I had a few folks post comments on some of my older posts, and I didn’t notice them right away. The problem is that I rarely use the WordPress “dashboard”, which is the easiest place to find recently added comments.
For several weeks, I’ve been meaning to bolt the Recent Comments plugin by Krischan Jodies’ onto the Journalized-Blue theme that I use. So I’d like to thank jim wilde, Bitcloud, and RTO Trainer first and foremost for commenting on my blog. Additional thanks are due for giving me the best incentive to get off my butt and get the necessary hacking done! While I was at it, I made some minor cosmetic changes to the interface, the most visible being the longer “top tags” list.
I’m wondering if the known bug in gatekeeper 1.5 depends on which theme you’re running? I’m running journalized-blue, and it was rejecting comments with “Sorry, posting has been closed for the time being.” errors.
I’m running Eric Meyer’s gatekeeper anti-spam tool. He has one known bug listed, where the auto-challenge feature doesn’t always insert the challenge in the comment form. I had tested this when I first installed the software, and it worked at the time, so I forgot about it. Then I added a bunch of themes to my site. I started getting a few complaints from people, saying that comments were closed, so I went and checked all my settings–all my comment settings looked correct, so I was stumped. Until I remembered about that known bug…
I found that my journalized-blue theme was rejecting comments from non-registered users. I added an explicit call to gatekeeperposechallenge() per this suggestion on Eric’s page.
I put the following code in the journalized-blue theme comments.php, between the email and text inputs:
if (functionexists(’gatekeeperposechallenge’)) {
gatekeeperpose_challenge(”,3); // default format string, tab index==3
}
(Need I mention that this needs to be wrapped with php tags?)
I have the theme switcher installed and several themes available, so I’ll log out and try to comment on this post anonymously with each of my themes.
I added a 404 page to Mike Little’s journalized theme. It’s nothing fancy, just ripped the content area out of index.php and put some semi-helpful text in its place. This page should work for all of the Journalized themes, and should be site-independent.
The WordPress Codex has an excellent article on 404 pages, including instructions for making your 404 page show up instead of the browser’s default (useless) information. It’s al got suggestions for 404 page content and links to other helpful sites.
Instructions: right-click on this link and save it to a local file. Add any custom text or links as appropriate for your site. Then upload it to your Journalized theme directory, e.g. wordpress/wp-content/themes/journalized-blue.
Enjoy!
I finished hacking up Journalized-Blue to support the tags plugin. Since this is the only theme I have finished (wrt tags), I have made this the default theme for my blog.
Replacing categories with tags for this theme turned out to involve only two files, index.php and leftcolumn.php. Patches for both files are below. I made the theme “tags aware”, so if you have the tags plugin, the theme will show tags wherever it now shows categories. If you want both tags and categories, it’d be very simple to hack the patched files so that categories were always displayed.
The patches are .txt files. I can’t recall how to force these to display “as is” (my http-fu is weak, I’ll admit), but you can either right-click on these links and save the files locally or simply click on the links and then use your browser’s “view source” command to see the straight .txt files.
Update: 2005-09-03 05:32 UTC
I’ve created a single patchfile of all the changes I’ve made to Journalized-blue. More information is available in this article.
I hacked up Journalized-Blue’s index.php to replace the category listing with Felix Wong’s tags plugin. I still need to grep the rest of this theme for categories and fix them as well. Then I’ll have to see which of the rest of my themes are worth the effort. (I guess it’s not that tough to add tags support, it’s just a matter of finding all the places where categories are listed in all of the theme php files.)
I should probably also be a good citizen and post the modified themes.
Another theme for people to try out. Journalized-Blue is the only 3-column theme I have installed on my blog. I was really trying to stick to 2-column layouts, but this theme is just too good to pass up. I’ll be tweaking it to better suit my needs over the coming days.
Great work, Mike!
