2005_04_21: Initial post

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

Backing Up WordPress — phpMyAdmin

Using phpMyAdmin (a MySQL database admin utility), it’s very easy to back up WordPress. 1and1 has a page 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 your blog is also really straight forward. After I had phpMyAdmin running, it literally took me about a minute to backup my site. Nice!

Theme

My current theme, which I’m calling ZoingerHead, is based on Letterhead. You can also try out lots of themes by using Alex King’s theme browser tool. A link to my current theme is located below.

2005_04_21_ZoingerHead.zip

Plugins

TextControl
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
Detects various mobile browsers and redirects them to a special mobile edition of your blog. Try it out for Zoinger here. 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
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.

Adding the Captcha for WordPress was easy. Just snag AuthImage — 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.

Hacks

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

Ping Services

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

Search Engines

Technorati
Added Zoinger feed on 2005-04-25

Pubsub
Added Zoinger feed on 2005-04-27