Technology Tales

A radical new look on the way for WordPress’ administration area

One thing that you can never say about Automattic is that it stands still for very long. That may generate adverse commentary from some but it’s bad to leave things stagnate too. In fact, resting on laurels also generates flak so you can’t please everyone all the time.

Earlier on this year, the WordPress administration screens went through something of an overall for version 2.5. In hindsight, it wasn’t terribly dramatic, but the prospect had me checking out what was happening with the development version and contributing to the project in my own small way. Now, it seems that a bigger upheaval is in prospect with wireframes and what not being brought into play on the design side.

The first change that anyone will notice is that the navigation has moved from the top to the side and that some things have been moved around and renamed. Another thing that you’ll see soon enough is that there is a QuickPress section added to the dashboard screen for those really quick and short postings. Sticking with the subject of content creation, alterations to post and page editing screens and the link creation screen are obvious too. What really comes to mind here is the level of customisation on offer so you can make yourself feel right at home: some of the screen furniture can be moved about and you can remove what you feel is nothing but useless clutter. Content generates comments, so the addition of keyboard shortcuts for comment moderation should be a boon for those with very active readers.

Some functionality currently added by plugins is getting incorporated in the main application. An example is automatic upgrades of WordPress itself. In the development version, it installs the latest nightly build but I am certain that it can be made to point to the latest stable release. That makes it more convenient for keeping a backseat eye on things rather than getting stuck into the hurly-burly of checking on what’s in Subversion.

There are some pieces that remain incompletely functional at present, such as the Inbox and Media added to this post pieces, but I have seen nothing that used to work to be broken. So, while the development version of WordPress is more of a work in progress than I have seen for a while, it will do what you need it to do. You always need to be cautious and I’d advise you to keep away until it’s ready for the big time until you have the knowledge to put things back should the undesirable befall your blog. I had an automatic WordPress update kick in maintenance mode without turning it off again. Nothing happened to the database, so a manual re-installation was all that was required to restore order. Otherwise, the development installation remains relatively stable though there are display problems in IE6 that do not afflict either Firefox, Opera or even IE8 Beta2.

All in all, these changes will make the next major WordPress a very big one and I have little doubt that the new administration interface will make for many comments. I must admit that I wasn’t too taken with it when I first glimpsed it in the crazyhorse branch but it now seems to be growing on me. The biggest change on the aesthetic front is that there’s a lot less whitespace about which may or may not float your boat. In any event, you can always change the colours like I have to make things more amenable. Even so, I reckon that WordPress 2.7 will be a major step forward when it comes and I think that I could like it. Saying that, I reckon that the release date is a good while away yet and the fact that 2.6.2 is being readied for release is telling in itself. Leaving plenty of time to remove any roughness is never a bad thing and especially so when you see the changes that are being made. In the meantime, I am certain that most people can wait.

Losing formatting with Windows copying and pasting

Copy and pasting between Windows programs can cause unwanted formatting to be carried over. Copying text from Internet Explorer into Outlook is one example of this that I see a lot and Word to Word does it too. A trick that I picked up for avoiding this copying of formatting comes from a while back: copying into Notepad and pasting from there. Doing the copy/paste shuffle in that way strips off the formatting baggage and alllows the default formatting for the particular destination to be applied. There may be other and slicker ways to do this but what I have described works for me.

Running Internet Explorer on Linux

On first sight, this probably sounds daft given how good Firefox is but you cannot ignore those surfing the web using the ever pervasive Internet Explorer when doing some web development. Using virtualisation is a solution to the need but it can mean that you need to set up a web server with Perl, PHP, MySQL and the like in a virtual machine, all for a little offline testing and then there’s the potential for a lot of file copying too. Otherwise, you are trying to sneak things online and catch the glitches before anyone else does, never a good plan.

Therefore, having the ability to run IE to test your offline LAMPP set up is a boon and IES4Linux allows you to do what’s really needed. Naturally, WINE is involved, so some flakiness may be experienced, even after the ever useful API library’s reaching version 1. Otherwise, all usually runs well once you work your way through the very helpful instructions on the IES4Linux website. I did get a misplaced message about the version of WINE that I was using, and Python errors made a worrying appearance, but neither compromised the end result: a working IE6 installation on my main Ubuntu box.

