How to

We’ll change your email signature in a way that tells people the message was sent using an iPhone. It doesn’t matter which email client you’re using: while Apple Mail is great, using Outlook will be okay as well.

Open your email client’s configuration menu, find the part that lets you change your signature and enter the following text into the input field:

Sent from my iPhone

Click on save and make sure that the signature will be used when writing new emails or replying to the ones from your friends.

Although you don’t really have an iPhone everybody will be impressed that you sent him/her a message with your cool gadget.

Conclusion

Sure, if the one you’re sending an email is a geek I bet he’ll find out that you didn’t really send the message with an iPhone in no time. Nevertheless, most people won’t be able to notice this but just think that you’re the proud owner of an iPhone.

Next up:

• How to pretend having an iPad.
• How to avoid meeting people in real life so they don’t notice that you haven’t really got Apple’s latest hardware.
• How to write silly posts on a 27″ iMac.

Although you can find this information in the Codex too, I would like to show you how easy it is to add a sidebar somewhere into your theme. You’ll see that it’s just about adding some function calls here and there – that’s it and you’ve got a new sidebar that can hold arbitrary widgets.

Three simple steps

Having a list of steps you can work through seems to be the best approach for this howto. Just follow these three steps and you’ll have a new sidebar in your theme.

1. Register the sidebar

First, you’ll have to register the new sidebar using register_sidebar. Open the file functions.php of your current theme – if there’s no such file just create it – and search for calls to register_sidebar. If you can’t find any that’s fine and you can go on inserting the function call where ever you like but if your theme already got a sidebar you should find at least one occurrence of the aforementioned function.

In case there’s already a call to register_sidebar insert the new calls to this function after the existing one. This way you’ll make sure that the widgets placed in another sidebar don’t suddenly appear in your new sidebar while the other one seems to be empty; has to do with the internal ordering of the sidebars.

The code is as easy as the following: just insert the function call and adjust the name as you see fit; please choose a unique name.

<?php
# maybe other calls to register_sidebar here...
# ...
register_sidebar(array('name' => 'My new sidebar'));
# ...
?>

Want to fine tune the appearance of your sidebar? Have a look at other parameters here.

2. Inserting the sidebar into the theme

Once you’ve registered the sidebar you’ll have to tell WordPress where the widgets associated with the newly created sidebar should appear. This, of course, depends on your specific theme and other considerations as well.

For now, lets assume we wanted a new sidebar below the title of a post. We would open the file single.php – or index.php if single.php doesn’t exist – of our theme and insert the following code:

...
<h1><?php the_title(); ?></h1>
<?php if ( !function_exists('dynamic_sidebar') ||
           !dynamic_sidebar('My new sidebar') ) : ?>
  <!-- This will be displayed if the sidebar is empty -->
<?php endif; ?>
...

See that we provide the name of the sidebar registered above in the function call to dynamic_sidebar. If you want to show some default content in case no widgets are assigned to the sidebar you can do so by changing the HTML comment to something else; this may be particularly interesting if you’re developing a theme and the user hasn’t customized the sidebar yet.

If you want to read more about dynamic_sidebar check out the Codex here.

3. Adding widgets

Now that you’ve added a new sidebar to your theme you should start adding widgets. Your new sidebar should appear under Appearance – Widgets and is ready to use. If you’re not satisfied with the appearance of the sidebar or the widgets try tweaking the parameters of register_sidebar or adjust your CSS.

Conclusion

It’s pretty easy adding multiple sidebars to your theme. This post presented the basics which are sufficient most of the time. If you want to learn more about sidebars and widgets a good starting point is the Widgets API page in the Codex; extra parameters can be found there.

The more sidebars a theme has the more flexible it is. From a user’s perspective it’s just nice to display widgets just where one wants to. Since it isn’t that hard to add another sidebar users can do this on their own or hire somebody to do this for them at low costs.

Since I’m using the Copyblogger theme that currently doesn’t come with comments on several pages I changed the comment.php to use this new feature. This post documents how this worked.

How to add paginated comments

First I started reading this, that and finally this post. If you’d like to understand what you’re doing I recommend reading these too.

Basically it’s all about the new functions wp_list_comments, have_comments and *_comments_link. Just replacing the old code with these won’t cut it for the Copyblogger theme because the CSS is based on a description list, i.e. dl with dt and dd inside. We’ll have to change that to either a div or – and that’s what I did – a ul.

