WordPress Archives

Tips and Tricks on WordPress usage and development. I am very passionate about WordPress, but it doesn’t work just by itself – it needs a rich environment to live and breathe in.

If you’re after theme and plugin alterations, we have a category for that.

How to fix “broken image captions” in WordPress 3.4

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We’ve been discussing an issue with broken captions at the WordPress forum over the last few days. It appears that due to a code change in the WordPress core, captions are now inserted in a different way. This is to allow for HTML in captions which was not possible beforehand.

Turns out that many themes have not been updated to make use of this. Sadly this means that many users are left hanging with themes that are no longer compatible with the latest version of WordPress.

Lets take a look at the problem and see if we can fix it.

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How to bring back Post Categories in P2

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We’re all excited about the new features in Automattic’s P2 Theme v1.4.0 – however many of us have setup custom tweaks around Post Categories. In the latest version these have been replaced with Post Formats.

Post Formats are great, but they are limited to values defined in the WordPress core. If you wanted to create a new post menu like “critical” or “alarm” this wouldn’t work. We could use Custom Post Types to add to those formats, however it’s way too big an operation for I wanted to achieve: which is bringing back the “posting into categories” feature we’ve come to love from the previous version.

In this article I’ll show you how to back-port categories so posts will appear as they did in P2 v1.3.3 while retaining all functions of the latest update.

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P2 Theme gets an upgrade: say hello to Custom Menus and To-Do List Support

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Today P2 Version 1.4.0 has been released – hurra! Thanks for everyone’s hard work on this amazing theme.

P2 now boasts a couple of extra options and plenty of changes under the hood, but like many other great features those are not immediately obvious. Let me show you how the new changes work and how they can make your P2 experience even better.

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How to tweak P2: adding and replacing categories

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Today I’m going to tweak the marvellous P2 Theme by Automattic.

P2 is one of my all time favourite themes – not only because it transforms WordPress into something completely different, but also because it’s an innovative way we communicate internally here at WP Hosting. If you don’t know P2 yet, do check it out at p2theme.com and watch the video.

At the time of writing P2 is at Version 1.3.3 and has been since November last year. Code changes quickly, so by the time you’re reading this my ramblings may be out of date.

Let’s have a look at how we can add and amend the default categories (i.e. Status Update, Blog Post, Quote and Link).

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FIXED: The Problem with running PHP as FastCGI Application (WordPress and Plesk)

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We’re currently on our way to Kissimmee, FL to join Parallels Summmit, an annual conference from the people who make Plesk. We’re also taking exams in Plesk 10.4.4 so we’re studying it in-depth – I’ve been using the software for over two years now but never had formal training in it. Well here goes!

In preparation for the exam tomorrow I’ve come across something the instructor mentioned: namely the benefits of running PHP as a FastCGI application instead of an Apache module. Sadly I’ve also come across some drawbacks when using this option in regards to WordPress. I thought I’d mention those here, alongside how to avoid those.

UPDATE: Thanks to Boldock this problem can be fixed 😉

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How to deploy HyperDB

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Ever since I’ve started experimenting with HyperDB I thought that once I’ve got enough servers at my disposal, and if I ever figure out how to setup MySQL replication I’d bring the two together. I believe that day has finally come: HyperDB is now deployed across over 60 sites I’m taking care of.

I want to share with you my configuration and some of the pitfalls I’ve come across – if it helps, great. But mainly these notes are for me to remember how I did it when the next cluster needs to be built.

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Calling all Forum Beta Testers

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Great News: I’ve been meaning to add a general WordPress forum to this site for a while, but none of the options seemed to work well for what I wanted to do.

All I needed was a simple discussion forum, integrated into WordPress – I really didn’t want to mess around with phpBB or the likes. bbPress is in a constant state of beta and gives me a headache every time I want to make it work, SimplePress is ugly and basically all of the above are overcomplicated.

Enter Tal.ki – an embeddable forum solution that promises to give me a forum with only one line of code, or alternatively as a WordPress Plugin! It’s not live on this site – let’s test it out!

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Snapshot Backup 2.0.1 Update: Let’s try this again, folks…

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I’ve just released Snapshot Backup 2.0.1 – the exact same version as 2.0, however this time it includes all the files it actually needs…

Let me explain what happened earlier:

So there I was, having tested the latest version of Snapshot Backup 2.0 for several weeks, all is well at my end, and I decided to release it to the public. After over 11.000 downloads it gets the long awaited automation feature, revamped menu structure and gets its own branding. How exciting! You should all finally have it, it’s been a long wait.

I uploaded the changes using Subversion, and thanks to Tortoise SVN I can do this with a right click from my Windows 7 machine. It’s all so much easier than hacking away on my development server via SSH. Ever so pleased I decided to treat myself with a Mac Book at the Apple Store in Covent Garden – let the iOS Development begin!

Shortly after I had arrived in town all your kind comments kept flooding in: some files were missing in 2.0 which Tortoise SVN didn’t import properly, and hence 2.0 was only 80% of what it should have been (read: 100% unusable).

Thank you to everyone who broght this to my attention, I’m really sorry I couldn’t rectify this before tonight when I got back home.

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