DVD Guide Blog

I tinkered with the Revolution Magazine, Revolution Tech, and Revolution Pro Media themes for a while, but I quickly identified several issues that will need to be resolved before any of those themes will be ready to deploy for regular use, so I switched WordPress back to the default theme for now.  Expect more Revolution Themes tinkering soon, though; I didn’t just spend a few hundred dollars on them to not use them.

I have licensed the Revolution Themes for WordPress by Brian Gardner (all of them via his All-Inclusive Developer Package) and started to experiment with them. If anything here looks or feels broken, that probably means I am actively working with a theme, so please just check back in a few minutes or so.

There are definitely a few things I do not like about the Revolution Themes, starting with the clunky handling of their various dependencies upon included but non-standard plugins. Strangely, these plugins are provided within their respective individual theme folders, from which they must be moved to the main plugins folder. After that move, they must still be separately activated within the WordPress administration system. So the non-obvious installation process is a bit clunky, but this is the worst part:

The theme—in this case, Revolution Magazine—does not bother to check whether a non-standard plugin upon which it depends is actually available before attempting to use it. Had it done so, it could have provided a more elegant, informative, and useful message; even just one of those would have been an improvement.  Had it done so, I might not have been primed with annoyance then exposed to the fact that the Revolution Magazine theme depends upon a function named “the_content_limit”, which struck my annoyance-primed self as doubly stupid because the name is a noun even though the function is not a constructor and because the name contains a definite article.

If you don’t understand what any of that means, feel free to pretend.  You could just nod knowingly and say something like “Pshyeah! The WordPress conventions of using nouns for verb-appropriate function names are functionally stupid—like calling functions tags” as though you understood everything and knew it to be true years ago.  Appropriately condescending facial expressions are optional.

I do like the looks of the some of the Revolution Themes, of course.  Hopefully I will be able to work through any remaining functional annoyances quickly so I can just concentrate on getting some great content up on some great-looking blogs.

I have not been announcing WordPress upgrades for a while, but since the last such announcement was made quite a while ago and I have not posted any other content since then, it was starting to look as though I had stopped paying attention to WordPress releases. Well, I didn’t, so here is another announcement just so anybody who checks will know that I am keeping the software on the site current even when I haven’t posted any real content for quite a while.

I have installed WordPress 2.3.3. As usual, I did a clean installation of all files instead of upgrading the previous installation, but I kept the extant database.

I have installed WordPress 2.2. As usual, I did a clean installation of all files instead of upgrading the previous installation, but I kept the extant database.

This new version of WordPress and the “Freshy” theme do not play nicely together, so I am going to change the theme, at least for now.

I have installed WordPress 2.1.3 in response to a security alert regarding WordPress 2.1.2. As usual, I did a clean installation of all files instead of upgrading the previous installation, but I kept the extant database.

I also moved my content from /wordpress to /blog, which better reflects the nature of the content in article URLs.

I created a test page using the page-creation functionality that was added in WordPress 1.5 then I decided to change that test page into an “About” page, which showed up in my custom index with the original page slug in the URL: “test” rather than “about”. I looked in the database both to check on the wp_posts.guid value and to see how I might be able to differentiate between WordPress “Posts” and WordPress “Pages” in my custom index-generator. My suspicion about the error was correct: wp_posts.guid was set to a non-existent URL with the original page slug, so that same old issue that was mentioned on the WordPress Web site two years ago remains in WordPress 2.1.2.

I changed the wp_posts.guid value manually, but I am still not sure why it falls out of synch with the value of wp_posts.post_name. I do not know of any good intentional reason for that to be allowed, so perhaps the WordPress developers have merely overlooked something where their code updates entries to the wp_posts table. Perhaps I can track it down, fix it, and contribute my fix to the WordPress project.

