Posts Tagged ‘plugin’

How to Downgrade WordPress install to a prior release to Fix problems with wordpress after upgrade

Friday, October 27th, 2017

howto-downgrade-wordpress-to-a-prior-previous-version-easily-with-wp-downgrade-plugin-step-by-step-guide

Are you a wordpress website or blog owner? Did you recently upgraded to the latest WordPress release as you wanted to always keep ahead with security and latest wordpress functionalities ?

but out of a sudden components of WordPress stopped working after the upgrade …

I'm one of this and recently I've upgraded WordPress to 4.8.2, hopeing that this would make my blog even better with the fresh new wordpress but suddenly my Widgets stopped working, e.g.

 

Appearance -> Widgets

 

Show me strange blank page, when I tried to debug that in browser, with browser console in Google Chrome and Firefox ESR / Opera with Inspect elements, I could see some partially generated webpage, so I investigated further to see what in reality is creating my WordPress Widget troubles, I tried adding WordPress Debugging in wp-config.php for those who don't know how to do it to do so, you need to add the following line of code to wp-config.php
 

# vim /var/www/blog/wp-config.php

define( 'WP_DEBUG', true );
define( 'WP_DEBUG_LOG', true );

 

If everything is fine with your wordpress installation (e.g. directory / file permissions are reporting the fine), The log file should be situated under
 

wp-includes/debug.log


But if you enabled debugging like me and nothing was visible neither in WordPress WP generated page, neither in that log or even worse, the file is not being written, that might be an indicator of either a seriously messed wordpress installation, or bugs occuring due to combination of WordPress release with the PHP installed on the server in my case the WordPress was 4.82 and PHP is standard Debian package PHP 5.6.30

 

The next place I checked logically is HTTPD (Apache) both access and error logs and there I found the widgets.php once called is returning 500 (Internal Server Errors), so I was forced to do something to make my appearance work again.

I tried my best to make Appearance -> Widgets and Appearance -> Customize WP Dashboard menus to work but without success so I finally got pissed off and decided to downgrade WordPress to the previous version where everything was running fine.

A quick investigation in Google led to find that there is an easy to use WordPress plugin that is capable of upgrading / downgrading wordpress to virtually all official WordPress releases.

Below is shortly what I had to do to Downgrade my WP 4.8.2 to WP 4.7.3

 

1. Download WP Downgrade Specific Core Version wordpress plugin
 

 The plugin “WP Downgrade” forces the WordPress update routine to perform the installation of a specified WordPress release. The Core Release you specify is then downloaded from wordpress.org and installed as would any regular update. You can permanently stay on a previous version of your choice or update selected.

To download the plugin click here, save it to your computer and then transfer to server or directly use wget or curl commands with the exact plugin location and unzip it standardly

#  cd /var/www/blog/wp-content/plugins
#  wget https://downloads.wordpress.org/plugin/wp-downgrade.zip
#  unzip wp-downgrade.zip

N.B. ! On a shared hosting or CPanel, you might have to upload the plugin with FTP.

 

2. Enable WP Downgrade Specific Core Version wordpress plugin
 

Plugins -> WP Downgrade Specific Core Version enable


Below is a quote from the plugin website describing more about WP Downgrade plugin:

"WP Downgrade | Specific Core Version has the potential for becoming one of the best-loved plugins among those, who simply cannot update to the latest WP release.

In the past the latest WP release was the only offering for WP’s Automatic Update routine. This left all those behind, who have to wait with Core updates, until their plugins become compatible with newer WP releases. When this finally happens, more often than not there has already been yet another Core update. In the end a dreaded, cumbersome, time-consuming and error-prone Manual Update used to be the only way to go.

With WP Downgrade | Specific Core Version this is now a thing of the past. Anyone who lags behind the latest WP release is now able to use Automatic Updates even to lower WP versions. What WP Downgrade does simply is to make WP believe that the version you want to update to actually is the latest version. Because of this, there is no difference to updating to the latest version."

