Category Archives: wordpress

New WordPress and Colorful Firefox Tabs

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First of all I upgraded to the new wordpress 2.0.1 release which fixes a lot of small bugs (114). I’m curious about the fix for XML-RPC uploading which will hopefully mean that posting images from within flock might actually work – I have to check that out.

Yesterday I found the simple but very useful firefox extension Colorful Tabs in the list of
10 Useful Firefox Extensions That Don’t Get Glamorised. By colorizing all the tabs with different colors it makes it easier to distinguish between tabs. The only thing that was missing was an easily visible highlightening for the active tab. This is why I modified the extension and added a shadow effect for all inactive tabs so that the active tab is sticking out a bit more. Here is how it looks:

Colorful Tabs with shadow effect for inactive tabs

I contacted the author of the Colorful Tabs extension, sent him the changes and I hope he will integrate them. For now you can try the shadow effect by using my experimental modfied version of clrtabs.jar. Just replace the file chrome/clrtabs.jar in the Colorful Tabs extension.

New look

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I finally finished my wordpress customizing and updated the site with a new theme. What you see here is a K2 r160 theme with customized CSS and the additional images. The only thing I had to change in the PHP scripts was the display of the categories in the sidebar which was limited to certain pages. So the upgrade to the next K2 release will hopefully be seamless. The archives page doesn’t work at the moment but I’ll have a look at that in the upcoming week.

Here is a screenshot of the new design for documentation purposes:
new design techbits.de based on K2 r160

Extending the blog

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I have just installed the tagging plugin Ultimate Tag Warrior for WordPress to easily add some technorati tags to this blog. It provides a tag editor within WordPress’ Write Post page to associate tags with the post and it even suggests tags for the post you have written. The tags for each post can be displayed as links to different services like technorati or flickr (and more) and build up to a tag cloud that can be used to dig through your post archive. A Very useful plugin.

I’ve been playing around with the recent K2 Beta Two in the last few days – it supports Ultimate Tag Warrior out of the box by the way. The Beta Two looks really nice, the new icons and the ajaxified comments dialog are particularly noteworthy. I still have some image editing and css hacking to do until I’ll update the theme here, maybe with the next (beta?, rc?) release of K2.

Search engine friendly urls without mod_rewrite

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When I set up my wordpress blog yesterday I wanted to use search engine friendly URLs which wordpress usually supports by the use of Apache’s mod_rewrite. Unfortunately my hoster doesn’t support .htaccess files in the small web package I currently purchased, which I found rather disappointing. Generally, there might by a couple of reasons why the default way of rewriting URLs might not work: Your hoster disabled .htaccess files (AllowOverride None), mod_rewrite is not loaded oder not available on the server or your site runs on IIS which naturally doesn’t Apache’s rewriting. Luckily there are two ways around this limitation that are supported by WordPress out of the box.

The first way that is suggested in the Using Permalinks Section of the WordPress Codex is by using URLs like index.php/some/path/. All you have to do is specifing the custom permalink structure in Options>Permalinks. Apparently this type of permalinks without the use of mod_rewrite worked in WordPress at least since v1.2 but for me, the ugly index.php/ path isn’t something I want to have permanently in my URLs. I favour the following sollution.

You can set your index.php of WordPress as the 404 error page for your website. This has the effect that WordPress is called for all your virtual URLs which do not exisit as actual files on the webserver. I’ve tested this with version 2.0 and so far it works pretty well. There may be problems with HTTP POST operations according to experiments with the textpattern weblog. If it turns out to work properly it should be added to the WordPress documentation since it produces the same clean URLs as mod_rewrite with the bitter aftertaste of being an ugly hack though.

Internally both methods rely on index.php to analyze the URL. Actually in WordPress v2.0 this has become the default way of URL rewriting any way. If you’d have a look at a .htaccess file of a WordPress v1.5 installation you’ll see about 30 rules for all the different URLs (search/, category/, author/, …). In WordPress v2.0 the .htaccess looks much cleaner: all requests are forwarded to index.php – pretty much the same way a redirection of the 404 error page would do it.