BurningbirdI posted some suggestions on the WordPress magic quote problem at the support forum, here.
Before running the application, make a mysqldump backup first, using the following:
mysqldump -u username -p databasename > wpdatabasebackup.sql
When prompted for password, enter password.
And this concludes the last of my posts on WordPress.
Two long time friends from this world have decided to fold up their blogs, at least for now. Possibly even permanently.
The first is our friend from South Africa, Farrago. As she writes:
This was fun, but the fun eventually ran out.
The second is our friend from the UK, Gary Turner, who writes:
What’s brought this sudden change of heart? Frankly, and I’m not sure if I’m 100% on the ball with this, it’s an identity crisis that was quietly baked in from the very beginning but which lately, has been surfaced and exacerbated by my recent spate of meetings. In short, my blog self is not my entire self and I must say that I’ve been cool with that as long as both of those two selves never happen to appear together in the same room. When that happens, it shines a spotlight right on top of that partial disclosure or split identity issue and this is something I’m finding uncomfortable to reconcile.
This isn’t a profound real life personal identity crisis thing, it’s just something that I’ve recently come to notice and realise is a conflict in my blogging terms of reference, and it’s a conflict which seems to have mortally wounded my blogging self.
Farrago brought us Charlie and penguins and beer bottle art. And I remember when Gary and Mike Golby used to back and forth about ‘porridgeboy’. Lately, though, everyone is all serious. Iraq. War. Bush. Outsourcing. Patriot Act. Social Software. Politics. Copyright. Rape. Starvation. Aids. People being hurt and hurting others. Technorati 100, and A listers. Journal versus weblog. Nosy news people crashing the party. Making the Money, baby.
But you know something? We had all this back ‘then’, too. It’s hard to go back to ‘porridgeboy’ and penguin games, when whatever we had then, we don’t have now; and we’re not even sure what it was that we once had.
I’ve been having a conversation, if conversation is the right word for email exchanges, with a long-distance friend about the reality of this environment, and that split between our real selves, and the people we create online. Dave Rogers’ captures this best with:
As authors, we’re too clever by half. We seduce ourselves with the beauty of our writing, until our attention becomes focused on the words and not on the existence. This is ego. We can, and usually do, become trapped in our narratives. Our choices constrained by the character we’ve constructed, by the plot holes we wish to avoid, or ignore. And it’s not just individuals, entire communities, countries, religions, political parties, families, any group of human beings that share a common set of beliefs and goals, all of them can become trapped in their own narratives as well. There’s a lot of that going around these days.
I think it’s truer to say that we’re not “writing ourselves into existence.” Rather, we’re writing ourselves out of existence. We cease to be people, and instead become characters and plot devices.
We’re writing ourselves out of existence, whether we continue to weblog or not. True ghosts in the machine. Or poppies, hidden behind the larger, showier flowers until one day we notice they’re gone.
So we stand in the doorway waving good-bye and cry out, “Good luck Gary and Lynette”, before shutting the door; knowing that if they happen to miss us someday, or miss this funny, bizarre, sad, lonely, non-existent existence we all share, no door can stop a ghost from returning. And anyone can reinvent themselves online, if they wish.
As Dave Rogers says, Don’t believe everything you read. Least of all, what you read here.
I wrote this before running into the magic quote problem in last post
I created another WordPress weblog today by copying the database and files from this weblog, and then once created, upgraded all the files to 1.2. I needed an environment identical to this one to make my edits so that upgrading this site would be relatively risk free.
To create the second database, I used mysqldump to download a copy the contents of the existing one, created a new database, and then loaded the data from the dump. Once I copied the files, I modified the wp-config.php file to point to the temporary database, and started to work.
I received my first comment spam within an hour of creating the duplicate weblog, and received a comment by someone who came in through Google within two hours. And during my effort, the original weblog was hit by a comment spam attack, which played havoc with my effort (me wondering what I was doing wrong to be generating all these ‘approve comment’ requests in the inbox). However, thanks to the attack, I found I had an error in my crapflood protection; fixing it should prevent manage these attacks in the future.
The first edit I made was to modify the upload.php file to incorporate a modification that wraps a thumbnail image with a hypertext link to the larger photo. I then tried this on a photo of another major storm that hit St. Louis today.
The next modifications were to copy the edited wp-comments.php and wp-comments-post.php files, and replace the top part of the wp-comments.php with the new code in the upgrade (everything above the line). All my edits I could save, as is–including the live preview from Chris Davis. There’s also a new plugin for WordPress 1.2 that provides a preview page for comments, and I may add that as an option for people who don’t have Javascript enabled.
The next change was to add the entry into menu.php for my Switch blogs multiple blog handler, in addition to using the install-multi-php file I wrote to create the table. All that was left then was copying the switch.php file into the wp-admin directory.
Following the previous discussion on multiple weblogs, I also deleted the wp-images, wp-contents ,and wp-includes directory for the new installation and created a symbolic link to their counter-parts in the first test WordPress 1.2 weblog directory location. By doing so, the plugins I’ve downloaded or created for my other WordPress directories are now available for this one.