IE5 and IE5.5 are also on offer if you’re interested but, after looking at my visitor statistics, I think that I can discount these. IE7 and the work-in-progress IE8 make no appearance on the availability list. The absence of IE7 is not a big problem as it might appear because coding for IE6 sufficiently suffices for IE7, even now; IE8 may not be the same in this regard but we shall see. Even so, a later browser release does mean a more secure version and I reckon that including IE7 should be next on the project’s to-do list. Saying that, what we have now is far better than nothing at all.

A case of “peekaboo” behaviour in Internet Explorer

Recently, I 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”. Within a DIV, TABLE, TR, TD, P and A tag hierarchy, 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.

Faster IE7 phishing monitoring

The standard phishing detection that comes with IE7 really does slow things down when it comes to navigating web pages. In contrast, the option offered as part of Norton 360 is much faster. So much so that you hardly notice that it’s there at all. When I restored IE7 on my PC and ran it for the first time, Norton asked me to be its default fraud detection and I was away from there. Norton 360 offers nothing for Firefox, my preferred and default option but there may be plug-ins that address that need.

LVHA…

On my web design journey, I have learned the wisdom that CSS styles for hyperlinks should be defined like the following:

a:link {…}

a:visited {…}

a:hover {…}

a:active {…}

List out the names of the pseudoselectors and you’ll soon work out where they got LVHA: Link, Visited, Hover and Active. However, I have recently spotted the following being used:

a {…}

a:hover {…}

The trick here is to define your style globally and only define specifics for the relevant pseudoselector, hover in this example. It works well in the likes of Mozilla and Opera but Internet Explorer is another story. Even IE7 needs the LVHA treatment. I spotted this when I observed unexpected changes in the appearance of link text after visiting the link: visited links startes to change colour. While I know that the likes of Jakob Nielsen frown upon non-changing link colour, I choose to ignore this and keep it constant so following the LVHA approach is needed to keep things as I would like them.

Missing borders in Internet Explorer

It’s quite hard to describe this observation in a title so here goes with a longer description in a post. One thing that I spotted with the Prosumer theme used on this blog is that the links on the horizontal navigation bar underneath the mast head were not appearing as they should. The links have been formatted using CSS to appear in boxes with borders that are more apparent when you hover over them. In IE, the top and bottom borders were missing. After a spot of digging, I came up with the line-height property being the cause and I was right: the extremities of the boxes surrounding the text were being cut off because they exceeded the allotted space. As if to emphasise that IE7 isn’t as major a leap forward from IE6 as we would have liked, the problem affected that browser as well.

Aside: Link text colours weren’t being honoured by IE7 like they are by IE6, Firefox and Opera so another tweak to the CSS was needed.

IE7 on the way up…

I don’t spend too much time looking at that stats in Google Analytics but I do find it useful to see what people come to see. Another thing that I keep on radar is the browser technologies that visitors are using. Screen resolution is a particular interest of mine. However, browsers and their versions are watched too and I have spotted the ascent of IE7 from where it was; there seems to be a surge in recent times. I am unsure as to the cause for this but it’s definitely happening and Vista take up seems to have noting to do with it.

Using external JavaScript files? Just don’t load them at the bottom of the page…

Looking through Google Analytics for my websites, I have always been struck by the lack of IE7 uptake seemingly apparent from the statistics. However, I recently discovered that there may be a reason for this. I use the Ultimate GA plugin with my WordPress blogs and that adds the JavaScript code block near the bottom of the page. However, I recently saw that giving me scripting errors in IE7 and a spot of manual coding saw it travel to the header section of the web page. That, and the deactivation of the said plugin, was sufficient to rid of the errors in question. Seeing the effect of my changes on the reported share of visitors using IE7 could be interesting. It might even boost the Vista numbers as well.

An inappropriate use of JavaScript

I have seen a web application that displays thousands of records in a scrollable table (please bear with me, there is a very good reason for this). from the appearance of the table, it would be reasonable to assume that the table is generated by the server and output directly to the screen but this isn’t the case. What actually happens is that the server more or less outputs JavaScript code that is then executed. This takes the form of large arrays that are slotted into the DOM as the contents of the required table by a JavaScript function. With the large amounts of data involved, this means that the browser fully loads the client CPU while the JavaScript processing takes place, something that takes up to a minute to complete. Admittedly, the browser is IE6 but this was all on a PC with a 2.53 GHz Pentium 4 and 512 MB of memory. Getting the server to deliver standards-compliant (X)HTML for what is needed in the first place seems a much, much better approach to me.