In my ongoing quest to bring flawless multi-language (multi-encoding to be more accurate) support to WordPress, I just had a blindingly simple, yet highly efficient, idea for an improvement.

If your blog is accustomed to receiving trackbacks or comments containing non-standard characters (accents, kanjis etc.), then you have probably noticed that a fair share end up getting mangled in the process. WP is not really at fault here, since this is caused by some browsers’ failure to respect the encoding set in a page when sending form content (e.g. submitting a comment). No need to tell you which poor excuse for a browser so shamelessly ignore proper web standards. This is of little comfort anyway, since in the end, all that matters is that WordPress is getting toh-mah-toh when it is expecting toh-may-toh, and pretty much ends up displaying poh-tah-to to everybody else.

The fix, as I was saying is ridiculously easy. And to the best of my knowledge it won’t break anything in your current WP install. Worst that could happen is that it won’t fix your problem, but it won’t break your blog.

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UPDATED 07/24/04 18:02 JST
Super Geeky entry on Blog migrations… you can safely skip if you do not have any idea what the names “WordPress” and “Movable Type” stand for. [I also added 100% WP stuff down there]

A temporary entry on the work in progress that is my move from Movable Type to WordPress.

I ported a bunch of scripts and plugins I was previously using with my MT installation. Also hacked happily through WP’s PHP sources…

Not completely done, but here are already a few usable hacks (I would not quite call them “plugins” given the amount of tweaking required to use them):

1. mt2wp: Redirecting old MT entries to WP entries

   This script will not only redirect your old Movable Type archives (both categories and monthly), it will also redirect direct entry permalinks (e.g. “000123.html#000123”).
   To do the latter, you will need to have your old ‘mt_entries’ table in the same database as your current WP tables (you do not need the full MT install, just this table), but you can still have archive redirection by date and category even if you have thrown out your MT tables.

   Please read the instructions for more details on how to install and use.

   Overall, don’t forget to:

   1. Edit the script (mt2wp.php) with your blog archive’s URL
   2. Upload the script to your WP directory
   3. Edit your index.php template file
   4. Edit your .htaccess file
   5. Optionally edit your css file (usually wp-layout.css)

   Sources – Zip File

2. Picture Glue: Image Posting Plugin

   A port of the small plugin I had written for MT. By far not the most advanced picture import plugin for WP: there are better and nicer plugins out there doing roughly the same. But I needed backward compatibility and after all, it’s a convenient lightweight plugin to seamlessly upload and insert pictures in an entry.

   Picture Glue automatically looks in a predefined location for folders containing pictures (presumably uploaded through FTP), generates thumbnails and insert HTML code (with css tags) at the top of appropriate postings. Each picture folder must contain the ID of the post it is to be inserted into and must be writable by anybody (for thumbnail generation). This plugin updates the entry content in the DB once and for all, instead of dynamically filtering, thus creating less runtime overhead.

   To use, upload the php file in your plugin folder (located in WP wp-content directory). Read the plugin instruction for details.

   Sources – Zip File

3. Updated! wp-Filterz: Dynamic meta-filtering of your main content

   This plugin lets you define a bunch of meta-filters controlled by checkboxes. Checking/Unchecking boxes will show/hide entries dynamically. You can try it by going to the left bar of this site and playing with the boxes under the “Filterz” section.

   Now supports both IE and Mozilla-like browsers.

   To use it:

   • drop the plugin file into your plugin folder (located in WP wp-content directory)
   • edit the sample preferences with your own categories (you will need to know the ID of the categories you want to filter by)
   • upload the pref file to the wp-content directory (*not* the plugin directory)
   • edit your index.php file to include <?=filterz_class()?> inside the class declaration of your entry divs. Your template should look something like this: <div class="storycontent<?=filterz_class()?>">
   • use <?=$filterz_html_code?> in your template to output wp-filterz’ checkbox list
   • BTW: make sure you activate the plugin in WP’s admin tools.

   Plugin Source – Prefs file sample – Zip File

4. wp-Mood-Quote: Random quote matching your mood (codeveloped with Masquerade)

   This plugin lets you define a list of quotes/taglines/sentences to be displayed randomly when people load your page… with a small extra feature over the countless other random quote generator: this one will let you assign a “mood” to each quote and will then try to match the random quote with the current mood of your blog (using the last “mood” tag you set in one of your post). See docs for more details. (docs wiped out from Masquerade’s server, following some infortunate adventures in shell scripting involving the use of ‘rm -f *’ and no backup whatsoever).

   Zip File – Tar Gz File

5. New! Getting the “updated links” feature to work

   Not a hack. Just a little bit of help to those who might be confused on how to get that sort-by-last-updated feature to work in WP.

   Supposedly, WP lets you sort links. But simply following the instructions and calling get_links() with the proper parameters won’t suffice to enable that feature. To enable it, you must also:

   1. include (before calling any link output function) the file links-update-xml.php as such: include_once(ABSPATH.WPINC.'/links-update-xml.php');
   2. if you have upgraded (and still possibly if you have not), you must make sure you have a file named links-update-cache.xml in your wp-content folder and that it is writable by the server (chmod 666). caveat: it looks like previous versions of WP used a slightly different file name (link-update-cache.xml: mind the missing ‘s’), make sure you have the correct filename.

   Of course, you must also set the parameters in your function call correctly, as well as the options in WP-admin option panel.
   As an example, here is the code I use to output the bookmarks section on this site (it uses a list of IDs for the groups of links I want to display there). Feel free to adapt to your needs and reuse:
   
<?php
include_once(ABSPATH.WPINC.'/links-update-xml.php');
foreach (array(2,3,5,9,7,8) as $this_cat)
{
echo "<li>", get_linkcatname($this_cat), "<ul>";
get_links($this_cat, '<li>', '</li>', '<br>', false, '_updated', false, false, -1, 1);
echo "</ul></li>";
}
?>


6. More will be coming… including:

   • a patch for MooKitty’s show_category plugin to generate a side blog from a specific category (the patch adds date synchronization between the main entries being displayed and the sideblog). it’s already being used on this very blog, I just need to clean it up and write a blurb for it.
   • small snippets that display smart navigational bars at top and bottom of the page… need to put these in a plugin and will release.
   • a patch on wp-mail plugin (allows posting of pictures through email) to use my Picture Glue plugin and generates thumbnails automatically (doesn’t do it at the moment). Actually, I made a whole plugin to do that (and more), it’s there: Keitai Mail Plugin
   • probably other stuff as I come across it…

I am currently carrying over a double move involving both my hosting solution and blog engine (switching from MT to WordPress, more on this later).
In the meantime, please excuse the many visual glitches, spare body parts scattered on the ground and blood stain on the walls. I’ll be working hard this week on making everything the way it used to be, when all was green and happy in drDaveLand…