Tag: wordpress

2 Great WordPress Plugins

I haven’t played with WP plugins for a long time because I had been very comfortable with my plugin suite :) Yesterday I did a little search to see if there are new exciting plugins out which suit my taste, and found 2!

  • GoldenGate: if you uses PicasaWeb and often inserts photos from there to WP posts, like me, you must know how painful it is to get the PicasaWeb photo URL out. This plugin makes it a breeze~ Actually I found it several months ago but at that time I failed to get it worked because of some PHP memory limit problem. This time it works somehow :) Give it a try if you uses PicasaWeb.
  • Yet Another Related Posts Plugin: I began to look for a good “related posts” plugin from the first day I started this blog. Though there are quite a few choices, no one really rocks. Some “powerful” plugins try to analyze post content and calculate the similarity, but they won’t work for Chinese. So I finally used a “full manual” plugin named “Terong Related Links“. Speaking frankly that plugin isn’t interesting at all and the author doesn’t seem to maintain it any more. This time with one or two google searching I found this post, which compared a few related posts plugins and selected YARPP out. Just by looking at the options I know this is exactly the plugin I want. YARPP leverages the category and tag information, which are what bloggers actually use to organize posts!

Still tweaking them, so much fun to play with WP~

Live Space Mover V1.7

This is another maintainence release because of the recent updates of live space. However the code changes are a little bit more than I expected, for the weird time format. Fortunately they stopped to use Ajax for paging comments, so I can get rid of some really magical/complicated/confusing lines.

In this version (and versions in the future, probably), there are some limitations for comments, including:

  1. can’t get the accurate time of comments, sometimes even incorrect;
  2. can’t get the email and url of comment authors.

These are both due to the ridiculous design of Live Space. If you have any idea about how to solve these 2 problems, please let me know.

Blank Page on Publishing a Post Under WordPress

This problem happend on a friend’s WordPress blog, version 2.2.x. In detail, every time one tries to publish a new post, the “post.php” returns a blank page with status code 200 (success). And there are totally no error logs (http and php) about this. This weird problem was not resolved even after I updated the whole WordPress to the latest version (2.5.1).

After a long time digging, this thread on WP support form pointed out the exact reason. My friend’s WordPress blog was hacked by a security vulnerability of previous WordPress versions. When I checked the database with this sql

select * from wp_options where option_name = ‘active_plugin’

There is a record with option_value as “a:1:{s:5:./././././././././././././././././././././tmp/***”, *** is a file name.

I deleted this record and the post function went back well again.

So, it’s beneficial to keep up-to-date, for security reasons.