WordPress Minutia

tips and trick.

Blockquote

Below is a blockquote…

this text is in a block quote. Lorem ipsem dolar Lorem ipsem dolar Lorem ipsem dolar Lorem ipsem dolar Lorem ipsem dolar Lorem ipsem dolar Lorem ipsem dolar

Here is some text after the blockquote has ended.

Text boxes

So the code looks something like this

<div style="float: right; width: 250px; height: 300px;  padding: 2px 6px 4px 6px; color: #555555; background-color: #eeeeee; border: #dddddd 2px solid;">text goes here</div>

… And you can also add in fancier CSS3 styles like box-shadow, text-shadow, and box-radius — they work, but the visual editor stripped the radius and box-shadow: -webkit-border-radius: 10px; -webkit-box-shadow: 5px 5px 5px rgba(0,0,0,0.5); text-shadow: 3px 3px 1px rgba(0,0,0,0.3);

The fancy stuff works on some browsers and not others, also there are moz equivalents, e.g. moz-border-radius for firefox.

Here is a text box using a div tag class of textboxfloatright, which I added to my theme’s style.css file.
Note that the visual editor won’t render it; but at least it leaves the code intact.
Also, some guy said you can’t use div tags, but they seem fine. this guy. he says to not use div tag (use p instead)… it seems that div is now ok w/visual editor..

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Immediately befosfsfre the text and lorem ipsum dolar immediately before the text and lorem ipsum dolar immediately before tsfsfshe text and lorem ipsum mix it up. Dolar immediately before the text and lorem ipsum dolar immediately before the tessxt and lo imm.

here are some other colors and no floating or width specification (full width) :

This text box has an inline css style in the div tag, i.e. 
<div style="margin: 20px 0; padding: 10px; border: 1px solid #ccc; color: #333; background-color: #f4f4df;">

lorem ipsum dolar immediately before the text and lorem ipsum dolar immediately before tsfsfshe text and lorem ipsum dolar immediately before thar immediately

Here is the .textbox style placed in style.css of the template, using a div-tag with class=textbox

Code (monospace)

here is some playing around with stuff that would want to be mono-spaced, e.g. dos commands.
after a break.

here is preformatted chosen from the visual editor's drop-down. It seems to me that if it is too long, it does not wrap as expected.
Rather you get this weird scroll bar.
I guess that would be good for cut/paste where line breaks are important.

…
I'm not sure what's the story with this code tag? Apparently it indents and wraps, so this looks pretty good. It renders as monospace courier in the visual editor, so that's pretty good. lorem ipsum dolar lorem lorem ipsum dolar lorem lorem ipsum dolar lorem lorem ipsum dolar lorem New line
…

Here is the .textboxcode style placed in style.css of the template, using a div-tag with class=textboxcode. This will not render in the visual editor.
x=1;
y=x’
printf(x+y,%d);

WordPress version tales

In early July 2011, WordPress released a relatively major update, 3.2 which has as prerequisites php v5.something, and mysql v5.something. This was a minor problem for my older (azbikelaw) wordpress installations on Godaddy. Update to php 5 was a simple control-panel checkbox. The database update was more of a pain, though it was accomplished just through control-panel as well, i.e. 1) backup existing database 2) create new, empty v5 database 3) restore from the backup to the new. The only downside is this might take a couple of hours (the restore, in particular took quite a while). To make the final switch, I needed to manually edit the wp-config.php file to match the new database credentials. At this point, everything was still working — and the auto-upgrade then can be done and that went flawlessly.

Themes

I fooled around with a theme with the unfortuante name “Powered By”. See for the time being: wikisneaks.org . it has an interesting home page design, it takes advantage of custom fields. See Powering your design with WordPress.

I’ve used Gear 1.3 here on azbikelaw.org for a couple of years. I noticed something wasn’t working, menus or something. Anyway, I updated to 1.3.7 … not sure if that fixed anything. I may need to go to a more modern theme. The newest version, early part of 2010, predates this major wordpress update.

Database Madness

I have tried (and failed) to “move” my blog’s folder (it’s url) via the wordpress dashboard under settings. Here’s how to do it rather easily:

As noted by craniumstorm.com ,to move a blog, the only two fields that need to be updated are siteurl, and home; just access the database using myphpadmin and give it this mysql command:
UPDATE wp_options SET option_value = ‘http://azbikelaw.org/newfolder’ WHERE option_name IN (‘siteurl’,’home’);

One issue to watch out for is the .htaccess file in the blog’s root; by default, there is none, but some choices of permalink require one. The easiest thing to do is use the dashboard to reset settings | permalink back to default, and then change them as desired. This will cause the correct .htaccess to be written (requires apache mod rewrite to be active).

backup-db

backup-db is a wordpress plugin that i formerly had no trouble with. The around Jan 2013, it started saying the backup folder (which is set under plugin’s options) /home/content/a/z/b/azbikelaw/html/blog/wp-content/backup-db was not writable and i should chmod it to 777 (is always had been 705).

Since it could also not find any backups, and it looked like there serveral in that folder — i suspected something else was afoot. Sshing in, a pwd said the full path is /var/chroot/home/content/90/4318490/html/blog/wp-content/backup-db