Include the my_recent_comments list that feeds the sidebar–my processing includes links to comment authors web sites and a few other odds and ends not provided by any existing WP function or plugin.
After making sure comments work, I then decided to have some fun and play with the CSS for the WordPress administration pages. I didn’t change much: added some background color, and some border effects for the buttons. I also changed the background color for the ‘look at me’ events such as deleting a post. Instead of that glaring red, I have a nice dark blue. The darkness is alert enough – never depend on color to ensure that a person pays attention to what they’re doing.
I rather like my new WordPress Admin look. It’s a newer, kinder, gentler WordPress…that just happens to work the same no matter what pretty pretty we do to the CSS.
Currently, WordPress supports moderation for all posts, or none. I’ve always liked turning moderation on by item, which I implemented in WordPress 1.02. To carry this forward, after upgrading the database during the 1.2 upgrade process, I had to use phpMyAdmin to add the ‘moderated’ option to the comment_status field in the wp_posts table.
The code to manage moderated comments in wp-comments.php didn’t need to change. But if you’re interested in adding this modification to your setup, first of all, look for the following line using your text editor:
<?php if (’open’ == $post->comment_status) { ?>
And replace it with:
<?php if ($post->comment_status ==’open’ || $post->comment_status == ‘moderated’ ) { ?>
After the line to create the “Leave a Comment”, add the following, but edit the message to whatever you want:
<?php
if ($post->comment_status==’moderated’)
echo(“Use your own moderation message here, complete with HTML formatting”);
?>
Save the file, and then open wp-comments-post.php and look for the following:
if ( ‘closed’ == $wpdb->get_var(“SELECT comment_status FROM $tableposts WHERE ID = ‘$comment_post_ID’”) )
die( __(’Sorry, comments are closed for this item.’) );
With the following:
$commentstatus = $wpdb->get_var(“SELECT comment_status FROM $tableposts WHERE ID = $comment_post_ID”);
if (’closed’ == $commentstatus)
die(’Sorry, comments are closed for this item.’);
Then look for the the following line:
$wpdb->query(“INSERT INTO $tablecomments
And insert the following code before this line:
if ($commentstatus == ‘moderated’) {
$moderation_notify = true;
$approved = 0;
}
else
$approved = 1;
Save the file. The last change then is to add the ‘moderated’ option in the advanced editing form, as shown in the following screen shot. Rather than talk you through this, a copy of my changes files is contained in zip file at the end of this writing.
This is the only change on this page–I also have added a link to my preview page.
Currently WordPress uses the same page, index.php, to serve all requests: archives, category, individual pages and so on. I don’t necessarily like the same look with each page, so I copied it into category.php and individual.php.
The pages themselves don’t need to change, other than to modify the look into what you prefer for these pages. But to ensure they’re called, I needed to modify my .htaccess file to point to these pages, rather than index.php:
RewriteRule ^archives/([0-9]{4})?/?([0-9]{1,2})?/?([0-9]{1,2})?/?([0-9a-z-]+)?/?([0-9]+)?/?$ /individual.php?year=$1&monthnum=$2&day=$3&name=$4&page=$5 [QSA]
RewriteRule ^archives/category/?(.*) /category.php?category_name=$1 [QSA]
To create my preview page, I copied individual.php to preview.php and made one modification to the code: it now calls a file called wp-blog-draft-header.php rather than wp-blog-header.php. This new file is an exact copy of the old one except for one change:
Look for:
$where .= ‘ AND (post_status = “publish”‘;
And replace with:
$where .= ‘ AND (post_status = “draft”‘;
Save the file, and now I have a preview page. You can take a look at it with a post kept in draft state.
WordPress 1.2 does have a page preview located at the bottom of the edit page, but I like the ability to preview the writing within the context. Especially when using my photos, I need to know how they look in context.
The file upload, individual moderated comments, and full page preview (and the new look and feel) are the first phase of modifications. The second is to add another page and menu option to manually generate a static page from any given page; a plugin that can be used to statically generate the index.php and syndication feeds; and selecting comments by date range to easily delete a comment spam attack.
You can get a copy of the files discussed in this writing here. If you decide to play with any of this, make sure you back your files up first.
As you may have noticed, I upgraded this site to WordPress 1.2 yesterday. You may have noticed because WordPress 1.2 has what I consider to be a very serious bug in that it ‘escapes’, or adds a slash, in front of all apostrophe’s in both comments and RSS. This is commonly referred to as the ‘magic quote’ problem with PHP. (I’m writing a LAMP essay on this for later.)
The rumors of workarounds at the support center talk about adding filters to filter out the slashes, and I did this for comments. But then, thanks to some friends, I found out that the RSS is also featuring escaped slashes. In fact, the built-in page preview is escaped, and the only thing not escaped is the text in the main post.
Since there are new users of WordPress 1.2 that haven’t said anything about this problem, I’m wondering if it has to do with the upgrade from WordPress 1.02 to WordPress 1.2. Or maybe they have a fix. Or maybe they don’t know the problem exists. Or maybe they got the secret decoder ring to wear while writing to their weblog. Mark did you get the secret decoder ring?
