This week I’ve been trying out the new version of the free wordpress app for the iPhone. I was quite disappointed by the previous version (version 1) as it “lost” some of my drafts. This new version  seemed to be a huge improvement, although I still found some problems.

The only iPhone app that lets you write posts, upload photos, edit pages, and manage comments on your blog from your iPhone or iPod Touch.

Comment moderation is brilliant

The app let’s you manage multiple blogs comments, posts, and pages and is useful whilst away from your computer. It also let’s you write posts and save them as local drafts, or publish them to your blog. The interface is much smoother and better looking than its previous incarnation, for instance the comments list now shows gravatars which is nice to see. On the subject of comments, I like how it let’s you approve, unapprove, delete, and mark comments as spam – for me this is actually easier than logging into the online admin section to manage comments on most occasions.

The posts interface lets you set title, tags, categories, attach photos, and of course write the post itself. Another welcome feature is that it automatically saves your post drafts when you leave the app.

To put the wordpress app through it’s paces I decided to create this post using the iPhone entirely – it was then I realised some of it’s shortcomings.

I was hoping the post editor would work a lot like the tinymce editor in Wordpress’ admin interface, however I was dissapointed when I saw it was just a basic plain text editor. You cannot add HTML or insert images inline – it does not even support lists or spell checking. Those features could have made this app great for publishing posts whilst on the road; instead it’s really only suited for quick, simple posts or for writing basic drafts to later edit via the online admin interface. I should point out you can ‘attach’ images to the post (its adds a gallery at the bottom), just not within the post content as you can online.

When it came to changing this post from local draft to draft for some reason it wiped my post out completely! Luckily I had it stored in the clipboard, but still, that’s a nasty bug.

Overall I was disappointed by the posts feature, but happy with the comment moderation features. If you only write quick and simple posts then this app will serve you well. Otherwise it’s really only useful for writing rough drafts, although I’ve seen other writing apps do this better as some have built in spell checkers and word counts.

Since this app is 100% free I still class it as a must have, but I really hope for more improvements to the post editor in the future.

The reason I wanted to change from shared hosting was the fact the server was always being hacked (even though ALL my scripts were secure), there was frequent downtime, support blamed me for problems every time, and it was slow as hell.

Those used to a shared hosting environment would probably not know where to start when faced with configuring a VPS. Luckily, a lot of it was pre-configured when I received my account – certainly some of the major security holes were patched. I was not satisfied with those however. As a victim of hacking in the past (previous host swears it was not there fault, something I don’t believe) I took extra care to secure it as a much I could – configuring brute force detection, the firewall, installing mod security (excellent rules for that here: http://www.atomicorp.com/wiki/index.php/Atomic_ModSecurity_Rules) and going though multiple guides (like this one: http://www.webhostingtalk.com/showthread.php?t=468168) with a fine-tooth comb.

The result? My pages are loading at least 6 times faster, I have had no down time (or at least have not noticed any), and I feel in control and happy. No longer am I at the mercy of shared hosts

If your interested, I chose ServInt as my provider as they offered a great deal, as well as being a managed service (so I’m not on my own if I screw things up). I was tempted by the bells and whistles of Media Temple, but felt the ServInt service was better value.

• Small bugfix in uploader.php – cat ID
• Changed stats graph calculation – thanks lggemini
• Changes to headers in download.php to avoid caching
• File Browser fixes – $root was clashing with something….
• exclude_cat works in all sections of download_page now
• Removed hardcoding of /uploads/
• Added action to download.php – should be able to use it to stop a download if you want – maybe limiting downloads per day or something? Whatever you want…
• Made it so if you post new file on ‘edit’ screen, the post date is updated.
• Fixed the ‘blank meta’ section which blanks out custom field values when nothing is set.
• Moved ‘allow_url_fopen’ check.
• Someone said downloads don’t work with spaces in the name. They do! Wasting my time sonny…
• All work and no play make jolley a dull boy
• Had to rename capabilities so they work. Apologies if you have to set this up again! Cheers to Mark Dingemanse.
• {category_ID} custom format tag added. Useful if you want to send someone to its category on the DL page I guess. Also added {category_other} so when no category is set “other” is shown – this is because the download page can show an ‘other’ section if you want it to.
• You can now manually edit the post date on the edit download screen.

If you have edited capabilities for download monitor user permissions, you’ll have to again sorry! This is because I named them too long. Also, you should check your forced downloads still work because there was a logic error meaning they may not have been forced after-all…

Enjoy.

The Wordress Snippets series of posts will give you some useful code snippets for use in your projects – just copy and paste (but try to understand how they work!).