The other issue—my custom index of WordPress “Posts” including a WordPress “Page”—was easy to track down and resolve. As I suspected from the rather high integer in my “About” page editing links, WordPress “Pages” are stored with WordPress “Posts” in the wp_posts table. The two are differentiated by values in a column named “post_type”, so I added a constraint for wp_posts.post_type values of “post” when loading information for my custom index. Done.

I have installed a new WordPress theme called “Freshy” by Julien De Luca. It looks pretty nice.

Please note that Freshy’s date blocks have days on top, months in the middle, and years on the bottom.

I have installed WordPress 2.1.2 in response to a security alert regarding WordPress 2.1.1. As usual, I did a clean installation of all files instead of upgrading the previous installation, but I kept the extant database.

I have installed WordPress 2.1.1, which the WordPress development blog describes as “a low-to-medium priority update”. I am not sure whether the new version will make any difference while comments are off, but just to be safe, I like to keep up to date. Again, I did a clean installation instead of upgrading (file-wise, anyway; I kept the extant database and let WordPress update that, obviously).

Seven days after WordPress 2.0.7 was released, WordPress 2.1 has been released, so seven days after I installed WordPress 2.0.7, I have installed WordPress 2.1. Again, I did a clean installation instead of upgrading.

This is a significant release for WordPress, supposedly bringing not only improvements, but over 550 bug fixes as well, so I am looking forward to exploring it and seeing how it compares to previous versions. I still have my lists of WordPress issues, so perhaps I will start with those.

Congratulations to Matthew Mullenweg and the rest of the WordPress 2.1 team. Your rapid releases make me regret my slow progress with PageDrive, but at the same time, they are impressive and inspiring.

I have installed WordPress 2.0.7, which was just released a few hours ago.

This time, I did not merely upgrade the previous installation; I uploaded a fresh copy of all files so I could do some tinkering without affecting what little live content I have more than necessary. I moved the content from /wordpress to /blog, but I encountered some difficulties of which troubleshooting is presently less compelling than preparing or purchasing some sustenance—updating the permalinks did not seem to update part of the database that my custom index-generator uses and I was not happy with the plain 404 Not Found messages that appeared in place of the previous content pages—so I moved it back for now.

Despite having a content management platform of my own in PageDrive, I like WordPress well enough that I have been tempted to spend some time customizing it—making my custom installation preferences work better, of course, but hopefully also improving some of the things I do not like about WordPress—and release my customizations under a compatible license.

As always, please let me know if you encounter any problems or oddities.

I have upgraded my WordPress installation to Version 2.0.6, which was just released today.

As always, please let me know if you encounter any problems or oddities.

I have upgraded my WordPress installation to Version 2.0.5, which was released hot and fresh from the WordPress oven on Friday. All of this site’s content, however, remains old and stale.

Note that both WordPress 2.0.5 and WordPress 2.0.4, which I skipped (probably mainly because I was not paying close enough attention to WordPress releases, but also at least a little bit because I remembered all of that broken link business and I did not want to risk breaking anything that was already working), include security fixes, so anyone running an older version should consider upgrading as soon as possible.

As far as I have seen, everything is running as it should be. Please let me know if you encounter any problems or oddities.

I have upgraded my WordPress installation to Version 2.0.3, which fixes the URLs that were broken by WordPress 2.0.  (Actually, it looks like the fix was implemented in Version 2.0.1, but I must have been very busy with school and work at the time, because I did not notice word of the fix or the new version.)

Comment moderation has kept my posts mostly free of comment spam lately, but the moderation queue and its many and frequent notification e-mails have grown overwhelming—sometimes dozens and even well over a hundred notification e-mails arrive at once—so I have disabled comments and pings until I can implement a better solution. I am not sure whether I will implement an existing WordPress plug-in, create my own, or spend some time implementing anti-spam measures in PageDrive then migrate to that.

