I’m moving all my business and work related content there and will be actually taking posts down off this site and reposting things there. I’ve also made new pages for and updated many of my wordpress plugins there.

From now on, business and programming related content will go there, and when I am ready to start posting on literature, history, philosophy and related topics again, the new content will be posted here.

I’ve had to let a few of my personal projects like AJAXed WordPress fall to the wayside as I had too many other things dividing my time into itsy-bitsy little fragments.

Things are slowing down now and the craziness of the past year or two has begun to ebb, so eventually, I’m going to start posting here again, but for now, if you read the website for WordPress related stuff, head over to my business website. And heck, if you need some web development done too, I’m pretty sure you won’t have a hard time finding a nice contact form.

This website is officially not running beta software now, so yay!

[geek]I upgraded after it was released for only 10 – 30 minutes. That has to be a record.[/geek]

In WordPress 2.5, the code is cleaner, the plugin is more responsive and you can add both “real” sidebar widgets, or add “fake” ones to match the dashboard.

This plugin is currently intended for 2.5, but it also works in WordPress 2.1 – 2.3 and can work in WordPress 2.0.x if you use the Completely Wipe Dashboard option.

Installation is a breeze:

1. Download the zip file for WordPress Dashboard Editor
2. Unzip and upload dashboard.php to your wp-content/plugins/ folder.
3. Go to your dashboard. There will be a new sub-menu item.
4. Select any options you want and add any PHP or HTML code that you want to the textbox.

Code Examples:

To add a sidebar widget to your dashboard (after selecting the option from the Dashboard management page) use the code:
<?php dynamic_sidebar('admin');?>
The Admin sidebar is modified and controlled the exact same way as any other sidebar.

If you use the WP-UserOnline plugin you can use:
<?php echo useronline_page();?>

In WordPress 2.1-2.3 f you find that your new content doesn’t align nicely you can add:

<div style="float:left; width:460px;">
//
//Add all other content here
//
</div>

Any code that can be used in your WordPress Theme can be used in the dashboard. This means that you can have different information appear for the different user roles among other things.

1. The automatic upgrading is nice, but it still has a couple kinks in it: it says one or two plugins are at the latest version even though it says they aren’t, it died when upgrading wp-phpmyadmin but not until it deleted it, and it upgraded me to a bum copy of Redirection which wasted two hours of time while I thought that AWP was broken.
2. I still think the Admin panel is way too washed out. If it stays this way, one of my first tasks will be to release an Admin theme. I think everything has a cartoony feel to it, and it is way too bright. (As well as difficult to see.)
3. For some odd reason the Gravatars aren’t working even though they were on the test install.There is a reason you should allow at least 24 hours between hitting the save button and hitting the publishing. I just forgot to echo it.
4. Love the new media library. It alone will be worth the upgrade for some people. It auto generates galleries, and makes uploading and editing several pictures extremely easy.

Check out the gallery of screenshots below the fold.

The first step is to add the following to your current theme’s index.php loop after the line that looks like <?php while (have_posts()) : the_post(); ?>, but before any other code.

<?php $cat_temp = cat_loop();?>
	<?php if($cat_temp && is_numeric($cat_temp)){?>
		<?php include('loops/cat_'.$cat_temp.'.php');?>
	<?php }else{ ?>

Then add } just before the line endwhile.

The next step is to add the following to your theme’s functions.php file (you may have to create a file with the same name):

function cat_loop(){
	global $blog_id,$post, $wp_version;
		if($wp_version >= 2.3){
			global $object_term_cache;
			$array = $object_term_cache[$blog_id][$post->ID]['category'];
		}else{
			global $category_cache;
			$array = $category_cache[$blog_id][$post->ID];
		}
		while (list($cat) = each($array)) {
			if(file_exists(dirname(__FILE__).'/loops/cat_'.$cat.'.php')){
				return $cat;
			}
		}
	}

This can be modified to look at author’s also. Now the only thing you have to do is to create a folder named “loops” in your theme’s folder, and then create a new file with a new “loop” — excluding the while and endwhile parts — and name it cat_xxx.php where xxx is the id of the category the loops is for.

This can be repeated for single.php, archive.php, or anywhere else a custom loop is useful. You can even use something similar for individual posts or pages.

A post may be in multiple categories, but it will only use the first custom template it finds, so make sure the post is in only one specially styled category at a time.