 

3. Configure WP Downgrade Specific Core Version plugin

 

Navigate to:

Settings -> WP-Downgrade

how-to-downgrade-wordpress-easily-to-a-previous-prior-release-wp-downgrade-screenshot

 

 

4. Install (Downgrade) WordPress to the previous release


Next you will have to press the re-install button to install the desired WordPress release, if you're unsure which was the exact previous version you used you can check the list of All WordPress official released versions here choose any version that was released few months before the latest that was creating troubles for you and do re-install with it, if you face issues with it, you plenty of other versions that are close to it with which you can try, after all one of them should be working.
 

downgrade-wordpress-howto-wordpress-re-install-button-screenshot
 

Assuming that your directory structure of the current installed WordPress is not having any permission issues, the respective version of wordpress would be downloaded and untarred over the actual latest release you're having, so soon you'll have your WP reverted to the OLD release.

Once downgrading in my case immediately my Appearance -> Widgets started working again. Hooray!

Note: that if you face some permission errors during download or install of the downgradable version of wordpress you will be notified, to fix that just take few minutes with chown command and so something like:

 

chown -R www-data /var/www/blog/


that should fix permissions for you so then you can happily again, re-run the re-Install button to finalize WP Downgrade.

Now you can enjoy your life as everytihng will be working as expected, no broken more strange plugins behavior (which is another additional effect showing incompitability between WordPress release and a Plugin, no nothing), you can sleep calmly again.

Enjoy! 🙂

Optimize WordPress Pictures with EWWW Image Optimizer, Async JS and CSS and Autoptimize for better Search Engine Ranking

Tuesday, December 9th, 2014

 


wordpress-ewww-image-optimizer_settings_screenshot-plugin-seo-for-images-wp_3

While optimizing picture performance with console tools optipng, jpegoptin, jpegtran, pngcrush (could save you a lot of server space and make pictures downloads faster (and hence increase your website responsiveness and SEO – check out), still for Blogs and WebSites based on WordPress its not worthy to loose time with console acrobatics but simply use EWWW Image Optimizer to Optimize all old or new uploaded Images.

To work EWWW Image Optimizer needs jpegtran, optipng, pngout and gifsicle to be installed on the Linux / BSD server. EWWW Image Optimizer can load the command line tools also from a Cloud, if a cloud service is running on the server. Once installed the plugin does scan all the imported WordPress Media files and can be run to optimize picture files on present blog psot / pages.

EWWW Image Opitimizer plugin does a good job in reducing file size on  NextGEN, GRAND FlAGallery galleries.

wordpress-ewww-image-optimizer_settings_screenshot-plugin-seo-for-images-wp

Here is how EWWW Image Optimizer works taken from plugin's website:
How are JPGs optimized?

Lossless optimization is done with the command jpegtran -copy all -optimize -progressive -outfile optimized-file original-file. Optionally, the -copy switch gets the 'none' parameter if you choose to strip metadata from your JPGs on the options page. Lossy optimization is done using the outstanding JPEGmini utility.
It is better if the server has not the jpegtran, pngout, gifsicle utilities installed as the plugin provides an uptodate static compiled Linux binaries.

How are PNGs optimized?

There are three parts (and all are optional). First, using the command pngquant original-file, then using the commands pngout-static -s2 original-file and optipng -o2 original-file. You can adjust the optimization levels for both tools on the settings page. Optipng is an automated derivative of pngcrush, which is another widely used png optimization utility.

How are GIFs optimized?

Using the command gifsicle -b -O3 –careful original file. This is particularly useful for animated GIFs, and can also streamline your color palette. That said, if your GIF is not animated, you should strongly consider converting it to a PNG. PNG files are almost always smaller, they just don't do animations. The following command would do this for you on a Linux system with imagemagickconvert somefile.gif somefile.png

wordpress-ewww-image-optimizer_settings_screenshot-plugin-seo-for-images-wp

Some othe plugins that could strenghten your WordPress Search Engine Optimization ranking worthy to check are:
 

  • Async JS and CSS
     

Most importantly plugin solves "Render-blocking JavaScript and CSS" warning shown during site audit with  Google Developers PageSpeed InsightBy the way Google PageSpeed Insight is a precious tool so I recommend you check if you already haven't, Google's suggestions could often double or triple daily site visitors 

What Async JS and CSS does is:

Converts render-blocking CSS and JS files into NON-render-blocking, improving performance of web page

async_js_and_css_wordpress-plugin_configuration_menu

The plugin makes ALL scripts loaded by other plugins to be loaded in asynchronous. All CSS files will be inserted inline into the document code or moved from the document beginning to the end, just before closing BODY tag (or just where you placed wp_foot() function). There are various methods to do that via plugin configuration page.
 

