YouTube is worlds apart from the likes of MySpace (*shudder*) when it comes to good code, but like most massively influential sites, they don’t really seem to care that much if their code validates, and even less if the code they provide webmasters for embedding content in their own sites does.

Frankly, I usually don’t care that much about validation either. I worked in this field for too many years when no validators even existed, and I’ve always taken the pragmatic approach: make it look and work the same, more or less, in all reasonably recent versions of Internet Explorer and Netscape (with Firefox and Safari having replaced Netscape over the past few years), and be done with it. Read more »

One thing that surprised me when I started using WordPress again is that its search function only searches on blog posts, not on static pages. I suppose if most WordPress sites are 99.9% blog posts, then it probably makes sense, but I have enough static pages on my site that I’d like to make searchable to warrant changing this.

Fortunately, someone has. Unfortunately this “Search Pages” plug-in is out of date and no longer works with current versions of WordPress. I dug in a bit and figured out why: the plug-in alters the SQL query that performs the search, but the substring it replaces in the query no longer exists! So I hunted down the place where the query occurs in the WordPress core, adjusted the plug-in as needed, and it works!

Here, then, is my hack of the Search Pages plug-in, modified to work with WordPress 2.1. (I’m not sure which other versions of WordPress it will or will not work with.)

[ search_pages.php.tar.gz ] [ search_pages.php.zip ]