The first step is to get WordPress to display the menu as a hierarchical list without a title. <?php wp_list_categories('sort_column=name&sort_order=asc&style=list&children=true&hierarchical=true&title_li=0'); ?>

We then wrap this WordPress code in the following so we can style it.

<div style="text-align:center;">
    <ul id="menu" style="padding:0; margin:0;">
        <?php wp_list_categories('sort_column=name&sort_order=asc&style=list&children=true&hierarchical=true&title_li=0'); ?>
    </ul>
</div>

I added this to my header.php, but you can add it anywhere you want it to appear.

The CSS is fairly simple and you just need to add it to your theme’s style.css file.

ul#menu {
	margin: 0;
	padding: 0;
	list-style: none;
	width: 100%;
	font-size:1.2em;
}

ul#menu li {
	float: left;
	padding: 0;
	margin: 0;
	border-right:solid 1px #fff;
}

ul#menu ul li {
	float: none;
	position: relative;
	border-bottom: 1px solid #7EAED7; /* fixes gap problem in IE */
	border-left: 1px solid #FFF;
	z-index:1000;
}

ul#menu li ul {
	margin: 0;
	padding: 0;
	display:none;
	list-style: none;
	position: absolute;
	background: #9CC;
}
ul#menu ul ul{
	margin-left: .2em;
	position: absolute;
	top: 0; /* if using borders, -1px to align top borders */
	left: 100%;
}

ul#menu * a:hover, ul#menu li a:active{
background:#7EAED7 !important;
color: #FFFFFF;
}

ul#menu li a:link,
ul#menu li a:visited,
ul#menu li a:hover,
ul#menu  li a:active{
	display: block;
	padding: .2em .3em;
	text-decoration: none;
	background: #5587B3;
	 color: #FFFFFF;
}


ul#menu ul li a:link,
ul#menu ul li a:visited,
ul#menu ul li a:hover,
ul#menu ul li a:active {
	width: 8em;
}

Of course you will need to change the colors and text sizes to ensure it blends with the rest of the theme.

Now the last step is the to make it work as a drop-down list on all browsers. This could be done in Firefox with a simple CSS declaration, but Internet Explorer doesn’t understand the :hover pseudo classes, so we mimic this in Javascript.

<script type="text/javascript">
 /*<![CDATA[*/

var mbA,mbT,mbTf,mbSf;
var mbR = [];

function mbSet(m) {
if (document.getElementById&&document.createElement) {
	var m=document.getElementById(m);
	mbR[mbR.length] = m;
	var i;

	e=m.getElementsByTagName('a');
	if (!mbTf) mbTf=new Function('mbHT();');
	if (!mbSf) mbSf=new Function('mbS(this);');
	for (i=0;i<e.length;i++) {
		e[i].onmouseout=e[i].onblur=mbTf;
		e[i].onmouseover=e[i].onfocus=mbSf;
	}

	m=m.getElementsByTagName('ul');
	for (i=0;i<m.length;i++) {
		mbH(mbL(m[i]));
	}
}}

function mbHA() {
	if (mbA) {
		while (mbA) mbH(mbA);
		mbHE('block');
	}
}

function mbHT() {
	if (!mbT) mbT=setTimeout('mbHA();', 0);
}

function mbTC() {
	if (mbT) {
		clearTimeout(mbT);
		mbT=null;
	}
}

function mbS(m) {
	mbTC();
	if (mbA) while (mbA&&m!=mbA&&mbP(m)!=mbA) mbH(mbA);
	else mbHE('none');

	if (mbM(m)) {
		mbSH(m,'block');
		mbA=m;
	}
}

function mbH(m) {
	if (m==mbA) mbA=mbP(m);
	mbSH(m,'none');
	mbT=null;
}

function mbL(m) {
	while (m && m.tagName != 'A') m = m.previousSibling;
	return m;
}

function mbM(l) {
	while (l && l.tagName != 'UL') l = l.nextSibling;
	return l;
}

function mbP(m) {
	var p = m.parentNode.parentNode;
	if (p.tagName == 'UL') {
		var i = 0;
		while (i < mbR.length) {
			if (mbR[i] == p) return null;
			i++;
		}
	} else {
		return null;
	}
	return mbL(p);
}

function mbSH(m,v) {
	m.className=v;
	mbM(m).style.display=v;
}

function mbHE(v) {
	mbHEV(v,document.getElementsByTagName('select'));
}

function mbHEV(v,e) {
	for (var i=0;i<e.length;i++) e[i].style.display=v;
}
/*]]>*/
</script>

A couple notes on the previous code.