One more thing you’ll have to think about is whether the paged pages should be indexed by search engines. Since I’m not an expert in search engine optimization I don’t really know what to do here; regarding duplicate content I guess the robots should only index the first page. Read what Malcolm Coles wrote about this.

Making the changes

Before making changes to the original comments.php from the Copyblogger theme I renamed that file and started from scratch just copying over the bits I needed. You can have a look at the result here; the corresponding part for the CSS can be found over here.

All I did was following the recommendations here, i.e. adding the new comment loop and changing the existing CSS to match the new HTML markup. This worked great so far until I wanted to add the round corners and the speech bubble style to the CSS. The solution I opted for was a filter that adds some div’s around the comment text like so:

function copyblogger_comment_text_filter($content) {
  return '<div class="comment_text_prefix"></div>'.
         '<div class="comment_text">'.$content.'</div>'.
         '<div class="comment_text_suffix"></div>';
}
if (function_exists('add_filter'))
  add_filter('comment_text', 'copyblogger_comment_text_filter');

This way it was possible to style the top and the bottom of the speech bubble around the comment text with the prefix and suffix div.

Conclusion

Adding paged comments to a theme is almost a snap: changing the PHP code will be done in a few minutes. More likely than not you’ll have to spent some time fixing the CSS to match the HTML code; this won’t be a big problem if your theme already uses an ordered or unsorted list (ol, ul). In case of the Copyblogger theme some extra work was required.

I’ve found the generator meta tag in my fresh installation of WordPress 2.7 here, there and everywhere:

/* In the HTML header */
<meta name="generator" content="WordPress 2.7" />
 
/* In the RSS feed */
<generator>http://wordpress.org/?v=2.7</generator>
 
/* In the Atom feed */
<generator uri="http://wordpress.org/"
 version="2.7">WordPress</generator>

And the code suggests that there’re even more places where this tag might show up.

How to remove it completely

If you’re doing some security through obscurity you might have googled a little bit and found the solutions that use the following piece of PHP code just unsatisfactory:

remove_action('wp_head', 'wp_generator');

So let’s remove it completely like so:

function rm_generator_filter() { return ''; }
add_filter('the_generator', 'rm_generator_filter');

This will remove the tag everywhere: from the HTML, the RSS and the Atom feed, et cetera.

WordPress’ world of possibilities…

Now I’d like to present another solution that might make sense: What about removing the generator tag almost everywhere but not in case of RDF content? Since RDF is widely used as a format for data mining applications why not show the information to these web robots? You could do this like so:

function rm_generator_filter() { return ''; }
 
if (function_exists('add_filter')) {
  $types = array('html', 'xhtml', 'atom', 'rss2',
                 /*'rdf',*/ 'comment', 'export');
  foreach ($types as $type)
    add_filter('get_the_generator_'.$type, 'rm_generator_filter');
}

What it does is adding a filter for every type but RDF returning just and empty string for the generator meta tag.

Although this doesn’t make much sense from the standpoint of security through obscurity because making the information available in just one place would compromise your security anyway, I just wanted to show that WordPress is flexible enough to do something like this.

Download

You can download the above code packaged in a plugin here. Have a look at the code and checkout the define in line 30: set it to true or false whether you’d like to remove the tag completely or not; the default is to remove it just everywhere.

• saving the appropriate FTP commands in a text file
• using Windows’ built-in ftp command along with the text file
• adding a task to the at scheduler.

Let’s have a look at this.

The upload script

First we’ll create a file that holds the FTP commands and then we’ll write a small batch script that uses the ftp command to execute the commands from the text file; have you ever read a sentence that uses the word command more often ?

This is what the text file (upload.ftp) may look like:

open example.com
username
password
cd another-directory
mput C:filesfile*.txt
bye

It will open a connection to the given host using the supplied username and password. Then it will change the working directory on the server to another-directory and finally upload some files. Adapt everything to your needs; if you’d like to use more FTP commands, this is a good starting point.

Next we’ll create a batch script that calls the ftp command using the text file that we’ve just created. Save the following into a batch file (upload.bat):

@echo off
@set logfile=upload.log
@ftp -i -v -s:"upload.ftp" > %logfile%
@del %logfile%

It creates a log file (upload.log) and deletes it after the ftp command is finished – if you’d like to keep the log file remove the last line from the script.

