So I upped the memory limit for PHP to 16Mb and all is now well. I hope.

Installation of the plugin is as simple as you can get: upload to your WordPress plugins directory and then activate from the admin area. Done! Configuration is pretty simple as well and you’ll probably find you don’t need to adjust anything from the defaults.

Actually using the plugin is, of course, simple as well. When you type into the Tags field below the post editor an auto-suggest box will be brought up with tags that you’ve already added to previous posts, which lets you quickly and easily make sure you’re using the same tags across different posts. If you save the post and then edit it you are also presented with a list of suggested tags that you can just click on to add to the list of tags. These things fit in with the existing system very well and don’t get in your way.

Simple Tags also provides some other handy features, such as managing the tags for you blog and allowing mass editing of the tags for your posts. Mass editing is excellent when converting to a tagged blog as you can change the tags for numerous posts all on one page, complete with the auto-suggest feature found in the post editor.

If you are using the tagging feature of WordPress 2.3 I highly recommend using this plugin – it will make your life a whole lot easier.

I have also started work on a completely revised theme for the site which I hope to get finished in the next week or so. I’m using The Morning After as a base and making some pretty heavy customisations as well as a bunch of cosmetic changes. The interesting thing is that many aspects of the theme are a step backwards for me in some ways, such as the CSS being far more complex than it needs to be and the semantics of the markup being all out of wack. Still, it’s a good base visually and structurally.

I used jQuery for this, just to further increase my exposure to the library, and I must say that it was extremely easy. I love the way you can simply attach functions to events with jQuery: you can see that when the search box has focus the “Search…” phrase disappears, allowing you to type straight away without having to worry about it.

After including the jQuery library, the code needed for this is:

$(document).ready(function() {
	$("#searchbox").val("Search...");
	search_flag = false;
	$("#searchbox").focus(function() {
		if(search_flag != true) {
			$("#searchbox").val("");
			search_flag = true;
		}
	});
});

Originally, I had attached the function to the click event, rather than the focus event. I realised that this was probably bad practice (since it doesn’t account for keyboard events) so I corrected it. I’m looking into ways to make the code even more compact too, perhaps by removing the need for search_flag if such a thing is possible.

If you’re planning on trying out jQuery then I highly recommend bookmarking Visual jQuery. That site is an invaluable reference during development. I wouldn’t have found the focus event otherwise!

Just from this I’m looking forward to seeing what else I can do with JavaScript and jQuery.

I have been wanting to try out some JavaScript programming for a while and I’m especially keen to get into jQuery so I decided to rewrite the JavaScript code to use that. Using jQuery is actually quite cool; doing operations on the DOM is simplicity itself. I transformed the original code into the following:

(Line wrap marked with »)

$(document).ready(function() {
	$("#searchform").submit(function() {
		location.href='http://www.chnorton.com.au/search/' + »
			$("#searchbox").val().replace(/\ /g, '+');
		return false;
	});
});

Even though it’s a little longer, it attaches to the onsubmit handler via DOM manipulation, rather than messing up the HTML, which makes it a bit easier to use and keeps a cleaner separation between the markup and the JavaScript. Good coding practice and all that (although apparently it also executes slightly slower).

As an introduction to jQuery I can say that I’m impressed by how quickly I could create some DOM manipulation code, especially considering that I haven’t really done much work with JavaScript before. I have some things in mind for further modifications to the site so look out for those in the near future.

Of course, the only problem with all this is that it relies on JavaScript to work so I have been looking into some alternatives that run on the server side. Hopefully I’ll be adding one of these in soon too.

I made these changes based on the code from Noscope’s modifications. The alterations I made to this were minor: mostly to clean up the code to my own coding style and to adapt it for my theme, rather than the default.

This mod is a pretty good idea and I’d recommend it to anyone running their own blog.

Here are the mods I did:

More link

On line 102 of wp-includes/post-template.php, change:

$output .= ' <a href="'. get_permalink() . "#more-$id\" class=\"more-link\">$more_link_text</a>";

To:

$output .= ' <a href="'. get_permalink() . "\" class=\"more-link\">$more_link_text</a>";

This is all that’s technically necessary but if you want to clean up the code a little bit (to remove a now unnecessary <span> tag) then do the following. On line 98 of the same file, change:

$output .= '<span id="more-'.$id.'"></span>'.$content[1];

To:

$output .= $content[1];

Feeds

Feeds took me a little longer to work out because I had to figure out what was going on in the content output functions before I realised what I had to change. Luckily, I’m about to tell you what to do so you don’t need to go crawling through code like I did.

At line 3 of wp-includes/feed-rss2.php, insert the line:

global $more;

So the top of the file should look like this:

<?php
header('Content-type: text/xml; charset=' . get_option('blog_charset'), true);
global $more;
$more = 1;

?>

And that’s all there is to it. Basically, the content output already checks to see if the global variable $more has been set, and if it has then the entire post is output, rather than just the excerpt. As you can see, feed-rss2.php already has the variable set, it just hasb’t declared it as a global variable so it won’t get used in the output functions.

The same thing can be done to the wp-includes/feed-atom.php and wp-includes/feed-rdf.php files, although I’m not sure how well it would work for RDF as I don’t use it.

Well, hope that was useful to you guys!

I actually came up with a nice way to list all the files that were changed by the update:
svn stat | grep -v '?' | awk '{ print $2 }' | sort

For next time I should come up with a way to just FTP these files across automatically. Shouldn’t be that hard; if I find a way I’ll post it here.