A more usable WordPress Upload

As a user, the Word­Press admin­is­tra­tion panel Upload facil­ity always frus­trated me. It was use­ful, and quicker to use than FTP in most cases, but the paths it gen­er­ated for images auto­mat­i­cally always needed to be edited before use.

This was, pri­mar­ily, my own fault — but I’d set things up that way based on the advice of the Word­Press admin­is­tra­tion panel. On the Mis­cel­la­neous Options page (/wp-admin/options-misc.php in a typ­i­cal setup), it pro­poses two “rec­om­mended” paths for both the Des­ti­na­tion direc­tory and the URI of this direc­tory, typ­i­cally your Word­Press installation’s wp-content folder and its cor­re­spond­ing absolute URI.

This is sim­ply manip­u­lated into a new string when files are uploaded to gen­er­ate a tag you can copy and paste into a post — a real­i­sa­tion that should have hit me long ago.

On this site, for exam­ple, the rec­om­mended URI string is “http://www.joahua.com/blog/wp-content” — note the lack of trail­ing slash and absolute nature of the path. I only just realised that this was the basis of the string, and so got rid of my trail­ing slash (I insist on hav­ing such things!) and trimmed off the “http://www.joahua.com” — this means the Upload-generated tag now gives a rel­a­tive URI. No more chop­ping and chang­ing the gen­er­ated tags for me!

# by Josh on June 2nd, 2005 Tags: , , ,
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DashLite 1.1 — The “I-don’t-read-long-posts” edition

I announced this at the bot­tom of the post A response to Dash­Lite crit­i­cism, but fig­ured not many peo­ple would actu­ally read that far… so I’m announc­ing it separately.

Essen­tially, ver­sion 1.1 re-introduces one only very spe­cific feed, which pulls the “Releases” cat­e­gory from the Word­Press devel­op­ment blog. This cat­e­gory is only used for post­ing updates to soft­ware — there is no announce­ment of com­mu­nity events, mile­stones, etc. To view exactly what’s being syn­di­cated, visit the Releases cat­e­gory page.

Basi­cally, this syn­di­cates new release infor­ma­tion and dis­plays it in the “Do Stuff” side­bar, as shown in the screenshot.

Get it

PHP source file, rich for­mat­ting (HTML)
Plain text ver­sion of the same, save this as-is

To install the update, sim­ply over­write the wp-admin/index.php file in your Word­Press instal­la­tion — it is advis­able you backup your old index.php file first, in case prob­lems arise (none noted in the changes made, but it’s pos­si­ble you’ll dis­cover some­thing, as always).

# by Josh on April 8th, 2005 Tags: , ,
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A response to DashLite criticism

Navid Azimi posted the fol­low­ing in a com­ment on the ini­tial Dash­lite announce­ment post:

This seems like a good imple­men­ta­tion and def­i­nitely has it’s uses but for most admin­is­tra­tors this could actu­ally be more detri­men­tal in the long run than ini­tially expected. The pri­mary idea behind the Dash­board was to allow all Word­Press Admin­is­tra­tors to stay informed regard­ing devel­op­ments in the community.

Many WP users (or any com­mu­nity for that mat­ter) install and sit. Often times being obliv­i­ous to new ver­sions and (most impor­tantly) secu­rity updates. This sort of unpatched soft­ware can be detri­men­tal not only to your web­host, and your web­site, but also to the entire web com­mu­nity itself.

For exam­ple, when phpBB was exploited with a major secu­rity flaw — there was a major defi­ciency in con­tact­ing all admin­is­tra­tors regard­ing the secu­rity hole. The prob­lem is twofold. The more you pro­mote the secu­rity hole, the eas­ier it becomes for mali­cious users to exploit unpatched instal­la­tions. You see where I am going here.

Of course — right now — in the prime heat of your blog you feel that you are check­ing wordpress.org every­day and you’re prob­a­bly skim­ming the forums daily too. There is no way you’ll miss any updates. But as time goes on and you have tweaked, retweaked and redesigned your web­site five times you’ll real­ize that its time for your blog to push bet­ter con­tent and not just look pret­tier. And its then when you sim­ply stop keep­ing up with every nightly or read­ing the forums daily.

Then again, I could be com­pletely wrong.

I kind of felt that this required a response more pub­licly than the con­tin­u­a­tion of the com­ment thread would per­mit, hence this post­ing. Read the rest of this entry »

# by Josh on April 8th, 2005 Tags: , , , , , , , , , , ,
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Content portage

I’m finally get­ting around to mov­ing posts and mis­cel­la­neous other junk across from my old weblog, pow­ered by my own junky PHP thing, to this cur­rent Word­Press instal­la­tion. There are two rea­sons for this — firstly, I’d been mean­ing to do it for ages, but hadn’t been both­ered to, and sec­ondly, I’m soon upgrad­ing this to Word­Press 1.5 (so I can use my own much talked about Dash­Lite, amongst other things! ;) Yeah, I’m enjoy­ing my 5 min­utes of fame…), which means this is as good a time as any to do some­thing about it.

Addi­tion­ally, there’s just been a server over­haul, which puts every­one in the mood to play and gen­er­ally break things as a side result of the cre­ative process — oh, yeah, and I’m kinda sorta on hol­i­days, between exams (well, you know, study­ing hard — but I need some­thing to keep me sane!). Kudos to Dale for his help with port­ing the arti­cles… work­ing on the com­ments still, but it’ll get there (prob­a­bly, assum­ing I don’t just give up in disgust!).

Some­thing of a more cre­ative nature to come, maybe, once the move to 1.5 hap­pens… it makes that sort of thing easier.

# by Josh on March 21st, 2005 Tags:
| 1 Comment »

Adding allowed HTML tags for WP comments

I couldn’t find any easy answer to this ques­tion myself when I setup cus­tom tags for com­ment­ing on this site a while back, and Indranil is try­ing to fig­ure it out as well, so I fig­ured I’d share a brief “how to” on the sub­ject. Read the rest of this entry »

# by Josh on October 30th, 2004 Tags: , ,
| 10 Comments »