1. To activate it, change your theme’s <body> tag to <body onload=”mbSet(‘menu’);>
2. It was not written by me, but I’ve been using it for a long time and don’t remember where I got it.
3. It can occasionally create a JavaScript error, and I’ve intended to rewrite it for a long time, but it usually works fine.

The Simple Tags has been around for a long time, but now it works perfectly with WordPress tagging. What does it do? Most everything you could want (I could retype the list, but I’m going to borrow it straight from the Simple Tags website):

• type-ahead input tags
• auto suggestion of tags
• tags management (rename, delete, amalgamate, search and add tags, edit tags ID)
• List of non tagged contents
• Edit mass tags
• Possibility to tag pages (not only posts) and include them inside the tags results
• Related content since common tags
• Possibility to add related posts inside RSS
• Dynamic Tag Clouds with colors with Widgets
• Tags inside your header’s blog
• Embedded tags ([tags]tag1, tag2[/tags]) for retro compatibility

I use a lot of Plugins and write a lot of Plugins, so the fact that I even use one usually means it is really well made or very useful, but this one is one of the very few that I thought was good enough to promote. Remember, if you have a favorite Plugin, do the author a favor and mention it once or twice.

Oh and what would be really nice is if it had a feature that would suggest related keywords based on the text (there used to be a Yahoo API that did this.) Wink Wink.

UPDATE `table` SET `field` = REPLACE(Field,'change_me','to_me');

Or specifically for the tags:

UPDATE `wp_tags` SET `tag` = REPLACE(tag,'_',' ');

WordPress looks first for special files and then defaults to the index.php file (as shown in this diagram). We can take advantage of this by using only an index.php file and then using conditionals to modify it. While it seems that this method would render the code less readable, it is actually far more readable, and far easier to modify.

Your theme should start off a header.php, footer.php, sidebar.php and an index.php. These files are the “code” files and are fairly self-explanatory, and at this point the only question should be whether you add just the header portion of the file to the header.php or everything including the calls to get_sidebar()—the same goes for the footer.php depending on your theme. This depends on how you use your them, if you plan to integrate it with bbPress and use the same header and sidebars, you should add everything before the normal loop to the header. However, we will focus on things outside of the header (this includes the navigation menus and such) and just focus on the_loop.

A “normal” index page looks a little like this. (Taken from the default WordPress theme.)

<?php get_header(); ?>

	<div id="content" class="narrowcolumn">

	<?php if (have_posts()) : ?>

		<?php while (have_posts()) : the_post(); ?>

			<div class="post" id="post-<?php the_ID(); ?>">
				<h2><a href="<?php the_permalink() ?>" rel="bookmark" title="Permanent Link to <?php the_title(); ?>"><?php the_title(); ?></a></h2>
				<small><?php the_time('F jS, Y') ?> <!-- by <?php the_author() ?> --></small>

				<div class="entry">
					<?php the_content('Read the rest of this entry &raquo;'); ?>
				</div>

				<p class="postmetadata">Posted in <?php the_category(', ') ?> | <?php edit_post_link('Edit', '', ' | '); ?>  <?php comments_popup_link('No Comments &#187;', '1 Comment &#187;', '% Comments &#187;'); ?></p>
			</div>

		<?php endwhile; ?>

		<div class="navigation">
			<div class="alignleft"><?php next_posts_link('&laquo; Previous Entries') ?></div>
			<div class="alignright"><?php previous_posts_link('Next Entries &raquo;') ?></div>
		</div>

	<?php else : ?>

		<h2 class="center">Not Found</h2>
		<p class="center">Sorry, but you are looking for something that isn't here.</p>
		<?php include (TEMPLATEPATH . "/searchform.php"); ?>

	<?php endif; ?>

	</div>

<?php get_sidebar(); ?>

<?php get_footer(); ?>

For most themes, the page and single pages look the same: the only part that really changes is the_loop itself, and even then the changes are usually minor, so if you want to change something outside the_loop, you have to change it in all files. However, by operating the majority of display elements out of the main files, we can make it infinitely extensible without overloading the end-user with large amounts of code to sort through.

The index.php file for the theme I use is very short and easily read.