I don’t know what’s happened in WP to generate this problem, but you might want to consider postponing a port or upgrade to WordPress 1.2 until an official fix has been created. Having to add these strip slash filters isn’t the best way to deal with this problem.
For those who have ported to WP 1.2 and are having problems, I’ve added filters to the syndication feeds, and the comments that seem to work with the comments at least. We’ll see how it does with syndication.
Add the following to wp-comments.php:
add_filter(’comment_text’, ’stripslashes’);
Make sure to add this into an existing PHP block.
Add the following to the PHP code in the syndication feeds:
add_filter(’the_excerpt_rss’, ’stripslashes’);
add_filter(’the_content’, ’stripslashes’);
Let’s say this post is a good test whether these work or not.
More later on the adventures of upgrading and also what hacks I’ve added.
Update
And when I first posted this, I had an opening PHP block, <?php> …<?> that I didn’t convert to HTML escaped characters included in the code. This caused WordPress to fail. This should not happen–the results might look funny, but the application should not fail.
But the stripslashes seem to be working on new entries within the syndication feeds.
Second update
Let’s do this the easy way: add the following to your .htaccess file:
php_flag magic_quotes_gpc off
php_flag magic_quotes_runtime off
This solves the problem without having to add all the filters on new or newly saved entries! The slashes are still in the database for the old entries.
In fact, this probably explains why others do not have this problem–either magic quotes are turned off for their installation, or they have these entries in their .htaccess file. However, it does seem as if the magic quote escaping is happening in the upgrade process. Yes? No?
Or was it that WordPress 1.02 and before handled this ‘badly’, and WP 1.2 handles the situation correctly, but the data is already ucky? I didn’t check the data before I did the upgrade (more fool me).
(Yes, that’s a tech term – ucky. )
More later in a LAMP essay on ‘magic quotes’.
Evil things.
‘You’ll have to excuse me if I seem focused on WordPress right now. This week if I’m not working the back end, adding in all sorts of new plugins and other general tweaking around; I’m working the front, creating several new looks for the Burningbird weblog–each as different from the others as possible.
Currently I’m playing with one look I’m calling “The Burningbird of Happiness”, and frankly having an enormous amount of fun. It’s colorful and very different from this look, and I rather like it. However, I fear that most people, used to the designs fostered by many of the popular weblogging tools, may find it a little, well, shall we say, unpolished? So much so, that I’m thinking of adjusting the titles for each look, just to set the expectations:
The Burningbird of Happiness (who flies outside the CSS Zen Garden)
Li’l Flame – the design guarateed to break TypePad (not the pages, the server)
Ode to Windows Hot Dog Stand (and don’t try this at home, kiddies)
The slightly off-center and irritating Missouri Green
To Ms. Moto: “Eat Pink and Die”
The one-too-many Margarita Look
The god-awful Clash of Colors
There’s something wonderfully liberating accepting the fact that you’re not known for your design acumen. You can, then, freely and happily break every rule of tasteful and elegant design and page layout. As long as the results are easily readable in most browsers on most systems, accessible, and validate, with a minimum of personal anguish to the more artistically sensitive among you, I’ll be happy. If it’s unpolished, at least it’s uniquely me.
Speaking of unpolished, I’ve heard this term used a lot with the WordPress administration pages. I’m not sure why, either. I don’t want to turn this site into a WordPress fandom site, but if WordPress administrative pages are considered ‘unpolished’ what will people think when they get to my pages? Perhaps what the problem is, I don’t understand the difference between ‘polished’ and ‘unpolished’.
I find that the WordPress administrative pages are easy to read and to navigate. They make good use of the space, and they’re clean and uncluttered. They load quickly and simply, and they provide enough space for me to add my tweaks, but not so much space that they’re wasting screen real estate. Frankly, what is so ‘unpolished’ about this?
Is it because the forms and writing isn’t set into miniscule format, and scrunched into a space that would work with the old 640×480 monitors? Is it because the text is black, plain, and easy to read?
Perhaps its the lack of graphics–Wordpress uses a minimum number of graphics. But without all those graphics, the page loads quickly and takes less resources.
In fact, WordPress has all the looks of an application designed to be highly functional and intuitively easy to understand. Aside from one small tweak to the CSS style sheet, to make some borders a tad darker, I find that the tool is very easy on eyes that can be tired at times, or perhaps not as good as they used to be when younger.
It’s odd, but when I first switched from Movable Type to WordPress, I also thought the interface was ‘unpolished’. Now, I’m not sure why, except for the fact that it doesn’t make extensive use of graphics, and the forms tend to fit the page, rather than leaving a great deal of white space.
Maybe that’s the problem: we’ve been looking at sites and styles that are so much alike that when we see something that’s ‘different’ we immediately equate the difference with being less somehow. The more conservative will point out failures in the design and attempt to create a ‘proper’ look; while even the most liberal of us, those who celebrate difference, will mentally ‘polish’ the image in their mind until they see it transformed into something ‘better’; discarding the unique bits along the way.
That’s not to say that a friendly suggestion and helpful hand is amiss–but doing so effectively rather requires one to step into the mind of those who we would help; to respect the essence and the truth of both the design and the designer. Maybe even realize that ‘better’, isn’t always better.