SonicChicken blog

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.

Nothing’s been going on here since I’ve been busy hacking up Central Valley NTrak, my model railroad site. It’s now a full WordPress site–all content is managed by WP. I learned a few things about Pages (note the capital “P”) and hierarchal categories which I thought I would share. (Or at least write down, so I don’t have to re-learn them the hard way!)

The site is using a modified version of BB Iverson’s theme, Spirit, which has a few non-post Pages linked from the header. Creating the pages sounded pretty easy, so I jumped in. I got the pages created okay, but I couldn’t view them–I kept getting 404 errors whenever I tried to browse cvntrak.org/archives/. I thought perhaps I had set the page template incorrectly, or perhaps I should have titled the page “archives” instead of “Archives”. I tried all kinds of things, to no avail. Eventually I found a reference to “the default ‘pretty’ permalink format”, so I double-checked that I had indeed set these up correctly, and found my problem–I had turned off write access to my .htaccess file after I got the permalink format set initially, and there were a whole bunch of new rewrite rules to be added for the new Pages I had written. I played with this a little bit more, and it seems like you need to visit the Options/Permalinks page and hit “Update permalink structure” whenever you create a new Page. I tried leaving .htaccess writable, then creating a Page, then viewing it, and I always got 404’s for pages created after the most recent permalink update. I don’t like leaving this file writable, so I’ll just cut-and-paste if I ever need to change the rewrite rules again.

“Spirit” has a category list in the left sidebar, generated by wplistcats(). I set up hierarchal categories for this site, with a couple of top-level “container” categories. Then I made the first post and filed it under the child categories, published it and viewed the home page and wplistcats showed… nothing! I futzed around with this for a while and finally I made a post in one of the top-level categories. Voila! All of a sudden I can see the category hierarchy in the sidebar, at least for all children of the top-level category with a post. I have to play with this some more to see exactly when it breaks. I’m not sure if this is a bug, or maybe I don’t completely understand how wplistcats() is supposed to work.

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.

I installed another theme this morning. Heck, I’ve got the theme switcher installed, and one of my readers wanted the Yaaarr (pirate) theme, I figured I might as well add it. The theme lives on the Radical Georgia Moderate’s download page. More information about the “Yaaarr, ’tis me blog!” theme is available here.

See this post for a link to the theme switcher tutorial and theme browser.

A fix to the awesome Borderline Chaos theme. I started noticing that my blog’s date format wasn’t being used, so I started poking around some more in the theme files. I found a couple of places where hard-coded date formats had been used. The following patches take care of these issues. Careful! I have been fiddling with the theme files already, so my line numbers may not match the master files’. A little human intervention may be needed, and the patches only involve three or four lines of code changes so it’s no biggee to take care of this manually.

index.php patch single.php patch

I tried using the function “the_date()” out of template-functions-general, but it’s a little too smart for its own good–this function automagically hides the date if it’s the same as the “previousday”, i.e. if the first two posts are dated the same, the date will show up on the first one but it will be suppressed on the second one.

Update: 2005-09-03T05:26 UTC As mentioned in this article, I created a single patchfile containing all the changes I made to Borderline Chaos. I’ll document these later.