By the way, WordPress 2.0 allows you to specify whether comments and pings will be allowed by default for all new posts and it allows you to specify those settings on a per-post basis, but I did not see a way to mass-modify them for existing posts, so instead of doing a lot of clicking through page after page of posts to uncheck their “Allow Comments” and “Allow Pings” boxes (under “Discussion”) and resave each post along the way, I employed the following SQL statement, which definitely saved me some time:

UPDATE `wp_posts` SET `comment_status` = ‘closed’, `ping_status` = ‘closed’;

Of course, you might want to back up your existing settings before you use that or anything like it, especially if you plan to reopen some comments or pings later, but not all of them.

I just upgraded to WordPress 2 and it already looks like a significant improvement over even its most recent former version. It makes me want to spend less time developing Web applications for my employer’s clients and more time working on PageDrive, which I have barely touched in maybe a year. Anyway, let me know if the site gives you any trouble.

Update 1 (1:32am): WordPress 2 has been returning “Error 404 – Not Found” messages instead of this post; once, a server error message appeared in place of the upload form on the post page; several times, attempting to resave this article (e.g., to change the post slug) has resulted in an “Internal Server Error” message, and various pages—especially the dashboard—have been appearing with missing content. I am presently using Firefox 1.5 under Mac OS X 10.4.4; I will try to check things out under Windows XP Professional (Service Pack 2) and various other browsers when I am less tired.

Update 2 (2:13am): It looks like WordPress 2 still has some permalink and database issues; the “Default” permalink option seems to work fine, but both the “Date and name based” and “Numeric” options result in the error I described above. Looking into the database reveals that the wp_posts.post_name and wp_posts.guid values still fall out of synch, but I am not sure if that is relevant to this particular problem. I have tried deleting my .htaccess files both in the “wordpress” directory (so that one would be regenerated) and in my Web root directory (in case any of my .htaccess stuff was interfering with the WordPress .htaccess stuff), but none of that seemed to have any effect. I have come across some posts from other people who have encountered the same or similar problems, but if a solution exists, I have not yet found it and I am now too tired to keep looking before getting some sleep.

DVD Guide, including its installation of WordPress 1.5.2, is now up and running on its new Web host’s server. Wheeeee!

As always, please let me know if you encounter any issues of concern.

I have moved DVD Guide to a different Web host and as a new version of WordPress was just released a few hours ago—version 1.5.2—I have upgraded to that as well. While uploading the new version of WordPress, I encountered some FTP difficulties—the FTP server stopped responding a few times—but everything seems to be in place now.

As always, if you encounter any difficulties or oddities, please let me know as soon as possible so I can resolve them as soon as possible.

I have upgraded my WordPress installation to Version 1.5.1.3. Please let me know if you notice any oddities.

I have moved DVD Guide’s hosting to its own user account to minimize damage due to any further WordPress exploits (the hacker on Friday gained access to the file system and defaced several sites hosted under a single user account). Although this is my only site that currently uses WordPress, security vulnerabilities may be present in any software, so hosting isolation may be prudent for all of my Web sites.

Initially, I had WordPress prepare its database tables anew, but after being unable to find any content and setting import and export functionality built into WordPress, I deleted the newly prepared tables then restored the old ones (sans the user account created by the hacker and with my own user level restored, of course) and changed my password again for good measure (it reverted to the old one when I restored the old database). I am not completely comfortable using the old tables as I do not know what other damage the hacker may have done to my database, but until I have a tool or time to restore only known-good WordPress content and settings without breaking any inter-table references, metadata, or who knows what else, it will have to do.

I noticed some strange things when exporting my WordPress database, including that WordPress has not actually deleted comments that I had it remove from the site after I found them to be spam. How strange.

Ryan Boren, one of the WordPress developers, got back to me about the breach and he thinks it may have been due to the known vulnerability in WordPress 1.5.1.1 despite their corresponding “Security Update” page saying “if you’re running the default template”, which seems to ascribe the vulnerability particularly to that configuration. Hopefully, that was it and WordPress 1.5.1.2 will prove more resilient.