Code Fix » Wordpress

Catching static from your archives page?

Jordan — Sat, 03 Mar 2007 01:52:24 +0000

I’m using the Tarski theme, and loving it. It does a lot of things really well, which makes the one or two awkward bits stand out that much more. If you have Tarski create “Archives” and “Tags” pages, make sure they are viewable by anonymous users. When I logged out and viewed those pages, 404 errors (Page not found) were shown.

Apparently, WordPress 2.1+ doesn’t display pages with any post_status other than ‘publish’ to anonymous users. The pages Tarski creates are created with the post_status ’static’. This needs to be changed from ’static’ to ‘publish’ before anonymous users can see your Archives and Tags pages. However, those pages won’t even appear in the Manage section of the administrative interface.

To change the post_status on those pages, you have to change the database directly, using phpMyAdmin or some other database editing tool. Open the wp_posts table, and find the entries that Tarski created. The easy way to do this is to search for all the entries whose post_status is “static”. Those are the ones you want to fix. Simply edit those entries and change post_status to “publish”.

Now those pages will appear in the Manage interface, and anonymous users will be able to see them.

I’m starting to see a theme here

Jordan — Wed, 28 Feb 2007 00:20:44 +0000

I hit this one after installing the Simpla theme, but you could hit this with any theme.

Symptoms (after switching to a new Wordpress theme):

The screenshot for the theme doesnt show up in the theme selector
The pages on the blog are unstyled
Theme images don’t load correctly
Trying to manually open the URL’s for the stylesheets, images, etc, gives you a 404 page

The problem was that permissions were not set correctly on the unzipped theme folder. I had to make sure there was read and execute access granted on the folder and all the theme files (chmod 755 for you command-line junkies). You could probably do this through your FTP client, if it’s a decent one (I recommend Smart FTP).

Cache me if you can

Jordan — Tue, 27 Feb 2007 22:44:39 +0000

It’s ironic that the second post on this blog is about fixing the software the blog is running on. Oh well, such is software. When I first set up this site, I wanted to make it as performance-friendly as possible, so I set up the Wordpress WP-Cache plugin. Everything seemed to work fine. However, I wasn’t quite finished messing with some other plugins, and I ran into issues with cached versions of pages not reflecting tweaks I was making in some of the core files.

Not a problem, says I…

I’ll just deactivate the WP-Cache plugin until I’m finished developing. As it turns out, that doesn’t work. Once you activate (on the plugins page) and enable (on the WP-Cache settings page) the WP-Cache plugin, to turn it off, you have to disable it (on the WP-Cache settings page). Deactivating the plugin does not disable caching.