Category Archives: Wordpress Stuff

WordPress 2.8 Upgrade problem – blank screen

I upgraded a few of my websites this morning and suffered the WSOD (white screen of death).

As I used the automatic upgrade to WordPress 2.8 both the website and the admin panel went blank.

I looked in my error log files and saw this line:

PHP Fatal error: Call to undefined method WordPress_Module::_weak_escape() in /var/www/vhosts/ …..

It seems the ‘Redirection’ plugin is at fault so do the following to sort out your WordPress 2.8 upgrade.

1. Go in to the remote view of your files.

2. I renamed the Redirection folder to Redirection2

3. Voila. The Redirection plugin will be disabled and your blog should be working again.

4. You can then rename the folder back to its original version and update the Redirection plugin and then activate it again.

Hope this helps some people who are having the same problem on upgrading to WordPress 2.8

How to change default WordPress gravatar avatar

Comments on online blogs and websites are one of the main ways of helping build a community.  WordPress enables commenters’ email addresses to be matched against the database on the Gravatar website to see if the user has uploaded an avatar for their email address.

Generally this works well for tech or computing websites where the readers will be generally more familiar with Gravatar, but for those of you who blog to an audience on non-technology matters it is likely that a vast majority of your users will not be familiar with, or even want to sign up to, the Gravatar site.

So what happens?  WordPress uses the default gravatar icon next to their comments.

default-gravatar

Boring!

But you can easily change the default avatar/gravatar icon for your wordpress blog by following the simple steps below.

1. Using a graphics program create an image 96 x 96 wide – or whatever size square you intend to use on your site. Make sure you choose a background colour that will help it stand out on your comments page – for blogs on white backgrounds you can see the default gravatar uses a grey background.

(I’m no graphic wizard but I quickly knocked up this new logo for the purpose of this tutorial)

jd77logo

2. Locate your avatar code

Usually found in your comments.php file for whichever theme you are using on wordpress you will see a line similar to something like this:

<?php echo get_avatar( $comment, 80 ); ?>

or

<?php echo get_avatar( get_comment_author_email(), '80' )?>

The 80 here represents the default size and can be customised to whatever size you want. All you need to do is add an extra comma after this number and insert the url to your default icon.

eg.

<?php echo get_avatar( $comment, '80' , 'http://www.jd77.co.uk/files/jd77logo.jpg' ); ?>

Save and upload your file again and you have changed your default wordpress avatar.

Sociable – the WordPress plug-in

Nearly all my favourite plug-ins for WordPress are the simplest.

I’d imagine most people heavily involved in the design of other people’s websites get to spend precious little time on their own – unless they’re looking for business of course.  So Joost de Valk’s Sociable plug-in is exactly the kind of thing up my street.

Enabling happy visitors to a web-page to either Digg, Facebook, Twitt or share your webpage across a myriad of socail networking websites is a great way to encourage communication, and for people to nit-pick articles around the webosphere that will be of interest to like minded friends.

The best thing about this plug-in is not only the ease of installation but the quick and easy way you can customise it to each blog/site you are involved in designing.

After installation a page exists in the Settings area of WordPress where you can select which ‘social networks’ you want to include.

Sociable wordpress plug-in

At the last version I roughly counted around 100 different selectable sites or options.

Clearly the ability to customise for each website’s target audience is a big bonus and you can further customise as to whether the plug-in is shown on all pages or posts, category pages, tag pages etc.

Simple but extremely efficient plug-ins like this one is one of the main reasons I so often favour WordPress on client sites.

WordPress 2.7 lands

WordPress 2.7 was launched to the entire blogging community this morning.

Codenamed Coltrane, the new version of WordPress features a altered backend layout which is aimed at reducing the number of clicks and reloads around the interface.

As an example you can now ‘quick-moderate’ comments, such as to correct spelling or grammar rather than  the need to reload the comment page.  WordPress also now has an automatic upgrade feature built in.  Previously a plug-in had been created but for those users who used the previous plug-in to get to WordPress 2.6.5 then it doesn’t appear compatible (yet) with an upgrade to 2.7.  You may have thought the days of a manual FTP upload were over, but for some users – not just yet!

Most sections of WordPress now have a ‘Screen Option’ tab.  If there is something on a screen you hardly ever use then you can simply turn this off and it won’t appear again – an example is if you never bother with an excerpt, or never need to change the slug on a post – you can simply remove these from the posting screen.

Another new feature is ‘Quick Post’ – which is on the main dashboard and allows you to quickly create a new post.  Ideal for short updates.

It looks like a long day of upgrading WordPress blogs for me then – at least, they promise, this will be the last time it needs to be done!