Oh Noooooo…..

My favorite function in WordPress seems to be missing from the admin pages of Word Press 2.5 rc1 (and from 2.5 after it’s been released) Might be because they claim to have removed javascript from the admin- as well as the AJAX functionality. It’s due to return in 2.6 (but, my students can’t wait!).

So, what to do? If you are upgrading- your old Word Press press it bookmark will still work. If you are doing a new install, you’ll have to make a book mark with the following as the url:

javascript:if(navigator.userAgent.indexOf('Safari') >= 0){Q=getSelection();}else{Q=document.selection?document.selection.createRange().text:document.getSelection();}location.href='http://www.YOURDOMAIN.tld/wp-admin/post-new.php?text='+encodeURIComponent(Q)+'&popupurl='+encodeURIComponent(location.href)+'&popuptitle='+encodeURIComponent(document.title);

Make sure you copy the whole thing- and replace YOURDOMAIN.tld (top level domain) with your own domain name. ie. websitetology.com for this site.

Step by step on how to make a Pressit bookmark for WordPress 2.5

1) use Firefox.

2) Bookmark any page (I prefer to save this in the “Bookmark Toolbar Folder” so it’s easily available

3) Go to “Organize Bookmarks” under “Bookmarks” and find the bookmark you just made

4) Right click on the bookmark and choose “Properties”

5) Change the name to “Press-it name of your site”

6) Copy the above code to the location field

7) Make sure you have your URL instead of “www.YOURDOMAIN.tld” ie www.websitetology.com for this site

Save the bookmark- and now- you are free to use the wonderful pressit- like this tutorial outlines.

Hope this helps- and that the code doesn’t get mangled by WordPress. works for you.

All of a sudden, you see your post and the previous posts all are in a different font, or your sidebar doesn’t appear in the right place. Did you just break WordPress? Probably not.

What you most likely did was put code in your post that WordPress either doesn’t recognize or doesn’t like.  That’s because WordPress likes you to do the writing, and leave the formatting up to it. Here is some info on Validation from the WordPress Codex:

Validating a Website « WordPress Codex
Validation errors aren’t limited to your template files. They can also happen inside of a post. When you are writing a post and using HTML, WordPress might not recognize the HTML and convert it to a character entity, or you may have entered it wrong. If you have a page with a lot of HTML coding, validate it to make sure you have it all correct. And occasionally check random posts to make sure everything is still okay from time to time as part of your general housekeeping.

So, if you are trying to write about php code- WordPress will strip it out- thinking you are trying to run code where you shouldn’t. People who write about code, use a plugin to make code quotable.

The main problem is copying and pasting either from other sites, or from Microsoft Word. These pastes can contain all kinds of tags and formating that WordPress has no use for, or doesn’t understand, or conflicts with the Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) built into your theme.

If you look to the right of your ? (help) icon in the toolbar- you will see the “Advanced Toolbar” button that will give you access to a whole bunch of formatting (and unformatting options). It’s here where you can underline text, add colors, use different heading tags- or remove formatting or clean up messy code.

So, if you see something looking wonky on your wordpress site, try the eraser tool- and remove formatting, before the panic, and try reformatting using only the tools that WordPress offers. If you are still finding errors- look in code view- and see if there are more than a few things that say MsoNormal, or Table or div or span in your code. Most of those are indicative of formatting problems.

Today we got the notification that netenberg had released the Fantastico updates for WordPress 2.3.1 after having 2.2.2 for the longest time. We’ve recently started using Fantastico to set up our initial installs of WordPress, but had done upgrades manually. Today, we tried the auto update feature for the first time- and have this warning: MAKE SURE TO DEACTIVATE ALL PLUGINS BEFORE RUNNING UPDATE. We’re not totally sure this guarantees an un-borked update, but, we’re pretty sure it helped after we reinstalled.

Fantastico is a script that runs from Cpanel on our server to help you automagically install a whole bunch of different Open Source software. It’s really handy, but, be prepared to be at least 30 days behind on most update packages (37 in this case).

Our main reason to switch to 2.3.1 was to familiarize ourselves with the new version of WordPress before the next seminar, but, I’ll give you the immediate highlights:

• ST Visualize Advanced Features plugin  is no longer required- giving everyone access to different levels of CSS tags, the paste from Word function, clean up mess code function, type color, etc.  It’s been a plugin we couldn’t live without- esp. for the glyph finder- so it’s easy to find the ©®™½€ etc.
• The plugin list now tells you if there is a newer version! Long overdue.
• The tag feature helps you organize your posts and categories with yet another tool.

I’m sure we’ll discover other great features as we explore- but, as a warning to all- always disable plugins before updating.