Download

Here is the link to download it: less-filters.

Quick instruction:

What you need to do is extract the less-filter.php file to /wp-content/plugins/ folder then activate the plugins. You will then be able to include javascript and other advanced codes into the wpmu post body and widgets. I will give more instruction soon. If not, please remind me.

Property right:

I made this plugin, so please kindly give me some credit if you talk about it or reproduce it. Thanks.

It's now available for download from this page: Post Teaser 2 - An Essential WordPress Plugin.

The Bug

When I click the Update Options button on the Manage Post Teaser page, I got this: "Cannot load post-teaser.php." as shown in the snapshot:

Locating the bug

It's annoying abit, but it's also easy to fix. I notice the following URL after the button is clicked:

http://binh.name/wp/wp-admin/options-general.php?page=post-teaser.php&saved=true

And this is the URL before the button is clicked:

http://binh.name/wp/wp-admin/options-general.php?page=post-teaser/post-teaser.php

The different here is noticable.

• The failed query is: post-teaser.php&saved=true
• The unfailed query is: post-teaser/post-teaser.php

So the correct query for saving the options should be: post-teaser/post-teaser.php&saved=true

Debugging it

Open file "post-teaser/post-teaser.php" in the Plugin Editor (found in the Plugins page in Admin panel).

Search for the string "post-teaser.php&saved=true" in the file , and found the following lines:

• 101: header('Location: ' . get_settings('siteurl') . '/wp-admin/options-general.php?page=post-teaser.php&saved=true');
• 103: header('Location: ' . get_settings('siteurl') . '/wp-admin/options-general.php?page=post-teaser.php&saved=true');

Replace "post-teaser.php&saved=true" with "post-teaser/post-teaser.php&saved=true" and we get:

• 101: header('Location: ' . get_settings('siteurl') . '/wp-admin/options-general.php?page=post-teaser/post-teaser.php&saved=true');
• 103: header('Location: ' . get_settings('siteurl') . '/wp-admin/options-general.php?page=post-teaser/post-teaser.php&saved=true');

Alternatively you could edit the plugin file locally then upload it.

A screenshot where it is located:

Problem Fixed:

Conclusion

The author of this plugin actually wrote it up to version 2.3 of WordPress. Or maybe because he just didn't mean to have the user keep the post-teaser.php file under the post-teaser folder. Either way, I hope when writing the plugin and packaging it the author should consider the end user first.

I, a web developer still didn't realise I had to extract the php file into the plugins folder instead of the whole folder which contains the php file? Most of the plugins come packaged with readme.txt, plugin-name.pot, etc. How does the user know what to do without reading pages of documentation? We should make it simple for the end users. KISS principle is appreciated.

Since this wonderful plugin has a public license I would like to continue supporting it. If you have any problem please feel free to leave a comment on this page. And... sorry I couldn't fix the translation files. So if you are using another language, please bear not having it, or modify the original file as directed by this debugging tutorial.

You can directly download Post Teaser 2 now.

The Bugs

The following are the bugs:

1. Redirect "/feed" URI to "/feed/" using 302 redirect. Ignoring the "/%postname%" rule having no trailing slash.
2. Redirect "/?paged=x" to "/page/x/" (where x is paging number) ingoring the fact ugly default URL is used, causing 404 message when paging.

There is no doubt about these bugs, because I test it by enabling and disabling Permalink Redirect plugin.

Fixing the bugs

Indeed being a programmer gives me some advantages, I could fix the bugs on the fly.

Feed redirect trailing slash

For the /feed to /feed/ redirect problem, I found these lines:

208 if (is_feed()) {
209 $link = trailingslashit($link) . 'feed/';
210 }

Solution:

1. If want no trailing slash, remove the "/" on line 209.
2. If it's WordPress 2.3.1+ simply remove the 3 lines because it's built-in.
3. If you don't want to touch code, include the following in the Options > Permalink Redirect > Paths to be skipped: ".+/feed.*" (without the quotes)

Page redirect ignoring permalink rule

For the /?page=x to /paged/x/ problem, I found this line:

204 if ($paged)
205 $link = trailingslashit($link) . "page/$paged/";

Solution:

1. If WordPress 2.3.1+, remove the lines because it's done better.
2. If you don't want to touch code, include the following in the Options > Permalink Redirect > Paths to be skipped: ".+/?paged=.*" (without the quotes)

Conclusion

Even being buggy, and not recommended by WordPress 2.3.1 which claim having internal redirect, Permalink Redirect still provide some benefit that built-in redirect doesn't offer, such as:

1. Redirect permalink from old structure to new structure
2. Redirect broken, or wrong URL, providing the post id is correct, or enough matching words in post slug.
3. Redirect feed url from "/?feed=rss" to "/feed" or "/feed/" depending your customization.

This plug-in is indeed getting a lot of my attention. I have more liking for it than the bult-in redirect. So, whenever I have time I will investigate deeper into the code and optimize it for better usage.

I started posting my blog entries with WordPress because I felt that's a necessary initiative. However, I strongly need to consider few things.

Website structure

The biggest issue I'm having is the website structure. I'm still wondering whether

1. putting niche topics on separate subdomains, and so using WordPress MU to power my site,
2. or just a single blog like right now with categories as niches.

