And so, WPLover is born.

Having a goal of providing “bite-sized WordPress news, and then some”, I hope I could grow that blog as well as this one. Managing multiple blogs is hard, so I cheated a bit by keeping in mind that WPLover will mostly contain snippet of news update instead of fully-blown article every time.

From now on, this blog will focus more on web design and code, so stay tuned for more articles on that area.

Oh, and thank you very much for reading. No, honestly.

For the past few months, we’ve been working with our friends at Happy Cog — Jeffrey Zeldman, Jason Santa Maria, and Liz Danzico — to redesign WordPress from the ground-up.

Yes, yes, yes. Music to my ears. Here’s my old post regarding Happy Cog’s involvement in redesigning WordPress’ backend.

You might also notice there are some new colors, the dashboard feels much fresher and lighter. If you’re jonesing for the old look under your user options you can now select the “classic” colors and get those old blues back. (It’s also pluggable so people can easily add or share their own color schemes.)

So, you can change the admin’s color schemes by creating plugins. Interesting. Here’s Ozh explaining how to do that in details. Now, I’m just itching to go to Colour Lovers and grab a few lovely schemes for this.

The software is basically done and stable, and could be released today

So, this is it. What I’m waiting the most from 2.5 is the redesigned admin, and if you’re like me, it’s probably quite safe to believe that the new design is there and ready to test. Now, let’s play!

I mean, the search term is also used on the correct page’s URL, so what’s the big deal here? Note that searching it via Google shows the correct page as the first result.

I frequently had some problems searching for various other things too. I love Codex, but sadly I must say the search functionality could use some help. What do you guys think?

At first I’m looking at the Template Tag the_ID(). Unfortunately, this function automatically prints out the Post’s ID instead of returning the ID when called. In other words, the following is not possible:

// Check whether the Post's ID is 5.
// This does not work.
if(the_ID()==5) do something...

…because the_ID() does not return 5. It turns out, the working method is by using $post->ID:

// Check whether the Post's ID is 5.
// This works.
if($post->ID == 5 ) do something...

Also, in my experience, the $post variable is still available after The Loop is done, very useful in my quest of displaying/hiding sidebar depending on the Post’s ID:

// This works.
<div id="content">

  // The Loop
  <?php if (have_posts()) : ?>
    <?php while (have_posts()) : the_post(); ?>
       // ...the usual content displaying stuff...
    <?php endwhile; ?>
  <?php endif; ?>
</div>

<?php
  // Outside The Loop!
  if($post->ID != 21) get_sidebar(); ?>

I suppose this works well on template files that only display 1 content (e.g: single.php, page.php). Expect crazy things to happen when calling $post outside The Loop inside template files that actually loops more than once (index.php, category.php, etc).

Say the Magic Word

This is how you would display the (current) query count in your theme:

<?php echo get_num_queries(); ?>

This piece of code is usually found inside footer.php, right at the very end of the code to display the total queries needed to display that single page. The secret is that you can place it just about anywhere inside your theme, and it will obediently display the total of query so far.

Also, you can have more than one of these in one go, so you could place one before and one after a certain part of a theme:

<?php echo get_num_queries(); ?>

The Loop here...

<?php echo get_num_queries(); ?>

…and you will have the query count before the loop and after it. Subtract the number and there you go, you have the total of queries invoked for The Loop.

However, today 2.3.3 is out and the announcement does not mention anything about changed files. Darn.

Trac Browsing to the Rescue

So, I decided to look around WordPress’s Trac. Now, I don’t know much about Trac, so I’ll let Wikipedia explain:

Trac is an open source, web-based project management and bug-tracking tool[...] (Source)

Okay. So, in essence, this is the place where you go to find the WordPress source code in various versions, with notes on modifications and whatnot, from the earliest to the most updated. So it’s the right place to go.

And the nice thing is that it allows you to compare the difference between versions. Exactly what we needed.

First, go to the tags directory of the source. There you can see a list of every WordPress version, from 1.5 to 2.3.3 and everything in between. Choose the most updated version. In our case, 2.3.3.

If you do it right, this page will be opened. At the bottom of the page there’s the View Changes… button. Exactly what we need. Click it.

You will see a form like below:

Except that in your case the input field might still be empty. Well, punch in the numbers the way I did: in the From field it’s “tags/x.x.x“, x.x.x is for the previous version, while in the To field it’s “tags/y.y.y” for the current version. Click View Changes. You don’t have to worry about the numbers on the two Revision input boxes.

And now you’ll see the list of files changed from previous version:

Those are the one you should upload and upgrade. Refer to the old tutorial for more detailed steps.

Now, if you’d excuse me, I have some upgrading to do.

• The front page now shows a stream of recent updates instead of one update per user
• Pages now have their own template and look much better
• Avatars are only shown once for sequential posts by the same author (front page and tag pages)
• Post titles are no longer empty, they are generated based on the beginning of each post
• Works out of the box for WordPress.org 2.3.2

And so, I have updated the Twitter-like 140 chars limit mod as well.

Download Prologue 140 Characters Limit Mod here.

