to log in with a client certificate) and I’m not sufficiently paranoid to worry about them knowing what sites I use. In fact, here are the sites that I’ve been able to use my new identity with over the past couple of days: Blogger, DOPPLR, Plaxo, Technorati and, of course, this site.

As part of playing around with phpMyID, I also finally got round to recompiling nginx with SSL support. As reported elsewhere, the only issue I encountered was with removing the default nginx installation.

Upgrade weekend

Dave — Sun, 13 Jan 2008 21:54:41 +0000

Finally had a chance to put in place a whole upgrades on this site. First up was WordPress 2.3.2. I then needed to upgrade Gallery2 for the latest version of the WPG2 so that’s now at 2.2.3. The WPG2 plugin now acts a lot more like I’d expect a plugin should. Two minor niggles. Firstly, it adds its own page which appears with all the others on the right. You can rename it but I’d rather like to get rid of it completely! Secondly, it doesn’t work with Gallery URL rewrites. Need to investigate that further but it is mitigated to a certain extent by enabling Lightbox support so you won’t usually get to the image page from a blog post anyway.

Next up was an Ubuntu upgrade to Gutsy Gibbon. The first two times my SSH connection dropped leaving the system hosed. Fortunately I’ve paid for slicehost backups so I could simply restore the server. Typically, the third time when I ran the upgrade under a screen session, the connection stayed up!

Changing servers

Dave — Fri, 13 Jul 2007 17:29:12 +0000

So, it’s been a little bit quiet on this blog for the past few days. The main reason is that it’s been on the move from the hosting provided by our ISP (PlusNet) to my SliceHost slice. Things would have been much quicker had I not decided to switch Apache for the increasingly popular (due to its low memory usage) nginx.

As is the beauty of a virtual server, with the click of a mouse I had a clean Dapper Drake install to start with. Rather than install nginx from source, I decided to upgrade to Feisty Fawn and install via apt. This means losing the long term support of Dapper but, hey, its my server and I’ll just have to upgrade again when necessary. From there, getting an nginx, mysql, Rails and PHP setup is well documented, on top of which I added an init script for FastCGI.

Then things started to get a little tricky. Our blogs use clean URLs for both WordPress and Gallery2 but these generate rewrite rules for Apache’s mod_rewrite. Translating these to nginx for WordPress is fairly straightforward but, despite many wasted hours, I’ve failed to get Gallery working correctly. The problem appears to be that nginx URL encodes when rewriting from the path to parameters and Gallery doesn’t seem to handle this well. Anyway, in the end I’ve gone ahead with the move but with Gallery rewrites turned off.

I’ve also switched to using SliceHost’s nameservers for one of the domains. The other is still stuck with PlusNet as the nameserver as the registrar (123-reg) returns an error when I try and update the settings.

If you can see this post then all of the important bits are working though!

WordPress 2.2

Dave — Sun, 20 May 2007 21:01:48 +0000

Having missed the previous security update I decided to upgrade to WordPress 2.2. I’m glad to say everything seems to have gone smoothly (although PlusNet managed to take the site down again at one point which had me a little worried). Nothing really different for you, the reader, to see. Widget support is now there out of the box but then I had the plugin installed previously anyway.

Welcome back blogroll

Dave — Fri, 16 Mar 2007 22:59:49 +0000

Apologies to those whose sites have recently been absent from the links in my sidebar. The modifications in WordPress 2.1 to use the same categories for posts and links managed to break my pages. Having just moved up to WordPress 2.1.2 this is now fixed so the blogroll returns.

Another WordPress upgrade complete

Dave — Fri, 26 Jan 2007 20:56:24 +0000

I’ve now moved this blog and Christine’s up to WordPress 2.1. I’m still waiting for the WPG2 patch which resolves an issue with g2image and TinyMCE but as I rarely post via the web then this isn’t too much of a problem. More problematic was that WordPress now appears to add an extra paragraph tag in around the images which broke the style applied to the Gallery one-image class. Having moved that to the ImageFrame_none class everything appears to be functioning again.

One slightly annoying side-effect of the fact that categories are now shared between links and posts, when combined with my earlier fix, is that the empty Blogroll category now appears in my sidebar. Maybe one day I’ll implement the fix properly and hide entries that don’t have any posts in themselves or their sub-categories! In the meantime I just have to sit back and enjoy the new 2.1 features.

Update 28/01/07: Looks like wp_list_cats has now been fixed so that the hierarchical view does show empty categories with posts in sub-categories (indeed, the post count includes these) so I can remove my earlier fix.

WordPress upgrade and widget fix

Dave — Tue, 16 Jan 2007 22:36:51 +0000

I’m glad I didn’t get round to moving up to WordPress 2.0.6 as, 10 days later, 2.0.7 is out. The upgrade itself went pretty smoothly. I’ve also fixed the categories widget in my sidebar. By default it doesn’t show categories without any postings but, in a hierarchical view, it doesn’t take in to account that sub-categories may have postings. Having selected Sidebar Widgets in the plugin editor, I located the widget_categories function in question. In the call to wp_list_cats I added &hide_empty=0 to the end of the parameter. You should now be able to see my People category (empty) but also its Family and Friends sub-categories (with postings).

Upgrade to WordPress 2.0.5

Dave — Tue, 21 Nov 2006 22:59:42 +0000

Finally found the time to upgrade to WordPress 2.0.5. The process of copying across all the modified files, plugins, themes etc. is always far more manual than I’d like so if you spot anything that looks broken please let me know!

Upgrade time

Dave — Sat, 09 Sep 2006 20:50:00 +0000

Though it was about time I upgraded the various technologies running this blog. After a few heartstopping moments where nothing worked, I’m now successfully running Gallery 2.1 and WordPress 2.0.4 with WPG2 2.0 tying the two together along with the newest WordPress Gallery theme. There’s probably not much to see for the viewer but WPG2 was certainly easier to setup this time and the TinyMCE plugin now lets you add wpg2id tags which is bonus.

I’ve also added the remote module to Gallery so that I can now used Gallery Remote to ease the process of uploading photos.

Widgets, links and spam

Dave — Wed, 21 Jun 2006 20:55:10 +0000

If there is anyone that actually visits this site then they have noticed that the right-hand column has changed a bit recently. This is as I’ve added WordPress Widgets to my template. The presence of a del.icio.us widget has encouraged me to sign up for an account there to store my links. I should probably also mention another Automattic project – Akismet – without which this site would have rapidly disappeared under the weight of spam comments. This saved me from the dilemma of whether or not to add captcha support to the blog with the associated accessibility issues.