<?php get_header(); ?>
	<div id="wrap">

		<div id="content">

			<?php if (have_posts()) : ?>

				<?php
					if(is_home()){

						include (TEMPLATEPATH . '/index-loop.php');

					}elseif(is_page() || is_single()){

						include (TEMPLATEPATH . '/single-loop.php');

					}else{

						include (TEMPLATEPATH . '/archive-loop.php');

					}
				?>

			<?php else :?>
				<h2 class="center">Not Found</h2>
				<?php include (TEMPLATEPATH . '/not-found.php');?>
			<?php endif; ?>

		</div>

		<?php get_sidebar(); ?>

	</div>

<?php get_footer(); ?>

If we break it down: it calls the header, adds the two structural divs, and checks to see if there are any posts (of any kind). If there are no posts it includes an error page before including the sidebar, closing the divs and calling the footer. This part of the page is fairly normal and is used in most themes—not only is it used in most themes, but most of the main files all have this same code–every single theme file calls the footer, sidebar and header, shows an error message if there are no posts to display. This is a lot of wasted space. If you suddenly want to change the name of something or move the sidebars, you have to change every file which is just pointless. The difference in my index.php file is that there isn’t a full loop. It checks if there are posts using have_posts(), but where you would normally see a loop it just has some conditional statements, and for each condition, a different loop is included.

Each of the loops is in a different included file. (The loops are shown below, but just notice the similarities and major differences.)

Index loop:

<?php while (have_posts()) : the_post(); ?>
		<h2 id="post-<?php the_ID(); ?>" class="b">
			<a href="<?php the_permalink() ?>" rel="bookmark" title="Permanent Link to <?php the_title(); ?>"><?php the_title(); ?> </a>
		</h2>

		<div class="main main_border">

			<small>
				Posted on <?php /*backslashes escape chars*/ the_time('l \t\h\e jS \o\f F, Y \a\t g:i a ') ?> in <?php the_category(', ') ?> <?php edit_post_link('Edit','-');?>
			</small>

				<?php the_content('Continue reading "'.the_title('', '', false).'"')?>

			<div class="small box">
				//Some comment and UTW stuff				
			</div>	
		</div>
<?php endwhile; ?>

<div class="main" style="width:99%;">
	<div class="main-nav-left" style="float:left;width:49%;"><?php posts_nav_link('','','&laquo; Previous Entries') ?></div>
	<div class="main-nav-right" style="float:right;width:49%; text-align:right;"><?php posts_nav_link('','Next Entries &raquo;','') ?></div>
</div>

single-loop.php (handles both singles and pages because there is only a tiny difference between the two)

<?php while (have_posts()) : the_post(); ?>

	<h2><?php the_title();?></h2>


	<small>
		<?php if(!is_page()){ /*Only difference between pages and singles*/?>

			Posted on <?php /*backslashes escape chars*/ the_time('l \t\h\e jS \o\f F, Y \a\t g:i a ') ?> <!-- by <?php the_author() ?> -->in <?php the_category(', ') ?> <?php edit_post_link('Edit','-');?>

		<?php }else{?>

			<?php edit_post_link('Edit','-');?>

		<?php } ?>
	</small>

	<div class="main">

		<?php the_content('Read the rest of this entry &raquo;'); ?>

		<?php wp_link_pages(); ?>

		<div class="small box">

			//some comment and UTW stuff

		</div>

		<?php posts_nav_link(' &#8212; ', __('&laquo; Previous Page'), __('Next Page &raquo;')); ?>

	</div>

<?php endwhile; ?>

And the archive-loop.php which handles categories, date archives, tags, searches etc.

<?php $post = $posts[0]; // Hack. Set $post so that the_date() works. ?>

	<?php /* If this is a category archive */ if (is_category()) { ?>

		<h2> Reading about <?php single_cat_title(); ?></h2>

 	<?php /* If this is a daily archive */ } elseif (is_day()) { ?>

		<h2>Archive for <?php the_time('F jS, Y'); ?></h2>

	<?php /* If this is a monthly archive */ } elseif (is_month()) { ?>

		<h2>Archive for <?php the_time('F, Y'); ?></h2>

	<?php /* If this is a yearly archive */ } elseif (is_year()) { ?>

		<h2>Archive for <?php the_time('Y'); ?></h2>

	<?php /* If this is a search */ } elseif (is_search()) { ?>

		<h2>The Search Results For "<?php echo $s;?>"</h2>

	<?php /* If this is an author archive */ } elseif (is_author()) { ?>

		<h2>Author Archive</h2>

	<?php /* If this is a paged archive */ } elseif (isset($_GET['paged']) && !empty($_GET['paged'])) { ?>

