Now that WordPress 2.6 is out, it is time to introduce a new version of Countrytones to the public. A few CSS tweaks have been needed to the original version after the changes that have been made to the administration interface for 2.6. Those screens still look largely the same with this release as they did before but for the styling of things like the bubble that alerts you to the availability of plugin upgrades, among other things.

Download Countrytones 1.0.1

I recently changed the engine of my online photo gallery to a speedier PHP/MySQL based affair from its PHP/Perl/XML powered predecessor. On the server side, all was well but a peculiar display issue turned up in Internet Explorer (6, 7 & 8 were afflicted by this behaviour) where photo caption text on the thumbnail gallery pages was being displayed erratically. As far as I can gather, the trigger for the behaviour was that the thumbnail block was placed within a DIV floated using CSS that touched another DIV that cleared the floating behaviour. I use a table to hold the images and their associated captions in place. Furthermore, each caption was also a hyperlink nested within a set of P tags. The remedy was to set the CSS Display property for the affected XHTML tag to a value of "inline-block". With a cascade of DIV, TABLE, TR, TD, P and A tags, finding the right tag where the CSS property in question has the desired effect took some doing. As it happened, it was the tag set, that for the hyperlink, at the bottom of the stack that needed the fix. Of course, it’s all very fine fixing something for one browser but it’s worthless if it breaks the presentation in other browsers. In that vein, I did some testing in Opera, Firefox, Seamonkey and Safari to check if all was well and it was. There may be older browsers like versions of IE prior to 6 where things don’t appear as intended but I get the impression from my visitor statistics that the newer variants hold sway anyway. All in all, it was a useful lesson learnt and that’s never a bad thing.

The final release of WordPress 2.5 isn’t out yet but that hasn’t stopped me playing around with it and spotting a bug or two. Along the way, I have taken the chance to create a plugin that takes the old Earthtones palate into the new world. To do this, I have taken the WordPress Classic colours stylesheet along with some template code from planetOzh and tweaked it accordingly. I may not have got to every possible nook and cranny for colouration but I hope to have covered most of them. You may even find it useful yourself.

See a Screenshot

Download Countrytones

I have encountered something very strange with my hillwalking blog and I have to admit that am at something of a loss as to how to resolve it. Opera (version 9.x), it seems, is not displaying the date corresponding to the first post of a particular month. You can see the effect at the right for the current month and, yes, the tenth of the month has a post associated with it. What compounds the mystery is that the same issue doesn’t affect this blog so some further investigation is very much in order. However, the cascading element of CSS doesn’t help much when trying to track down the cause of this sort of thing. While, it’s irritating, I don’t have any definite answers yet and so would appreciate some suggestions. In the meantime, I’ll be staying on the lookout for a fix. Curiously, all’s fine on Firefox and IE.

Primarily because of the WordPress plugins that I use, a few inconsistencies have leaped out of the woodwork that needed to be fixed. Here are the issues that I encountered:

Database errors appearing in web pages

This was a momentary discovery along the upgrade trail, entirely caused by the way in which I was doing things. As usual, I went and copied over the WordPress 2.3 files to my web server so I saw these errors before I ran the upgrade script. Then, they were banished, confirming that WordPress 2.3 code was trying to access a WordPress 2.2 type database; 2.3 has made some database changes in order to incorporate tagging.

Dashboard Editor no longer fully functional

The move to JQuery meant that some of the things for which its was looking had changed. They also changed the incoming links provider from Technorati to Google, now that the former is having a tougher time of it. It took a while to track down why I was unable to remove components from the front page of my dashboard as before but a quick comparison of 2.3 code with its 2.2.3 forbear revealed all. I can make a copy of the updated code available for those who need it.

WordPress Admin Themer

The plugin works as before and does its job so well that you end up applying an old stylesheet (in the blog’s theme folder) to the latest release. It only took a spot of tweaking to put everything in order.

I am not complaining about any of these, partly because they were easy to resolve and, in any event, I don’t mind a spot of code cutting. However, I can foresee some users being put out by them, hence my sharing my experiences.

Update: Dashboard Editor has since been updated by the author. Even so, I will stick with my own version of the plugin.

