Googpress – the vanweerd sandbox

My little sandbox site, where I try all sorts of stuff, it's chaos, I know. No/little seriousness attempted here!

Well who would have thought I’d start writing DokuWiki plugins for a change. It’s a bit of a workaround plugin, due to an issue in a WordPress – DokuWiki login bridge that I’ve implemented. All wiki content was being escaped (addslashes), so that “you’re” became “you\’re”. I have yet to find a real solution for this, whether it is the bridge, or dokuwiki, but for the time being, I can move on without polluting the wiki pages by using this plugin:

[download id="4"]

As it turns out, the standard WordPress issued search widget generates xhtml validation errors, by using the form role keyword.

For reason way beyond me, WordPress staff can find more time tracking the issue, changing it to a “future release” milestone, then decide to change the status from “new” to “closed”, set the resolution to “wontfix” (what a great resolution!), and then remove the milestone “Future Release”, and add the bold comment: “we’ll reopen if/when we’re interested.” source: WordPress Trac

I’m sure it must have been easier to remove the erroneous code: role="search" from the function that generates the search widget.

Here’s a quick trick to avoid these validation errors

Create your own search form

By creating your own searchform.php, you override the one WordPress uses by default, so it’s an easy fix. Using a text editor, like notepad, create a new file, and simply insert the following code:

[php]<form method="get" class="search-form" id="search-form" action="<?php bloginfo( ‘home’ ); ?>/">
<div>
<label class="screen-reader-text" for="s"><?php _e(‘Search for:’); ?></label>
<input class="search-text" type="text" name="s" id="search-text" value="<?php _e(‘Search this site’); ?>" />
<input class="search-submit" type="submit" name="submit" id="search-submit" value="<?php _e(‘Search’); ?>" />
</div>
</form>
[/php]

then save this file in your theme folder, and name it searchform.php.

From now on, your custom searchform will be used by the widget, and there will be no more validation errors.

As requested in this post on the iThemes support forum, here are the instructions to create a page template for the iCompany Theme series by iThemes (these instructions will most likely work for iCar and iRealEstate as well). This template will not have the grey bar and the featured area, and the main content will expand to the right until the right tabber sidebar.

Read more…

There is some confusion about the widgets used in Flexx themes. I will try to explain what the standard setup is.

Initially, Flexx was shipped without the additional Page Templates. Once these were implemented, we felt that we could increase functionality, by creating separate widget sections for these pages. That is when the Page widgets where created.
Read more…

The spreadsheet here

If you have just upgraded to WordPress 2.8 and are experiencing issues with your widgets, a potential solution is to go to the Appearance > Themes screen and select and activate another theme (any theme will do).

Then go back into theme selection, and re-select your desired theme. Upon activation, you will see this message at the top of the screen.

Click the widgets settings page link, and you should be able to gain back control over your widgets.

Google Wave announced at Google I/O, watch a 1’20″ video on this amazing product, can’t wait to get my hands on it!

It’s IM, e-mail, twitter, calendar, scheduler and more in one collaboration application. Not in a suit of applications, but integrated into one application. Google Wave will be released end 2009, so be prepared. API developers can already get there hands on it and request sandbox access.

Read more…

Here are the instructions to create a landing page without sidebar and (optionally) the footer blocks (about and navigation) for iThemes‘ bSocial theme.

Read more…

the vanweerd sandbox. For visual spectacle, this is not the right place, but I am excited to find out what BuddyPress and WordPress can do.