		<h2>Archives</h2>

	<?php } ?>


	<div class="main" style="width:99%;">
		<div class="main-nav-left" style="float:left;width:40%;"><?php previous_posts_link('&laquo; Previous Entries') ?></div>
		<div class="main-nav-right" style="float:right;width:40%; text-align:right;"><?php next_posts_link('Next Entries &raquo;') ?></div>
	</div>


	<?php while (have_posts()) : the_post(); ?>

	<h3 class="b"><a href="<?php the_permalink() ?>" rel="bookmark" title="Permanent Link a <?php the_title(); ?>"><?php the_title(); ?></a></h3>

	<div class="main main_border <?php echo anth::styles();?>">

		<small>
			<!-- Posted <?php the_time('j F Y') ?>  by <?php the_author() ?> -->
			<?php if(function_exists('UTW_ShowTagsForCurrentPost')){?>
				<span class="utwtags">Keywords: <?php UTW_ShowTagsForCurrentPost("commalist") ?></span>
			<?php } ?>
			<?php edit_post_link('Edit','-');?>
		</small>

			<?php the_excerpt() ?>

	</div>

<?php endwhile; ?>

<br/>

	<div class="main" style="width:99%;">
		<div class="main-nav-left" style="float:left;width:40%;"><?php previous_posts_link('&laquo; Previous Entries') ?></div>
		<div class="main-nav-right" style="float:right;width:40%; text-align:right;"><?php next_posts_link('Next Entries &raquo;') ?></div>
	</div>

The actual loops in each of these files starts with <?php while (have_posts()) : the_post(); ?>, and you will notice that all the loops are similar with only a few cosmetic changes, the major difference is in the archive page which uses a large conditional block to set the title text, but this could have been done on the index.php page and used a completely different loop if you needed it.

Okay, so you get down to here and wonder why you haven’t heard anything new. well once we start using custom loops the possibilities are endless.

For example, as I posted about recently, on my index I use a special loop for items that are in the Asides category, but only on the index page, so inside of my is_home) conditional statement I also add the code:

<?php $in_cat = cat_loop();?>
	<?php if($in_cat){?>
		<?php include('cat_'.$in_cat.'.php');?>
	<?php } ?>

Which calls the function: (added to the functions.php file)

function cat_loop(){
	global $blog_id,$post, $wp_version;
		if($wp_version >= 2.3){
			global $object_term_cache;
			$array = $object_term_cache[$blog_id][$post->ID]['category'];
		}else{
			global $category_cache;
			$array = $category_cache[$blog_id][$post->ID];
		}
		while (list($cat) = each($array)) {
			if(file_exists(dirname(__FILE__).'/cat_'.$cat.'.php')){
				return $cat;
			}
		}
	}

Basically the function loops through all the categories a post is in and if there is a custom loop for a category it uses it. This can easily be extended for author ids, name or anything else that you can test.

Let’s review: use as little repeated code as possible because when you do lots of tricks are available to you.

The easiest way to get a non-fatal wp_die() error (an error that shouldn’t cause the entire application to stop) is when submitting comments: non-fatal errors occur whenever someone posts too quickly or submits a duplicate comment, so this can be a problem when creating an AJAX app to submit comments (I ran into this problem with INAP.)

Since AJAX makes the entire submit process very quick, so it is easy to trigger the “Posting too quickly” error if the user make short comments, and when this happens an entire page –complete with CSS and headers– is returned as the AJAX response. Originally, I detected this by updating the element and then doing doing a regex test on it. If it was an error, I would use another Regex to strip out the error message and update the element again, but because of the CSS, if the same user triggered an error multiple times (eg testing to see if they could submit the comment yet) there would be a momentary flash. I fixed this problem by updating a variable instead of going straight to the element, but it still required using client-side code to process it.

The Setup:
Some data is posted through AJAX to the server-side script. This script then calls a function (submit_data) which then passes on the data to WordPress. (There is of course PHP and JavaScript that isn’t shown here.)

The Original Function:

function submit_form(){
global $wpdb, $post,$id;
	require_once('../../../../wp-comments-post.php');
	echo 'Comment submitted';
}

The new function that traps the error:

function submit_form(){
global $wpdb, $post,$id;
ob_start("nodie");
require_once('../../../../wp-comments-post.php');
ob_end_clean();
echo 'Comment submitted';
}

function nodie($error){
	preg_match('@<p>(.*?)</p>@', $error,$errs);
	return $errs[1];
}

Global  $wp_actions;
 $wp_actions[] = 'admin_head';