This snippet will add a stylesheet to your login page so that you can style it fully, and also change the default Wordpress logo link (to wordpress.org) and title text to something of your choosing. Add it to functions.php in your template.

1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
20
21
22
23
24

function custom_loginpage_logo_link($url)
{
     // Return a url; in this case the homepage url of wordpress
     return get_bloginfo('wpurl');
}
function custom_loginpage_logo_title($message)
{
     // Return title text for the logo to replace 'wordpress'; in this case, the blog name.
     return get_bloginfo('name');
}
function custom_loginpage_head()
{
     /* Add a stylesheet to the login page; add your styling in here, for example to change the logo use something like:
     #login h1 a {
          background:url(images/logo.jpg) no-repeat top;
     }
     */
     $stylesheet_uri = get_bloginfo('template_url')."/css/login.css";
     echo '<link rel="stylesheet" href="'.$stylesheet_uri.'" type="text/css" media="screen" />';
}
// Hook in
add_filter("login_headerurl","custom_loginpage_logo_link");
add_filter("login_headertitle","custom_loginpage_logo_title");
add_action("login_head","custom_loginpage_head");

How it works

We simply use the wordpress hooks on the login page (custom_loginpage_logo_link, custom_loginpage_logo_title, custom_loginpage_head) to insert our code and modify the existing title text and link to something of our own.

• {user} tag added for custom formats
• ‘autop’ option fix
• Download page buttons applied with CSS so they are easier to customise/translate.
• Fix for pagination bug after editing a download
• Category output fix on edit downloads screen
• Category urls on download page use ID rather than name to prevent errors when cats have the same names.
• exclude_cat added to download_page shortcode
• Localised ‘hits’ ‘date’ ‘title’ on download page
• Option to disable the download logging
• Read file ‘chunked’ some people found large files were corrupted so this should help (fingers crossed)
• Added show_tags option to download page – displays x amount of tags on the download page.
• File Browser root setting and download.php logic/mime types modified thanks to Jim Isaacs (jidd.jimisaacs.com)
• Interface Improvements
• Bulk edit categories, custom fields, tags, member only downloads
• Added roles for download monitor admin – should be able to use with a role manager plugin if you want anyone other than admin to access the admin section e.g. http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/capsman/
• Change redirect after add
• Edit Cat names/parents
• Dedicated tags and thumbnails fields (they still use meta table though)

And yes, those category link bugs are fixed at long last, and you can edit category names finally. Phew!

The Wordress Snippets series of posts will give you some useful code snippets for use in your projects – just copy and paste (but try to understand how they work!).

This snippet will add rel="nofollow" to the links in your blogroll, or those outputted by wp_list_bookmarks. Add to functions.php or your links template.

1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8

function nofollow_my_bookmarks( $links ) {
    foreach($links as $link) {
        $link->link_rel .= ' nofollow';
        $link->link_rel = trim($link->link_rel);
    }
    return $links;
}
add_filter('get_bookmarks', 'nofollow_my_bookmarks');

How it works

Wordpress uses a function called get_bookmarks when it gets links for your blogroll – we use a filter to hook in and add the ‘nofollow’ rel tag.

• Added changelog to readme.
• Email validation bug squashed
• Cached comments now work; if user forgets to fill in antispam or makes a mistake (and the JS does not catch it) the users comment will not be lost.
• Redone entire code to make it more efficient
• Admin section added for changing the antispam question
• Form ID and honeypot trap added to form
• Fully localized

You can get the plugin from wordpress.org: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/spam-stopper/

For support, please keep my comments clean and post on either the wordpress forums or my forum.

To help support spam-stopper you can make a donation (buy me a coffee, or several) or rate it on wordpress.org. Thanks!

• Added changelog to readme.
• OpenID Plugin (http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/openid/) Integration.
• %username% can be used in your custom links shown when logged in (gets replaced with username)
• WP-FacebookConnect (http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/wp-facebookconnect/) integration (untested!)
• Minor fixes (worked through a big list of em!)

You can get the plugin from wordpress.org: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/sidebar-login/

For support, please keep my comments clean and post on either the wordpress forums or my forum.

To help support sidebar login you can make a donation (buy me a coffee, or several) or rate it on wordpress.org. Thanks!

Fatal error: Allowed memory size of 33554432 bytes exhausted (tried to allocate 228968 bytes)

You may also be seeing pages fail to load fully (for example the wordpress admin dashboard) if php error messages are hidden. I’ve already had one case where we thought certain plugins were to blame but in fact it was just out of memory. A possible fix (which worked in the previously mentioned case) is to add:

@ini_set('memory_limit','64M');

to your wp-config file. Has anyone else encoutered this error?

You can grab the latest files from Google Code here. Enjoy.