2005_04_21: Initial post

I’ve created this page to organize all of my WordPress customizations including themes and plugins.

h3. Backing Up WordPress — phpMyAdmin

Using “phpMyAdmin”:14 (a MySQL database admin utility), it’s very easy to back up WordPress. 1and1 has a “page”:13 detailing how to install phpMyAdmin on your site. It was fairly painless — the process took me just a few minutes.

WordPress’ documentation on using phpMyAdmin to “backup”:12 your blog is also really straight forward. After I had phpMyAdmin running, it literally took me about a minute to backup my site. Nice!

h3. Theme

My current theme, which I’m calling _ZoingerHead_, is based on “_Letterhead_”:1. You can also try out lots of themes by using Alex King’s theme browser “tool”:2. A link to my current theme is located below.

“@2005_04_21_ZoingerHead.zip@”:3

h3. Plugins

“TextControl”:4
Take complete control of text formatting options on your blog: Formatting and encoding per post, globally on posts, and globally on comments.

Text Control will allow you to choose from a variety of formatting syntaxes and encoding options. You can choose between Markdown, Textile 1, Textile 2, nl2br, WPautop, and “No Formatting” for formatting along with the choice of SmartyPants, WPTexturize or “No Encoding” for character encodings.

“WordPress Mobile Edition”:5
Detects various mobile browsers and redirects them to a special mobile edition of your blog. Try it out for Zoinger “here”:6. I was encountering a bug with the plugin when I initially installed it. It worked fine except it was bouncing mobile browsers up one level in the file structure, so I was getting a @file not found@ error.

That is, it was going to @zoinger.com/wp-mobile.php@ instead of @zoinger.com/words/wp-mobile.php@). I hacked this line in the @wp-mobile.plugin.php@ file to fix the bug (but it still breaks if you try to load a static page).

$URL = $siteurl.'wp-mobile.php?';

changed to

@$URL = $siteurl.'../words/wp-mobile.php?';@

“AuthImage”:8
AuthImage is a Captcha plugin/mod for WordPress’ posting infrastructure used to help prevent comment spam. Captchas are images that challenge a user to decode letters and/or numbers encoded within the image. They are commonly used on the web to try and tell machines from humans — for example, combating comment spam and machine registration. Added to the Zoinger comment template, here’s a screenshot to show ya what it’s all about.

!/img/AuthImage_WordPress_Captcha_plugin.png!

Adding the Captcha for WordPress was easy. Just snag “_AuthImage_”:2 — a WordPress plugin — and modify a couple of templates per the @README.TXT@ file. Simple.

Oh, the original @README.TXT@ install instructions were… _terrible_. I updated a version of them specific to WordPress v1.5 which you can find “here”:9.

h2. Hacks

“Dashboard Fix”:7
Fixes the dashboard by removing extraneous information leaving only the useful links (a list of recent posts, draft posts, etc.)

h2. Ping Services

Default: http://rpc.pingomatic.com/
I Added: http://rpc.technorati.com/rpc/ping

h2. Search Engines

“Technorati”:11
Added Zoinger feed on 2005-04-25

“Pubsub”:10
Added Zoinger feed on 2005-04-27

[14(phpMyAdmin home page)]http://www.phpmyadmin.net/home_page/

[13(Installing phpMyAdmin on a 1and1 account)]http://faq.1and1.com/scripting_languages_supported/mysql_database/5.html

[12(WordPress' backup documentation)]http://codex.wordpress.org/Backing_up_your_database

[11(Technorati's pinging service)]http://www.technorati.com/developers/ping.html

[10(Pubsub add your feed page)]http://www.pubsub.com/add_feed.php

[9(Link to updated README file for AuthImage Install)]/files/README_AuthImage_Install_by_Zoinger-2005-04-26.txt

[8(AuthImage WordPress plugin homepage)]http://www.gudlyf.com/index.php?p=376

[7(Dashboard hack page)]http://blog.taragana.com/index.php/archive/wordpress-15-hack-how-to-trim-the-fat-resource-hogging-dashboard-in-admin/

[1(Alex Kings excellent WordPress theme page)]http://www.alexking.org/index.php?content=software/wordpress/themes.php

[2(Alex Kings theme browser)]http://www.alexking.org/software/wordpress/theme_browser.php

[3(ZoingerHead theme as of 2005_04_21)]/files/2005_04_21_Zoingerhead.zip

[4(TextControl WordPress post formatting plugin)]http://dev.wp-plugins.org/wiki/TextControl

[5(WordPress mobile plugin)]http://www.alexking.org/blog/2005/01/12/wordpress-mobile-edition-17/

[6(Mobile version of Zoinger blog)]http://www.zoinger.com/words/wp-mobile.php