For quite some time, I’ve been wishing the thumbnail images WordPress creates when you upload an image were slightly bigger. The function that generates the thumbnails accepts a maximum dimension as an input parameter, but then the value (a paltry 128 pixels) is hardcoded in the script that calls the function, and there’s no way in the standard WordPress configuration to change the value, other than manually editing the admin script where the call is made.

This is easy enough to do, if you know how to find the block of code in question, but it’s wrong wrong wrong in terms of ongoing WordPress updates: when a new version is released and you update your files, the changes you made will be lost. Read more »

Does this site look completely wonky to you? I’ve just implemented a new design! Most likely you’ve got some old files cached. Clear your cache and refresh (or, just refresh about 20 times and your browser will get the hint and clear the cache itself). Of course, you might also be using Internet Explorer 6, in which case my annoying alert dialog box should have already goaded you into upgrading. If that’s the case, enough said.

Does this site look a little wonky to you? In that case, then you are probably a better graphic designer than I and/or you’ve discovered that the new design isn’t 100% implemented yet. If I’m lucky, it’s the latter. At any rate, I’ve already spent far more time in the past 24 hours working on this than I’d have expected to, given the limited extent of the results, but I’m a little burned out, so I’ll be finishing a few things (like the background on the footer and a few other little graphical touches) over the next few days. Oh, and I’ve only done the bare minimum trying to update the “Offspring” pages to work with the new look. (It took me about an hour of hunting before I realized/remembered that some of the style settings for the gallery pages are actually in the plug-in settings in WordPress and not in the Gallery2 files at all.) But I am hoping to make the move from Gallery2 to the Dutch Monkey’s DM Albums plug-in soon anyway.

Alas, the woes of using open source software rear their heads. WordPress abounds with undocumented, or at least very poorly documented, features.

My dilemma: the default function for displaying a list of page links (used on this site to populate the Points of Interest panel in the sidebar) sorts links alphabetically, and there isn’t any obvious way to make it sort by the database’s menu_order field, which logically, to me at least, should be the default especially given that this is how they’re sorted in the admin tool.

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 ]