  • Autoptimize

     

     

     

    Wordpress-Autoptimize-screenshot-a-plugin-to-minify-wordpress-html-js-and-css-scripts

Autoptimize speeds up your website and helps you save bandwidth by aggregating and minimizing JS, CSS and HTML.

What does the plugin do to help speed up site?

It concatenates all scripts and styles, minifies and compresses them, adds expires headers, caches them, and moves styles to the page head, and scripts to the footer. It also minifies the HTML code itself, making your page really lightweight. Autoptimize is very much like WP Mnify (CSS / JS) minifaction WP plugin. The only difference and reason why you might want to use WP Mnify is it does HTML minification – something that WP Minify does not. Both plugins play nice together the only thing to be careful is not to configure CSS / JS minification in both Autoptimize and WP Minifyas this might slower instead of fasten the WP site.

A great bunch of other useful WP plugins to make a WordPress Blog friendly to Search Engines is here.

Linux convert and read .mht (Microsoft html) file format. MHT format explained

Thursday, June 5th, 2014

linux-open-and-convert-mht-file-format-to-html-howto
If you're using Linux as a Desktop system sooner or later you will receive an email with instructions or an html page stored in .mht file format.
So what is mht? MHT is an webpage archive format (short for MIME HTML document). MHTML saves the Web page content and incorporates external resources, such as images, applets, Flash animations and so on, into HTML documents. Usually those .mht files were produced with Microsoft Internet Explorer – saving pages through:

File -> Save As (Save WebPage) dialog saves pages in .MHT.

To open those .mht files on Linux, where Firefox is available add the UNMHT FF Extension to browser. Besides allowing you to view MHT on Linux, whether some customer is requiring a copy of an HTML page in MHT, UNMHT allows you to also save complete web pages, including text and graphics, into a MHT file.
There is also support for Google Chrome browser for MHT opening and saving via a plugin called IETAB. But unfortunately IETAB is not supported in Linux.
Anyways IETAB is worthy to mention here as if your'e a Windows users and you want to browse pages compatible only with Internet Explorer, IETAB will emulates exactly IE by using IE rendering engine in Chrome  and supports Active X Controls. IETAB is a great extension for QA (web testers) using Windows for desktop who prefer to not use IE for security reasons. IETab supports IE6, IE7, IE8 and IE9.

Another way to convert .MHT content file into HTML is to use Linux KDE's mhttohtml tool.

linux-kde-converter-mhttohtml

Another approach to open .MHT files in Linux is to use Opera browser for Linux which has support for .MHT

Note that because MHT files could be storing potentially malicious content (like embedded Malware) it is always wise when opening MHT on Windows to assure you have scanned the file with Antivirus program. Often mails containing .MHT from unknown recipients are containing viruses or malware. Also links embedded into MHT file could easily expose you to spoof attacks. MHT files are encoded in combination of plain text MIMEs and BASE64 encoding scheme, MHT's mimetype is:

MIME type: message/rfc822
 

Make your WordPress Blog or Site Mobile Friendly with WPTouch plugin

Friday, January 24th, 2014

make your wordpress mobile friendly plugin wordpress mobile seo logo

I bough a new Mobile Phone changing my old Nokia Communicator 9300i (powered by Symbian) with ZTE Blade 3 with Android. I'm not a big fan of big mobility myself. However as I already have it decided to test my blog with Mobile phone default browser and my blog theme looked really crappy. Knowing that the amount of Mobile devices on the Internet is increasing dramatically these days raises the chance my blog is found by Mobile user thus its nice my blog to be Mobile ready well …

To solve that I did a quick search in google and found WPToucha mobile plugin for WordPress that automatically enables a simple and elegant mobile theme for mobile visitors of your WordPress website
To install it downloaded the plugin in usual /var/www/blog/wp-content/plugins , enabled it and refreshed in Android Mobile Browser and my blog appeared great in a theme specially designed for mobile browsers as you can see in below screenshot:

my-blog-outlook-in-mobile-android-browser-with-wptouch-wordpress-plugin-screenshot

If you still haven't tried WPTouch give it a try.

