Digital home of Peter Manis » Wordpress

Design modifications, please give input

Peter Manis — Sat, 03 Feb 2007 05:29:31 +0000

I am going to be changing this theme soon, it will look the same for the most part, but I will be making it just wide enough so the shadows just fit on a 1024 screen and I will also be changing from the original table layout to css divs.

I would like to know the things you dislike about the site so I can possibly remove them.

Arabic translation added

Peter Manis — Tue, 23 Jan 2007 03:37:44 +0000

I have added the Iraq flag to my translation bar. I think I am going to have to write a quick plugin for wordpress to handle translation differently. I currently use Translator and enjoy it, but Arabic seems to cause problems. Arabic is read and written right to left and if you view my website in Arabic you will see that it has put my sidebar on the left. I would like my text to be in available in Arabic, but I do not want my site to be altered. I am thinking about using CURL to post to the translator and I will make it per post linked with the Iraq flag or something. Then it will show up in a separate window and it will only be the Arabic text.

My reasoning behind all this is that I am beginning to learn Arabic and I am waiting for some CDs from a friend of mine that are supposed to be exceptional. I will be giving updates on the process as I learn and I am very excited.

Design Change, input needed

Peter Manis — Tue, 17 Oct 2006 16:01:18 +0000

Should I have the line under the post title like I have had

Screen Shot

or use boxes like I have setup right now

Screen Shot

I can’t decide so input would be appreciated

Wordpress Post Popularity

Peter Manis — Sun, 13 Aug 2006 02:02:13 +0000

For anyone wanting a popularity ranking for Wordpress posts that are also using the WP-Postviews plugin this is a solution. It isn’t the best version, but it does what I want. Someone has already created a popularity plugin, but it did not work for me and taking the time to make it work could not be justified.

$int_tpop = 0;

the_pop();

function the_pop() { global $wpdb, $int_tpop; $total_views = $wpdb->get_row(" SELECT SUM(meta_value) as tviews FROM wp_postmeta WHERE meta_key = 'views'"); $int_tpop = $total_views->tviews; }

function return_pop ($views = 0, $total = 0) { $formatted = number_format((($views/$total)*100), 1, '.', ''); $out = $formatted; echo ' · '.$out.'% Popularity'; }

Enter this where you would like the popularity to be displayed.
return_pop(trim(the_views('',FALSE)),$int_tpop) ?>

I placed the above code into my header template file and placed the last line of code in my post display file. If you have any problems please let me know.

Email problems with Wordpress Plugins

Peter Manis — Wed, 26 Jul 2006 01:53:00 +0000

Moving everything to Wordpress has been different I guess you would say. I have had to edit many plugins to get this thing to work correctly and recently I had to edit even more to get some simple functionality. I am in no way knocking Wordpress, it is just that most plugins are originally developed for the developer and eventually get released to the public. This makes the occurance of bugs a little more common. There are a couple scripts which shall remain nameless that caused problems with my current setup. The reason was that IIS6 seems to have trouble with email addresses that have < and > in them.

Example Header

From: Peter Manis

So you have to remove the name and the < and > to get it to work. However this seems strange to me because I remember formatting my email in asp that way. It has been so long since I wrote any asp that it could just be the way asp works that makes that format work. I did not test whether it was IIS WWW or IIS SMTP that caused this problem. When I have the opportunity to test this I will post an update.

So to those of you who have seen an error in your PHP logs that said

“SMTP server response: 501 5.5.4 Invalid Address in….”

then by removing the above from the scripts it will fix the problem. My recommendation is to make a copy of the line and make it a comment until I have an opportunity to find out whether it was W3 on IIS or SMTP.

Printing Pages with wp2pdf

Peter Manis — Fri, 07 Jul 2006 13:14:35 +0000

When I installed wp2pdf I was only able to print posts, but since I am offering tutorials and articles on the site I wanted to make sure you guys could have a offline copy available. These are the changes I had to make to get it to work properly.

wp2pdf v0.4.2

Start by opening wp2pdf.php and add

$wp2pdf_bln = TRUE;

to line 26

Change directories to wp-includes and open classes.php

Open that file and add

global $wp2pdf_bln;

to line 594

Replace line

} elseif ($this->is_single) {

on line 599 with

} elseif (($this->is_single) && !$wp2pdf_bln) {

The last part is to go to line 601 and add

} elseif ($wp2pdf_bln == TRUE) {
$where .= ' AND (post_status = "static")';

What we have done is set a variable stating that we want to print pages and when it starts to build the SQL query it will check if it is a static page and that our variable is not TRUE. If it is true it will add

post_status = "static"

to our SQL query. It works and it hasnt screwed anything up.