Technically speaking, WordPress MU is capable of helping me separate the niches pretty well. SEO point of views, the 2nd option is much better, though require some serious initial design.

As for the niches, I have a few expertises and a few hobbies.

My expertises include:

• Software development
• Web development
• Software reviews
• Website reviews
• Reporting

My hobbies include:

• Photography - armature level, mostly common things and discoveries
• Giving opinions - just about anything I my find interested in having a say
• Learning - that's strange, but yes, I like to learn new things, and write about it.

Theme Design

The design is not finalized, yet. The design is a very important factor in retaining readers and building brand image. Hence, I need some serious time off writing and reading to do redesign the theme I chose, which is JustSimple.

URL structure

As you can see, my URL is still in ugly form. Earlier I wrote about the good URL structure choices, but since then haven't got good replies yet. I may need to visit some forum and invite people over for some feedback. Mean while, I still need to keep it like this.

WordPress Plug-ins

I installed and tested many WordPress plugins. So far I am very pleased with those:

• AdSense Manager
• All in One SEO Pack
• Google Analytics
• Google XML Sitemaps
• Inline Posts
• Permalink Redirect
• Post Teaser
• Subscribe To Comments
• wp-cache

The list for all plug-ins are long. Hence, I will keep it for another post summarizing those plug-ins and tell what worth using. The above plug-ins are nice to use, but new ones come out pretty often so they not yet for my permanent usage. For example recently WP Super Cache comes out and claim to take over 10,000 hits without a trouble.

Blog Directories

Yes, I have found out about those blog communities and was so surprise they existed and they really help. Recently as I go along learning, I stumbled on and signed up for the following:

• MyBlogLog.com
• BlogCatalog.com
• BlogFlux.com
• Technorati.com

I'm looking toward signing up on more directories. I will write review about each of them while I go along.

What's Next?

I planned to post about 10 articles a day. But due to those burdens I am delaying the writing. Struggling to start-up something does give much learning experience. I will be sharing my experience as I go along. Stay tuned for my progress on growing this baby "Binh dot Name" which ought to be a giant.

What about your blog? What do you plan with it? How will you achieve your goals?

The Good as I can see

1. This site has a professional look.
2. It is well established and has nearly 3,000 community member on MyBlogLog.
3. It is content rich with a niche about marketing and SEO.

The Bad as I can see

1. The banner is too large, it covers 1/3 of my screen height and push the content down.
2. There are some logos of various search engine across the header. Those I feel are not necessary and they take plentiful of valuable space. Why are you advertising the search engines?
3. Also, instead of a horizontal menu I see the subscribe buttons accross the screen between the header and the content. And the way they animate is distorting the display on my screen.

The Bug as I can see

I can't believe it have some bug with the comments form. After submitting the comment I waited for a while without seeing any change in the page. When I scroll up I found this:

Warning: main(../../../wp-config.php): failed to open stream: No such file or directory in /www/wordpress24/wordpress/wp-content/themes/vantagepress-green-13/vantagepress-green-13/comments-ajax.php on line 2

Fatal error: main(): Failed opening required '../../../wp-config.php' (include_path='.:/usr/share/pear') in /www/wordpress24/wordpress/wp-content/themes/vantagepress-green-13/vantagepress-green-13/comments-ajax.php on line 2

I took a screenshot here:

Comment to the author: The file comments-ajax.php is missing. Somehow it's with the theme vantagepress-green-13? I don't know much details about this theme and the plugin they are using on TheWebMarketingBlog.com, so I can't comment on this.

I kindly suggest the author of this blog should fix it soon, so that I and other readers can have our say.

What's Next?

Since this is a first review, I also would like to notify everyone of my intention: I'm not for sale. Reviewing is one of my hobbies and I do so without any bias. Expect me to write more negative reviews than positve reviews.

As a matter of interest, since I'm so happy to review other people's stuff, I'm also happy other review about mine too. So feel free to slap to the face for something I done wrong, or thumb up my good work, all are welcome.

On Tuesday the 25th of September 2007 I was having this annoying bug. I was testing my website using FireFox (my main browser). I found out I couldn't send my page description to Digg using the following Digg JavaScript variable:

digg_body = document.getElementsByName("description")[0].content

While Internet Explorer, my 2ndary browser worked fine with it.

Debug Process:

The debug process was done using the alert statement to show the object.

alert (document.getElementsByName("description")[0].content);

When the page is loaded in Internet Explorer 7, the alert statement shows a pop up message containing the page description. While in FireFox it return NULL. I couldn't see anything wrong with the syntax. After many hours trying to fix, the problem was actually too simple. In the HTML page I got

<meta name="Description" content="some text...">

Instead of

<meta name="description" content="some text...">

Debug Result:

The only different here is the "D" in the actual code, as apposed to the "d" as what the FireFox JavaScript was looking for.

The cause of the problem is that, the meta Description tag was placed automatically by the ASP.NET code, so I had to modify the JavaScript instead.

Lesson learned:

FireFox is very strict in JavaScript casing. So watch out for the bug similar to this and save you some time wondering what's wrong with the "perfect" code.