Httpwatch a must have web developer and web hosting sysadmin Firefox / Internet Explorer / IPad / IPhone add-on

Monday, December 16th, 2013


Today a colleague of mine referred me to a wonderful Mozilla Firefox (Windows / Mac) plugin called HttpWatch.

HttpWatch is an HTTP sniffer for IE, Firefox, iPhone & iPad
that provides new insights into how your website loads and performs.
The plugin is quite simple it shows you all requests from your Browser to remote server with plenty of Debug information (on the fly). You can see exactly the Commands sent over the HTTP protocol as well as returned request status responce from Web Server (i.e. 200, 300, 400). By knowing the status returned by webserver you can debug odd problems with website authentication as well as oddities caused by proxies you don't know about. Besides showing responce returned on web requests HttpWatch shows also hand-shake of session ID variables. This makes the plugin  precious for Web developers and System Administrators working in Web & Middleware (Linux / Windows based Web Hosting companies)  etc.

HttpWatch is also a must have plugin for anyone looking to optimize a website for speed or for fixingwebsite responce time bottleneck issues. The size of plugin is quite big as of time of writting about 18.2 Megabytes. HttpWatch comes with separate app installer like any other stand alone Windows application.  Unfortunately Httpwatch does not have a version for GNU / Linux. Linux users could use HTTPFox, Google Chrome Developer tools or
Firebug.

Once you have plugin installed to check what's happening with a website access in (Firefox) select Tools -> HttpWatch. You will get a bottom screen new window with deug info.

httpwatch debugging accessed website information - web browser tool to optimize your website

Here is list of some of the many things for which plugin is useful;

  • Records HTTP
  • Decrypts HTTPS Traffic
  • Integrates with Internet Explorer & Firefox
  • Supports the SPDY Protocol in Firefox
  • Standalone Log File Viewer
  • Summary of Recorded Traffic
  • Grouping of Requests by Page
  • Collect Log Files From Your Customers
  • Request Level Time Charts
  • Real-Time Page Level Time Charts
  • Page Events
  • Detects Potential Problems
  • Customizable Data Columns
  • Data Tips
  • Automation Support
  • Advanced Filtering
  • Millisecond Level Timing
  • HTTP Compression
  • Network Level Performance Data
  • Extended Cookie Information
  • Shows Interaction with Browser Cache
  • Raw HTTP Streams
  • Export Data to CSV, HAR and XML
  • Import HAR files
  • Customizable CSV Export
  • Keyboard Accelerators
  • Access to Cached and Downloaded Content
  • Accurately Records Requests and Responses
  • Automatic Recording and Saving

Finally HttpWatch is a plugin to have next to Yahoo's YSlow, FasterfoxFireBug and Firefox's Web Developer plugin

Lastpass – store and manage website passwords plugin for Firefox

Wednesday, November 21st, 2012

lastpass entry screen firefox browser screenshot picture
Lastpass is a handy plugin allowing you to save and manage website passwords. As with other password manager programs, it is necessery to set one Master password which allows you to view all other website login passwords. Of course for people very concerned of security LastPass might not be the best choice, as it can reveal a possible malicious person all passwords by stealing just one. Besides that lastpass plugin sends and stores password on lastpass.com, so anyone who might hack into their server will get your account details and password. Anyways, still for the casual web user which is very lazy and less security concerned it nice.

As I see on the Lastpass's website it even was mentioned in Forbes  Business Magazine 🙂

The quickest way to install it in Firefox is to follow menus:

Tools -> Add ons -> Search (type lastpass) and click Install

After the usual browser install the plugin loads up, it is necessery to create account with lastpass.com and tick the Agreement to send encrypted password data to LastPass.

never forget password lastpass dialog

Once it is configured interesting feature of LastPass is automatic filling up of Forms.
You know how much often it is nowdays to create new registration with websites. If you have to create new registrations too frequently and fill up the same data again and again you start to get very irritated. Here LastPass will be mostly helpful as it can fill up around web-forms automatically with a predefined Form data (Fork Skele).

configure form fill automatic form filling lastpass screenshot automatically fill web page forms in Firefox

Configure automatic form filling about bank accounts, credit card information etc. LastPass Mozilla Firefox

After filling up all data, you will be redirected and automatically logged into LastPass's website Vault. This is a webplace, giving you access to see and manage all password via lastpass.com. You can put different identities inside have numerous pre-filled forms to be used as a samples for automatic form filling, add notes, create groups etcetera.