<ul>
<?php
  // display recent posts excluding those from certain categories.
  query_posts("showposts=10&cat=-4,-5,-6,-7,-8,-9"); // grab 10 posts, negative to exclude cat IDs

  while (have_posts()) :
    the_post();
?>
  <li><a href="<?php the_permalink() ?>"><?php the_title(); ?></a></li>
  <?php endwhile; ?>
</ul>

The key here is to tweak query_post’s parameter to your liking. “showpost” means how many post you want to display, while “include” can be used both to include or exclude a category. Note that here you used a category ID. Normal number means you include that category, while adding a negative (”-”) symbol before the number means that you exclude that category. You use comma (”,”) to separate multiple IDs.

So, my query_post above can be translated to “get a list of ten most recent posts, excluding those that belongs to category ID 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9″.

Update: Okay, I was being a total fool for thinking that Twitter’s limit is 128 instead of 140. Thanks to Jeffro2pt0 for reminding me, and I have reuploaded the theme to reflect the changes. End of update.

Prologue is the new, wonderful theme by Automattic. What’s great about this theme is that it’s not your average blog-looking theme. Here’s what they have to say:

So last week Joseph Scott and Matt Thomas decided to tackle this problem and within a few days they had a new theme for us: Prologue. Imagine it like a group Twitter.

Yes, it is a Twitter-like theme, complete with textarea at the top of the page for logged-in authors to submit their post immediately, Twitter-style. They have set up a demo as well.

All in all, it’s a great, well-executed idea. And as a tribute to its greatness, I’d love to contribute my own addition: make it so that you can only post 140 chars per post. Because there’s something Zen-like about it. Because constraints drive innovation and force focus. Because you’re addicted to Twitter enough that writing longer than 140 characters grinds your brain to a halt.

Whatever the reason, this might just be the mod for you.

Terri Ann to the Rescue

Being the lazy guy that I am, the first thing I do is of course look around the net for scripts to do the functionality. And Terri Ann just so happen to create the very functionality a week ago. There are actually quite a lot of such scripts, but I liked Terry’s for its ease of use and simplicity. Plus, it uses Prototype JS, which is already included in everyone’s installation of WordPress. Nice!

And after fooling around for a bit, I finally made it!

Here you go, download Prologue Theme Mod, now with 140 chars limit!

Final Note

I didn’t create the Prologue Theme, Joseph Scott and Matt Thomas from Automattic did. I didn’t create the character-limiting JS functionality as well, it was made by Terri Ann. All credits should go to them. I didn’t do much but combine the two things together.

Also, since the limiter is done by Javascript, you will be able to bypass the chars limit if you turn it off. But hey, it’s your own blog, so I don’t think that would be too big of a problem

Thanks, and hope you like it! (Please don’t bother them if there’s bug with the mod, let me know instead.)

Miscellanea

Here’s a great topic regarding the design of limited characters input.

Up until now, I didn’t have any idea how comments-popup.php works. Oh, it’s not like I haven’t done any research. The Codex’s Theme Development page, for instance, explains this file as:

The popup comments template. If not present, comments-popup.php from the “default” Theme is used.

And it doesn’t link to any specific page explaining more about it. On another page, Using Themes, the information is even more sparse:

Popup Comments Template = comments-popup.php

For quite a long time, my understanding is that this file is used if, somewhere within WordPress, the option to display comments as a popup is activated. When that magic switch is on, people who click the comment link will get a popup window with the comment area inside it. The question is, where on earth do I find that option?

Oh, don’t ask me how many hours I’ve spent looking around for it. I’m even tempted to enter the famous Konami Code inside the WP admin area just to see if a secret page will open and show me the magic “Display Comment as Popup” option—it’s really that hard to find!

And no wonder. I just got the revelation today, and it turns out there’s never been such option within the admin area. Nope. I was digging in the wrong place.

The option to use comments-popup.php, ladies and gentlemen, depends solely on the presence of a single PHP line inside a theme’s header file. Go open the header.php of the Classic theme (available in any default install of WordPress), line 21 you will see:

<?php //comments_popup_script(); // off by default ?>

Yes! That’s the magic switch. The Holy Grail of Popup Commenting. I uncommented that and, bam, the very first WordPress comment popup appared before my very eyes. Try it.

By searching for that PHP function into the Codex, I found this small but complete explanation about popup comments, which I wished I’ve found before.

Anyways, it’s also interesting to note that many, many themes out there have comments-popup.php inside them but no comments_popup_script() function, making it practically useless. It’s not even available within Kubrick, WordPress’s current default theme.

I’m not sure why comments_popup_script() function is not included within the default theme (not even in commented form like the one inside the classic theme); to me and many others, Kubrick is the first theme we tear apart and learn in the process. Perhaps the usage of popup window is discouraged?

I’m not sure. But in my case, I’m very likely to leave out the comments-popup.php like I often do. I used to do it out of the fact that I don’t know what it does, and because Sandbox theme—another good theme I learn a lot from—does not have it. But now, after some thinking, I’ll just leave it out for one more reason:

I’ve never ever visit a WP-powered blog with popup comments (have you?). I’m sure that’s what most users experience as well—we’re already accustomed to the open-new-page-for-comments behavior.

Better not mess with that.