Tag: WordPress

Posted on

Free BlackBerry applications I use daily

I’ve had my BlackBerry for about a year now and find myself using the same few applications every day. I’m going to quickly run through and explain why each one is used.

BlackBerry App WorldBlackBerry App World is the source for most of the apps that I download, finding myself scanning through looking for new applications that might prove useful.

There is a lot more trust in downloading from here, rather than browsing the internet and downloading from less trusted locations. It allows you to manage any of the paid for or free apps you have downloaded. Continue reading “Free BlackBerry applications I use daily”

Posted on

WP – Enable read more links for pages

When listing pages using the_loop(), the latest version of WordPress (2.8.4) does not allow for a “Read more…” link to be appended to a list of pages using the_content() along with the <!–more–> quicktag.

Although it wasn’t immediately obvious to me, read more links can be enabled by over-riding the global $more variable and setting it to false, before looping through the result set, for example: Continue reading “WP – Enable read more links for pages”

Posted on

WP – Add class name to first paragraph in blog post

When re-designing my blog I wanted to display the first paragraph of each blog post in bold text. A CSS3 selector could have been used, but wouldn’t work in older browsers such as IE6.

Instead I decided to write a very simple function to add a class name to the first paragraph by filtering the content, then setting the styles accordingly in my theme CSS file. Continue reading “WP – Add class name to first paragraph in blog post”

Posted on

Upgrading to WordPress 2.5.1

After receiving notification of the latest WordPress release I wandered over to the WordPress Blog to see what was included in the latest version (2.5.1).

Aside from what has been described as a “very important security fix” there were over 70 additional bug fixes, most of which I hadn’t come across myself although had heard of some troubles encountered by others.

Unlike my previous upgrade this time I just switched the subversion repository and ran the web based update script, shaving off an additional few minutes and therefore upgrading my install in under two minutes from start to finish!

svn switch http://svn.automattic.com/wordpress/tags/2.5.1/

Luckily everything seems to be working fine and I have faith in the WordPress releases, but if you want to be more cautious you should probably backup your database first.

As Paul’s response to my previous upgrade post mentions, any web scripts can be rolled back using svn.

It is highly recommended that you carry out the upgrade as it is said that the vulnerability to 2.5 will be made public shortly.

There is also to introduction of additional security in the form of secret keys, introducing randomness into the cryptographic functions used for cookies.

Simply obtain a secret key and paste the code into your wp-config.php file along with the other defined variables.

Posted on

Upgrading WordPress using SubVersion

I have just upgraded my WordPress install to the lastest release, luckily with SubVersion the whole process can be achieved with minimum time and effort.

Paul went through the upgrade steps on his blog, but thought I would go through them here as I went along.

Unfortunately when I initially installed WordPress I committed it directly to the root directory unlike the more popular location of the subdirectory /blog, but not to worry.

Here are the steps I followed to complete the update:

# Backup the current directory...
cp -Rp http httpBACKUP
# Create a new location for the update...
mkdir httpNEW
# Checkout the latest release from the repository...
svn co http://svn.automattic.com/wordpress/tags/2.5/ httpNEW/
# Copy across any custom changes/themes and config file...
cp -Rp http/wp-con* httpNEW/
# Copy over the .htaccess file..
cp -Rp http/.htaccess httpNEW/
# Delete the old directory...
rm -rf http
# Rename/move the update to the original location...
mv httpNEW/ http
# Switch the SubVersion Repository...
svn switch http://svn.automattic.com/wordpress/tags/2.5/
# Finally, run the browser based update script...
http://yourdomain/wp-admin/upgrade.php

And that’s all there is to it really, now every time I need to update WordPress I can simply copy and paste the above commands.