The plugin's idea is good and useful and as I said most people might have no objections using it still I don't like  fact that a 3rd party site (Lastpass.com) stores my data is very so though it was fun to test it I doubt to seriously use it in future.

Check how webpage looks with Internet Explorer on Linux and FreeBSD with Mozilla Firefox (Netrenderer Firefox plugin)

Thursday, November 1st, 2012

Simulate Internet Explorer in screenshots on GNU / Linux and FreeBSD using Netrenderer in Firefox - Internet Explorer testing tool for web developers on Linux and FreeBSD

I'm not full time web developer. But sometimes, I develop websites too or just had to do some website testing.
I'm using GNU / Linux and BSD as main server and desktop platforms for many years already and hence I don't have regular access to Windows OS and respectively Internet Explorer. In that manner of thoughts it is very useful to have a way to check if a certain website I create displays fine on Internet Explorer 6,7,8 too.

Usually whether I need to test if website displays properly its elements in Internet Explorer I do use the infamous  http://ipinfo.info/netrenderer/index.php – I guess it is almost impossible anyone is developing websites on Linux and don't know it :). Fortunately while I was googling to remind myself about the exact link location to netrenderer, I've stumbled upon Mozilla Firefox add-on extension which does precisely what ipinfo.info/netrenderer/ website does – i.e. renders a website with HTML Web Engine compatible   to most Internet Explorer versions and creating screenshots on how a website would look under Internet Explorer. Of course the plugin is not a panace and since it only makes screenshots whether there are problems with interactivity (Javascript AJAX) of a website on IE will the plugin will be of zero use. However in general it is good to know if at least the website elements are ordered fine.
After the plugin is added in the usual way as any other plugin in FF, you can start using it with keyboard shortcuts:

Ctrl+Shift+F5/F6/F7/F8 – respectively renders the page in IE5.5, IE 6, IE 7 / IE 8 Beta 2

Pressing CTRL + Shift + FX, makes the IE screenshot of site using http://ipinfo.info/netrenderer/

I'm currently running latest Firefox version 16.0.2 and here plugin works, fine I guess on most FF releases not older than few years it should work fine too.

Below is description of the plugin, as taken from plugin website:

IE NetRendered Add-on Description

Adds buttons, tools menu and contextual menu entries to get a screenshot of the current page with IE NetRenderer.

Keyboard shortcuts are also available: Ctrl+Shift+F5/F6/F7/F8 to render the page in IE5.5/6/7/8 Beta 2 (Cmd+Shift+F* on Mac).

Really useful for webmasters which are not using Windows!

You can also access the IE NetRenderer service here: http://ipinfo.info/netrenderer/index.php

Please note that the extension developper is not affiliated with GEOTEK, providing the IE NetRenderer service. You can visit his website here: http://nicopensource.free.fr/

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

How to install Adobe FlashPlayer Firefox browser plugin on FreeBSD 7.2 and higher

Monday, October 1st, 2012

Install linux_base FreeBSD port either using binary pre-compiled one or compiling via port tree.

1. Install and set up linux_base to load on FreeBSD boot


freebsd# pkg_add -vr linux_base
Opening BINARY mode data connection for linux_base.tbz (31858826 bytes).
Fetching ftp://ftp-archive.freebsd.org/pub/FreeBSD-Archive/ports/i386/packages-7.2-release/Latest/linux_base.tbz...^CSignal 2 received, cleaning up..

Or via port tree with cmd:


cd /usr/ports/emulators/linux_base-f10 && make install clean

Next add linprocfs to /etc/fstab:


freebsd# echo 'linproc /compat/linux/proc linprocfs rw 0 0' >> /etc/fstab

Mount linproc virtual filesystem:


freebsd# mount -a

2. Set linux_base to auto load on startup via /etc/rc.conf


echo 'linux_enable="YES"' >> /etc/rc.conf

3. Install other libraries on which ndislpuginwrapper and flash player depend

For me it was necessery to install linux-pango and linux-tiff, which were missing. For other people it is likely other packages on which flash pluguin and ndispluginwrapper is dependent to be missing. If that’s your case just install the required ones pkg_add-ing them 🙂


pkg_add -vr linux-pango
....
pkg_add -vr linux-tiff
....