Now you have a batch file that you can click on and the files will be uploaded to the FTP server. Although this was pretty easy to setup is has a great impact: You don’t have to do this manually any more.

Adding Automation

While the script that you’ve just created is fully functional you may want to run it automatically every now and then. To do this, you’ll have to:

• make sure that the script uses absolute path names
• add a task to the at scheduler

First put the batch script and the text file into a directory of your choice. Add the path to this directory in front of log file’s name in line two of the batch script and to the text file containing the FTP commands in line three.

At last you can add a recurring task with at like so:

at 22:30 /every:M,T,W,Th,F,S,Su C:Scriptsupload.bat

In this case the script that I put under C:Scripts will run every day at 22:30, i.e. 10:30 pm.

Conclusion

As we’ve seen it’s pretty easy to automatically upload files to some FTP server with Windows. For example, this comes in handy if you’d like to backup some files to another server.

Here’s my idea: What about adding another sidebar to your theme that holds some Text widgets, each representing an item in your menu? I think that’s ultra neat because you can:

• change your menu just by adding another Text widget
• rearrange the order with drag and drop
• use Widget Logic to control where your menu items appear.

Let’s implement this.

Changing the theme

Since I’m using a modified version of the great Copyblogger Theme I’ll show you how to change this specific theme. But it’s no problem to translate the following to other themes.

Basically we’ll have to change three files: functions.php, sidebar.php and nav_menu.php; I think the latter is a specialty of the Copyblogger theme. First we’ll register a new sidebar called menu in the file functions.php like so:

if (function_exists('register_sidebar')) {
    register_sidebar(array('name'=>'sidebar'));
    register_sidebar(array('name'=>'menu'));
}

More likely than not you had a call to register_sidebar with no parameters: This registered your sidebar. As you can see we have to supply a name for each sidebar; make sure that each sidebar gets a unique name.

If your theme has got only one sidebar you have to change the file sidebar.php to pick up your original sidebar; if you already had more than one sidebar in your theme you can skip this step. Search for a call to dynamic_sidebar somewhere in the file sidebar.php and add the parameter 'sidebar' to dynamic_sidebar:

if (!function_exists('dynamic_sidebar') ||
    !dynamic_sidebar('sidebar')) :

This is a line from my file and it might look different in yours. Just make sure that the code uses the right sidebar here.

Finally the users of the Copyblogger theme will change the nav_menu.php. Everybody else may place the following in the header.php or wherever the menu of your theme might be.

<?php
  if (!function_exists('dynamic_sidebar') ||
      !dynamic_sidebar('menu')) :
?>
<li><a href="/">home</a></li>
<li><a href="/archives/">archives</a></li>
<li><a href="/about/">about</a></li>
<?php
  endif;
?>

This snippet will display the widgets associated with the sidebar called menu. If there’re no widgets in this specific sidebar the three hardcoded links will show up.

Customizing the menu

Now that you’ve got a new sidebar called menu go to Design – Widgets and under Current Widgets select the menu sidebar in the drop down list and click on Show. Add as many Text widgets as you like and use them to link to sensible pages on your website. It’s as easy as this.

Since we leverage the power of the cool widget screen you can easily rearrange the order of your menu items by dragging them around. You can add other widgets to your menu as well – maybe that makes sense too.

Conclusion

As we’ve seen the concept of the sidebar is powerful and can be used for different purposes: one of them is a neat navigation menu. The new menu is easy to setup in any theme and I bet you’ll really like the way to manage it via the widget screen.

If you’d like to read more about the functions from the Widgets API used in this post I recommend having a look at this and that page.

This was inspired by Justin Tadlock’s Widgetize This post.

For the impatient: check out the code here.

The code

The actual code is very simple:

1. it executes an HTTP GET with a given URL
2. follows HTTP redirects
3. finally downloads the contents
4. checks whether there’s a meta refresh tag
   • starts over at 1. if it found such a tag
5. returns the content.

Have a look at the class TitleTest here: the private method doGet will be most interesting.

Conclusion

I was wondering why there aren’t that many tools out there which support following meta refresh tags. Since a lot of websites use this feature I thought that this would be something a lot of people might want to use when testing their websites.
Hacking a small tool that does the job is very easy though, as demonstrated in this post.

