Tech from Hel

I am not an official Wordpress tester, but to keep up with the latest changes and to make sure my own plugins are always compatible with upcoming versions of Wordpress, I run Wordpress development version on this site.

There are several plugins installed on this site that end up also getting tested for compatibility with upcoming versions of Wordpress, although that is not my intention. Wassup, cFormsII, Bad Behavior, and Akismet all run successfully on Wordpress 2.7 development version . One plugin that failed was Simple Tags version 1.5.7 by Amaury Balmer. This plugin produced an error because of a test in the code that rejects unrecognized versions of Wordpress.

Fortunately the fix was simple. It only required that the version test be replaced by one that tests for current or higher version of Wordpress. I modified the code myself and now “Simple Tags 1.5.7a” runs on 2.7-dev.

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Soon after I upgraded to Wordpress 2.6, I discovered that the Wordpress' dashboard and post/page editor cause the Safari 1.3 browser to crash. Though other Wordpress 2.6 admin functions continue to work fine in Safari 1.3, including the widget functions, without the Dashboard, users can’t login, and without the post/page editor, users can’t update their blog. This makes Wordpress 2.6 completely unusable in Safari 1.3.

A quick search of the forums showed that this problem has cropped up for other Wordpress users and that it may extend to Safari 2 as well. Here what one user had to say on wordpress.com forums.
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Step-by-Step Instructions to Install and Configure WordPress with Better Security*

When I went looking for a blogging software, I checked user ratings, server requirements, amount of documentation, available CSS templates and plugins, and did a test install of a few blogs. In the end I chose to go with WordPress because it was one of the easiest to install (it worked on the first try), it had built-in CMS (content management) capability, it had the best documentation, the most plugins, and lots of freely available CSS templates.

I installed and configured WordPress as CMS and blog for my existing website. I put WordPress in a subdirectory of my site's root directory because this is more secure and did not overwrite my existing web documents and applications. The install went smoothly and afterwards, I was delighted to find that the URLs for my other web documents** and applications continued to work seamlessly, without interference from WordPress.

Below are instructions to install your own copy of WordPress on a new or existing site, with improved security. These instructions assume that WordPress will manage your host domain/subdomain, not a subdirectory of that domain/subdomain (ie. www.mysite.com or subdomain.mysite.com, NOT www.mysite.com/blog/). It assumes that you are familiar with a FTP software to upload files to your ISP, that you can create a MySQL database on your ISP account, and that you can edit a plain text file using a text editor like Notepad or VIM. These instructions can also be used to “upgrade” an existing copy of Wordpress to make it more secure.

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Embedding Videos: YouTube in a Thickbox

Note: This is a duplicate of an article I originally wrote on April 29, 2008 on the Supernatural Station website.

“Thickbox” is a great way to showcase a youTube video on your web site. Thickbox’s light box effect gives videos a dramatic, theatre-like feel. You only need to add a few extra lines of code to the preset embed code supplied by YouTube.com to show your video inside a “thickbox”. This method works with embed code from youTube.com as well as embed code from other video hosting sites. Click the links below to see some examples.

[youTube Thickbox demo]
[DailyMotion Thickbox demo]
[iMeem Thickbox demo]
[Vimeo Thickbox demo]

Step-by-step Instructions to embed a youTube video inside a Thickbox:

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Embedding Videos: Flv Videos in a Thickbox

NOTE: This is an updated version of an article I originally wrote on September 6, 2007 that was posted on SupernaturalStation.org.

Step-by-step instructions on how to display a flash video (.flv) inside a thickbox* using JW's Flvplayer

For those of you wondering how to implement JW's Flv player inside a Thickbox, it is actually quite simple. Here's how:

1. If you don't already have them, download jquery and ThickBox 3 and add them to your page's head section

   jquery.js is available at docs.jquery.com/Downloading_jQuery. ThickBox 3.1 is a group of files and images (thickbox.js, thickbox-compressed.js, thickbox.css, loadingAnimation.gif, and macFFhack.png) located at jquery.com/demos/thickbox. Download all the Thickbox files and install them in a single common directory, “thickbox”, on your web server.

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