Time to Close Comments

The WordPress 2.7 core has a setting to close comments for posts which exceed a user specified aging. Unfortunately, the core doesn’t differentiate between posts and pages. Since I need additional control, I use this wonderful plugin.

Given a choice, I would prefer if the plugin would filter the comment_status page when the post is called and change its value based on aging. This functionality would prevent having to send scheduled update queries to the posts table. I believe the core functionality works this way.

Update Feb 24, 2009 – I decided to have a go at making a theme function that would mimic the core’s behavior of closing the old posts on the fly without additional queries while preserving comments on pages. It was pretty simple. You have to remove the filter (‘the_posts’, ‘_close_comments_for_old_posts’ ), copy the function _close_comments_for_old_posts from /wp-includes/comment.php, modify it to do an is_page() check, rename your new function and then add the new filter (‘the_posts,’your_function_name’) after you’ve defined it.

Ajay’s plugin will still allow you to keep specific posts open so there’s more functionality than what I need so my solution isn’t a replacement.

WordPress Plugin: Most Comments

It’s been a while since I added a plugin to my blog but this fits a need. I tweaked the plugin to return only posts from the current calendar year when duration is set to 365. Works better for my self hosted blog.

via WordPress Plugin: Most Comments (+ Widget) | BRAND INFECTION

Event Calendar 3 « WordPress Plugins

Alex committed the Event Calendar3 plugin svn to the WordPress plugins directory. A very good thing.

WordPress › Event Calendar 3 « WordPress Plugins

Email Spam Protection » Blueberryware

Sometimes commenters really want to leave their email address but don’t realize how easily it can be scraped. I’ve been kicking around implementing antispambot on my blog but thanks to the new shortcode API in WordPress, the folks over at Blueberryware came up with a neat implementation. I think it’s a work in progress but give it a try.

Email Spam Protection » Blueberryware.

Just When You’ve Got It Figured Out

Despite my best intents, I wrote a 600 word post today. I rarely go that long so I clipped it with the more tag. Well, it’s obviously been a while because the next thing I saw was the horror of the entire feed showing up on a BuzzBoosted web site page. Come to find out that since WP 2.5, feeds don’t respect the more tag any longer.

As always with all things usability, Ozh to the rescue with his Better Feed plugin. Now when I tried some of the fancy footnoting and stuff in the plugin, BuzzBoost (Feedburner feature) demolished the CSS on the rest of the page. Turned the web page into an eye chart so I’m just using it to cut the feed off.

WordPress Plugin : Better Feed « planetOzh.

More on Eventcalendar3 and WP 2.5

Quite a bit of the hits I get here have to do with the EventCalendar3 plugin and getting it to work with WordPress 2.5. It’s really not that tough to make the small changes. I go over to the EC3 mailing list to see what kinds of problems people have with the plugin. Many folks are looking for functionality the plugin just doesn’t have. More people have problems that I don’t experience with my installation so I usually check out their blog to see if I can help.

I am always amazed how many people are running outdated versions of the plugin. Yesterday, I read a couple of support requests. They were running WordPress 2.3.x or 2.5 and EC3 version 3.1.0! I’m surprised EC3 ran at all.

The current version of the plugin is 3.1.1. RC3. Even though the it’s a ‘release candidate’, it works very well with pre-WordPress 2.5 installations. So if you find your way here looking for help with EventCalendar 3, take these simple steps:

1. Make sure you are running the most recent version of the plugin.
2. Go to the SourceForge bug/patch directory for EC3 and grab what you need to make it work with WordPress 2.5.

EventCalendar 3 and WP 2.5 Upgrade

EventCalendar3 has a couple of issues with the WordPress 2.5 update. There’s an unofficial patch at SourceForge that seems to work quite well on my WP 2.5 upgrade. The patch also addresses a javascript bug that showed up some time ago but hasn’t quite made it to the latest RC release. Hat tip to Andrew for the patch!