Abschließend wollten alle Plugins wieder installiert werden. Einen Schlussstrich ziehe ich bei dieser Gelegenheit auch unter die zweisprachige Pflege meiner Artikel. Einerseits wird das zuständige Plugin Language Switcher seit einem Jahr nicht mehr weiterentwickelt, andererseits schaffe ich es auch einfach vom Aufwand her nicht. Die Erkenntnis schmerzte ein wenig, aber wie man ja hier beobachten konnte, tat sich nicht mehr viel. Für eine saubere englische Übersetzung der Artikel benötigte ich etwa doppelt so lange wie für den deutschen Inhalt, was meist schon vorab zu abschreckend war, um überhaupt was zu schreiben. Ich hoffe, das ändert sich nun wieder ein wenig zum Besseren.

Ein paar Baustellen sind derzeit hier im Blog noch offen. In erster Linie entstehen Probleme durch das Plugin Language Switcher, das sich noch weigert die deutsche Übersetzung alter Inhalte auszuspucken. Auch ein neues Theme will noch gesucht und ausgewählt werden. Aber das wird schon werden.

Call to undefined function get_user_meta()

WordPress codex tells us this function get_user_meta is not available in WordPress until version 3.0. It is replacing the now deprecated function get_usermeta which is available for earlier versions of WordPress. So I came up with a little hack to get the OpenID plugin running again for my ancient 2.9.2 version of WordPress.

Simply add these lines at the top of the plugin files admin_panels.php, server.php and server_ext.php:

/**
* Hotfix for WordPress 2.x
*/
if ( !function_exists('get_user_meta') ) {
function get_user_meta($user_id, $key, $single = false) {
if ( $single == false )
return array(get_usermeta($user_id, $key));
else
return get_usermeta($user_id, $key);
}
}

This code defines a new function get_user_meta in case it is not existing already. The new function calls the deprecated function get_usermeta and returns the result so the plugin is working as expected again.

If I only had known it before writing my diploma thesis…

Addendum: adminblogger just pointed out to me, that you can tell htpasswd which algorithm to use when creating a password hash. See a short example by him at pastebin.

To get TinyMCE running again, get a fresh copy of the config file and overwrite your flawed one with it. If you need to edit the config file try a different editor. WordPad did the job for me. Just to make sure you are not running into the same problem again, check the edited file with a hex editor of your choice and see that it’s not starting with EF BB BF.

So I had to rewrite some of the code to match it Zooomr’s API and to my honest surprise it worked quite well. The plugin reached sort of a first stable alpha and although not all features supported by WordPress Flickr Manager are working, the most important of them do. This is a feature matrix of WordPress Zooomr Manager:

Because I’m a bit short of spare time right now, I’m gonna release the modified plugin in it’s current state. I’d LOVE to see someone improve it or – even better – integrate both Flickr and Zooomr support into Trent’s WordPress Flickr Manager. If you need further information on the modified code or the Zooomr API, I will happily provide it for you as far as I can.

Download WordPress Zooomr Manager

Well, I managed to get it done and here it is:
http://threewheeler.feeds.kochs-online.net/jzr-threewheeler.xml

I hadn’t finished the work on this, when Adrian came up with the next task for me. He wanted to have a news feed to follow all recent posts at simsonforum.de. This was a way easier job to accomplish. Message board software does follow strict rules when compiling the pages so parsing them is quite easy because you don’t need to take all kinds of exceptions into account. So a set of simple rules is sufficient to process all the data. Using the board’s search function my PHP script downloads a list of all recently changed threads and generates the feed based on it. Because this produces quite heavy load on both involved servers (the forum’s and mine) results are cached for at least an hour before an update is made – another script using the caching code.

You can find this feed here:
http://simsonforum.feeds.kochs-online.net/simsonforum.xml

I tried to make it as compliant as possible, but lacking most of the sellers/buyers e-mail addresses and being reluctant to publish mine to all those spambots out there, the feed isn’t completely valid. Maybe I’ll come up with a solution to that problem someday.

An optional “items=” URI query string may be used to define the maximum number of feed entries to be generated.

Well, now there is. I wrote a little parser that converts all news entries into a nice, (almost) well-formed RSS 2.0 feed. You can find it under http://kuttner.feeds.kochs-online.net/kuttner.xml. Using the optional query string “items=” you can specify how many of the latest news items the feed should contain. Default is 10.