The Visual Basic script

For everybody who knows how to program in Visual Basic it’s be pretty easy to write some lines that get the files from a certain directory and deletes them if they haven’t been changed for some time. For everybody else: just copy the following lines into a file e.g. cleaner.vbs.

1
2
3
4
5
6
7

Dim fso, f, f1, fc
Set fso = CreateObject("Scripting.FileSystemObject")
Set f = fso.GetFolder("C:foobar")
Set fc = f.Files
For Each f1 in fc
If DateDiff("d", f1.DateLastModified, Now) > 7 Then f1.Delete
Next

All that’s left to do is to change the folder in line 3 to whatever you want. Have a look at line 6 and adapt the number of days, currently 7, to your needs.

Running the script

The at command helps you to run programs at a certain time. Let’s say we want to run our script every day at 22:30 o’clock (that’s 10:30PM) we would type this on the command prompt:

at 22:30 /every:M,T,W,Th,F,S,Su C:Scriptscleaner.vbs

If we just type at we’ll see all the tasks that are planned for execution.

Conclusion

With a simple Visual Basic script and the at command it’s pretty easy to run recurring tasks under Windows. If your Windows server is running longer than a week without rebooting this is a really nice solution.

While the link tags were introduced in an earlier release of WordPress the meta tag came with 2.5. I’m pretty sure that the latter will cause incompatibilities with a lot of existing themes that have a line like this in their header.php:

<meta name="generator" content="WordPress 2.3.2" />
<!-- leave this for stats please -->

In this post I’d like to share my ideas about removing some clutter from your WordPress installation. Namely:

• RSD and WLW links
• generator tag
• some JavaScript

Removing RSD and WLW links

Getting rid of this stuff is as easy as using the WLW Disabler plugin. After installing and activating the plugin the links are gone. That’s great.

Getting rid of the generator tag

Maybe it’s possible to write a nice plugin that removes this tag too but a quick and dirty hack is to edit the file general-template.php; you can find it in wp-includes. On line 1187 set the variable $gen to an empty string:

// ...
$gen = '';
return apply_filters("get_the_generator_{$type}", // ...

If you come up with a clean solution to this please leave a comment.
Update: I found a nice solution and wrote about it.

Living without JavaScript

Although this isn’t really related to the previous two I’d like to share this one too. I’ve disabled most of the JavaScript that comes with WordPress quite some time ago. And it works great for me: especially the admin pages load a lot faster.

Furthermore I got rid of Prototype that doesn’t play well with SmoothGallery. So, if you’re using the WordPress SmoothGallery plugin this might be something for you.

Just open the file wp-includes/script-loader.php and comment out the line saying:

$this->default_scripts();

That’s it.

Conclusion

If you don’t use Windows Live Writer and the like, using WLW Disabler should be of no harm for you. Disabling some of the JavaScript will give you a performance boost but you’ll lose some of the nifty features at the same time.

Then I was told that the plugin as I built it wasn’t working with Internet Explorer. I booted up Windows and came up with a solution to this problem that I want to share here: don’t embed SmoothGallery and Prototype on the same page.

SmoothGallery and Prototype

Jonathan warns us on the download page that he doesn’t recommend the namespaced version of SmoothGallery because of incompatible frameworks like Prototype or jQuery.

I did some tests and found out that SmoothGallery doesn’t work with Prototype at all – if you’re using Internet Explorer. You can download the tests here: Just open the HTML files and check whether the gallery is present.

Have a look at my results:

If you try to use SmoothGallery with Prototype enabled in Internet Explorer the gallery won’t be rendered; I have tested this with version 6 and 7 of IE. No problems with Firefox or Safari though.

There’s another thing I noticed: if you change the order of the script entries in the HTML header IE will display the images of the gallery in two different ways. Either you’ll be able to see all pictures in the gallery or you’ll just see the first one.

Another observation is that SmoothGallery breaks apart if you insert an a tag with the name set to options. Once you’ve inserted such an anchor IE won’t render the gallery; again no problems with Firefox or Safari.

Conclusion

I’ve just explained what I observed testing JonDesign’s SmoothGallery and Prototype with Internet Explorer, Firefox and Safari. I didn’t take a look at the JavaScript and didn’t search for a solution there.

If you want IE users to watch a smooth gallery on your website it seems that there’s no other way than to get rid of Prototype – remove it at least from the specific page you’re using a SmoothGallery on.