Add styling and formatting to the Wordpress Administration view of custom fields by updating WP User Manager with this unofficial update.

WP User Manager

I install and configure WP User Manager on all commercial Wordpress-powered sites requiring custom user profile fields, Dealsway Solution’s plugin really is in a league of its own, plus I’d like to give back to the Wordpress community!

A modified release of WP User Manager 0.4 is available for download that ammends the HTML and CSS styling of custom fields to conform with the Wordpress 2.5 Administration layout.

Download WP User Manager 0.4.1 Update

Warning: date() expects parameter 2 to be long, string given in /htdocs/michaelvisser/wp-content/plugins/wp-forum/forum-functions.php on line 668

Look familiar? There is a bug in the current release of WP-Forum which exists in the plugin’s PHP function ul() hidden away in cookies.php of the plugin root directory. To fix this issue open cookies.php with your favourite text editor and replace…

function ul($user_id){
if(!isset($_COOKIE[’session’])){
update_usermeta( $user_id, ‘lastvisit’, time() );
return true;
}
return false;
}

with…

function ul($user_id){
if(isset($_COOKIE[’session’])){
update_usermeta( $user_id, ‘lastvisit’, time() );
return true;
}
return false;
}

Save your changes and refresh the page. All done.

Alex from Zirona has released a Wordpress plugin that allows visitors to donate money in return for a back-link of their choice. The process has been automated and no interactions are required making this a great revenue generator for power-bloggers and niche hobbyists who can now be rewarded for their efforts.

The donations cloud is something like a tag cloud, only that it displays – donations. The more a person donates, the larger the link to his/her website will be.

There is a critical bug in 0.1.1 (currently available version at time of writing) whereby if you increase the value of DC_MIN_LINK_AMOUNT and a visitor donates a value less than your DC_MIN_LINK_AMOUNT amount the donation will not be visible and the visitor who just generously made a donation will call foul.

To resolve this issue do the following:

1. Open an FTP connection to your website
2. Edit donationscloud.php (/wp-content/plugins/donationscloud/...)
3. On line #45 change the value of “5.00″ to be the same as what you set for DC_MIN_LINK_AMOUNT within settings.php (/wp-content/plugins/donationscloud/...)
4. Save changes

By increasing the minimum value that visitors can donate any future donations will appear in the donation cloud. Looking at the source for Donations Cloud it seems there is no minimum amount checking meaning someone who donates $4.99 will not receive a back-link, this should be announced to visitors and/or a server response mentioning that a donation of less than the minimum amount will not generate a backlink.

Over the past month I’ve been stretching a vanilla installation of Wordpress (now 2.5.1) into a secure Intranet site for distributing news updates as well as an enabling technology for performing electronic tasks across the workplace.

To date it’s been a complete hit with staff placing high and frequent demand on the system from a staff base of 15-20 employees. The majority of staff and client details are sourced from a maintained SugarCRM installation which are regularly referenced by Wordpress.

I’d like to be able to shortly discuss what components were used and steps to creating your own Wordpress-powered intranet system.

I added a feedback page to allow staff members to contact me with suggestions for improvements, feature requests and to file bug reports. Various staff members are now seeking to further integrate critical tasks (quote generation, time management, etc.) into the web-based platform.

One of my gripes in Wordpress plugin development is the function add_action() with the admin_menu property as there’s no easy way to disable a erroneous plugin in the Wordpress Administration without editing that plugin file.

I often find myself digging through my active Wordpress site database when developing custom Wordpress plugins and theme solutions, thanks to the Wordpress development team you can disable plugins by editing the active_plugins record within the wp_options table as follows…

1. Open PHPMyAdmin and connect to your Wordpress site database
2. Open the wp_options table
3. Browse the contents of wp_options until you locate the active_plugins record
4. To deactivate a single plugin decrement the value of a (eg. 4 to 3)
5. Remove the statement from the initial declaration of i to the ; following the declared plugin path
6. Save changes

Example contents of active_plugins record

a:3:{i:0;s:19:”akismet/akismet.php”;i:1;s:41:”popularity-contest/popularity-contest.php”;i:2;s:15:”stats/stats.php”;}

Make your individual image gallery photo’s look better start by adding a border and centering the image.

Wordpress Gallery Images

Wordpress 2.5 includes image galleries for sets of related images. Unfortunately as this is a new feature it also has yet to be refined. Add the following Wordpress code snippet to your theme’s style.css file…

.post p.attachment{ padding:3px;border:1px solid #aaa; }
.post p.attachment img{ margin:0 auto;display:block; }

The first step of two to fixing Popularity Contest is to edit popularity-contest.php and update the contest of a single line so the plugin can support the new Wordpress 2.5.

Open popularity-contest.php (within /wp-content/plugins/popularity-contest/) and scroll to line 59. Replace require('../../wp-blog-header.php’); with require(’../wp-blog-header.php’);

The second step is to manually create the default Popularity Contest tables within your Wordpress site database, this is done with a simple SQL statement through PHPMyAdmin.

CREATE TABLE IF NOT EXISTS `PREFIX_ak_popularity` (
`post_id` int(11) NOT NULL,
`total` int(11) NOT NULL,
`feed_views` int(11) NOT NULL,
`home_views` int(11) NOT NULL,
`archive_views` int(11) NOT NULL,
`category_views` int(11) NOT NULL,
`single_views` int(11) NOT NULL,
`comments` int(11) NOT NULL,
`pingbacks` int(11) NOT NULL,
`trackbacks` int(11) NOT NULL,
`last_modified` datetime,
KEY `post_id` (`post_id`)
) ENGINE=MyISAM;

CREATE TABLE IF NOT EXISTS `PREFIX_ak_popularity_options` (
`option_name` varchar(50) NOT NULL,
`option_value` varchar(50) NOT NULL
) ENGINE=MyISAM;

There are many reasons you may not want your site content to appear in search engine results - be that you are writing a journal, aggregating site content or building a Wordpress-powered development site - and it’s great to see that Wordpress has an easy method of enabling this.

Sample HTML

To hide your Wordpress-powered site from search engines do the following…

1. Using an Internet browser open your site’s Wordpress Administration (eg. http://wordpress.visser.com.au/wp-admin/)
2. Open the Settings > Privacy page
3. Click on I would like to block search engines, but allow normal visitors
4. Press Save Changes

1. Using an Internet browser open your site’s Wordpress Administration (eg. http://wordpress.visser.com.au/wp-admin/)
2. Open the Settings > Permalinks page
3. Click on Custom Structure and fill the field beside with /blog/%postname%/
4. Press Save Changes

1. Download the latest version of Wordpress (Link to Wordpress.org > Download)
2. Extract the contents of the archive to a temporary directory on your computer
3. Using an FTP client open your new site directory (eg. /public_html/visser/)
4. Change the permission levels for your new site directory to 777
5. Create a new file within your new site directory called .htaccess (with no extension)
6. Upload all the files within the /wordpress/ directory from the temporary directory you created to your new site directory
7. Using an Internet browser connect to your new site (eg. http://wordpress.visser.com.au)
8. Fill in your MySQL database and basic site details
9. Click Install Wordpress