The final release of the next version of WordPress is due out on Monday and, because there are sure to be security fixes included, I have been giving the release candidate a go on my offline blogs. 2.3 is another major release so I have been doing some preparation.  In fact, WordPress have a blog entry dedicated to such things for this release. Thankfully, I think that my hillwalking blog should emerge unscathed by this upgrade; I still need to have a go with an offline version of this blog.

The special feature in the new release is tagging and it is good to see that it has had no impact on legacy set ups. I had the same reservations about 2.2 with its inclusion of sidebar widgets but the backward compatibility was enough to see me through without any hiccups. Tagging is not something that I see myself using with categories fulfilling much the same type of role; I am unconvinced by the idea of tag clouds, the type of thing that it powers. However, there are some useful extras here and the filtering of posts by edit status is one of these. Having pending review as a publishing status sounds like a tweak that I might use to allow myself a cooling off period before I publish a post for all of the world to see. Revisiting something with a fresher pair of eyes might stop typographical howlers from emerging into public view…

Update: Another 2.3 feature discovered! I have picked up on multiple category widgets by virtue of the fact that category styling disappeared with the upgrade of the offline version of this blog to 2.3 RC1. Adding "-1" to the relevant CSS class definitions soon sorted things out. It does support the idea of testing before implementation even if no other unexpected changes were spotted. I still am not sure why anyone would have multiple category listings, though.

I recently spotted a request for a drop down list like that which you see below. I managed to create it using the CSS but it only worked for Firefox so I couldn’t suggest it to the requester.

form select, form select option {width: 185px; white-space: normal;}

form select {height: 16px; width: 200px; white-space: normal;}

form {margin: 300px auto 0 auto; width: 300px;}

Here’s how it looks in Firefox 2:

And in IE6:

And in Opera 9:

It would be nice if the white-space attribute gave the same result in all three but hey ho… As it happens, the W3C are working up other possible ways of controlling text wrapping in (X)HTML elements but that’s for the future and I’ll be expecting it when I see it.

For menus with wrapped entries, using DHTML menus and DOM scripting seems the best course for now. I suppose that you could always make the entries shorter which is exactly what I tend to do; I am pragmatic like that. Nevertheless, there’s never any harm in attempting to push the boundaries. You just have to come away from the cutting edge at the first sign of bleeding…

Of course, if anyone had other ideas, please let me know.

I have taken what some might consider a retrograde step: I added code to insert my blogroll directly below the widgets section of my left-hand sidebar. The reason for this is reuse of the same ID; it causes my Firefox HTML Validation add-on to issue warnings and so can hardly be standards compliant. Ironically, in its native state, the blogroll functions take panes to ensure that each category has its own ID, only for the widgets functions to go and disregard all of this and assign the same ID for each category. To change this in the widgets code involves ploughing through loads of arrays (and functions) and is not something for which I have time when an easier solution is very much possible.

I recently posted about using mod_rewrite to block access to your images from all but the websites to which you want access to be available. Following so doing, I discovered that my FAVICON had disappeared from Firefox’s address. As it turned out, it was easy to fix and that is covered in another recent post.

I have been tweaking the widgets in this blog and the thought has crossed my mind that purveyors of open source blogging and CMS’s may be overcomplicating matters with the CSS that they are writing. Using inheritance without much thought as to others having to pick it up is one irritation but bunching styles together can confuse too. For instance, you can draw from from two different styles for the same HTML element (it’s what’s going when you see class="class1 class2" in a tag definition), which is OK if done simply but can confuse matters when customisation is attempted later. Drupal particularly suffers from this bugbear but it’s their in WordPress too, though not to the same extent. Using a hierarchy to define and attach your styles (#id1 .class2 tag1 {style definition…} is the kind of thing that I have in mind), can also confound but I admit to finding the approach very useful for myself. I think that I know what’s driving this: the need to cut down the bulk of CSS files but using the advanced features that I mentioned above without clear commenting and other documentation hampers later efforts. It would be nice if every developer of a theme for use blogging or CMS software was forced to document their work extensively and share that documentation with interested users. After all, sharing is the whole purpose of their endeavours…