4. Start ABI emulation and set sysctl linux variables

Make sure ABI Linux Binaries is enabled and sysctl variables for the emulated Linux kernel (via fbsd external module) are started:


freebsd# /etc/rc.d/abi start
Additional ABI support: linux.
freebsd# /etc/rc.d/sysctl start
kern.maxfiles: 50000 -> 65535
kern.maxfilesperproc: 50000 -> 12000
kern.maxfilesperproc: 12000 -> 50000
kern.maxfiles: 65535 -> 50000

5. Set some shell and sysctl variables before installing ndiswrapper and flash player

Export OVERRIDE_LINUX_BASE_PORT and OVERRIDE_LINUX_NONBASE_PORTS shell variables before installing the respective flash player. I install flash player 10 which is relatively stable on FBSD for newer flash plugins, change the var to whatever FP version.


freebsd# setenv OVERRIDE_LINUX_BASE_PORT f10
freebsd# setenv OVERRIDE_LINUX_NONBASE_PORTS f10

It is also needed to set compat.linux.osrelease=2.6.19 sysctl variable.


freebsd# sysctl compat.linux.osrelease=2.6.19

6. Install from ports ndispluginwrapper and flashplugin 10

Now installing the Flashplayer is done via flash plugin port and nspluginwrapper:


freebsd# cd /usr/ports/www/linux-f10-flashplugin10 && make install clean
....
freebsd# cd /usr/ports/www/nspluginwrapper && make install clean
....

BTW, nspluginwrapper is required because the flash player is not natively compiled to run on FreeBSD but a Linux binary.

It is also good idea to add OVERRIDE_LINUX_BASE_PORT=f10, OVERRIDE_LINUX_NONBASE_PORTS=f10 to /etc/make.conf to make the settings permanent:


freebsd# echo 'OVERRIDE_LINUX_BASE_PORT=f10' >> /etc/make.conf
freebsd# echo 'OVERRIDE_LINUX_NONBASE_PORTS=f10' >> /etc/make.conf

7. Adding Firefox, Opera flash plugin support for users

If after installing flash plugin and restarting GNOME in a certain user still t

How to fix bug with WordPress domain extra trailing slash (Double wordpress trailing slash)

Monday, July 9th, 2012

How to fix bug with wordpress extra slash, domain double slash issue pic

2 of the wordpress installations, I take care for had been reported an annoying bug today by some colleagues.
The bug consisted in double trailing slash at the end of the domain url e.g.;

http://our-company-domainname.com//

As a result in the urls everywhere there was the double trailing slash appearing i.e.::

http://our-company-domainname.com//countact-us/
http://our-company-domainname.com//languages/

etc.

The bug was reported to happen in the multiolingual version of the wordpress based sites, as the Qtranslate plugin is used on this installations to achieve multiple languages it seemed at first logical that the double slash domain and url wordpress issues are caused for some reason by qTranslate.

Therefore, I initially looked for the cause of the problem, within the wordpress admin settings for qTranslate plugin. After not finding any clue pointing the bug to be related to qTranslate, I've then checked the settings for each individual wordpress Page and Post (There in posts usually one can manually set the exact url pointing to each post and page).
The double slash appeared also in each Post and Page and it wasn't possible to edit the complete URL address to remove the double trailin slashes. My next assumption was the cause for the double slash appearing on each site link is because of something wrong with the sites .htaccess, therefore I checked in the wp main sites directory .htaccess
Strangely .htacces seemed OKAY and there was any rule that somehow might lead to double slashes in URL. WP-sites .htaccess looked like so:
 

server:/home/wp-site1/www# cat .htaccess
RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /

# Rewrite rules for new content and scripts folder
RewriteRule ^jscripts/(.*)$ wp-includes/js/$1
RewriteRule ^gallery/(.*)$ wp-content/uploads/$1
RewriteRule ^modules/(.*)$ wp-content/plugins/$1
RewriteRule ^gui/(.*)/(.*)$ wp-content/themes/$1/$2 [L]

# Disable direct acceees to wp files if referer is not valid
#RewriteCond %{THE_REQUEST} .wp-*
#RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} .wp-*
#RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !.*media-upload.php.*
#RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !.*cadia.*
#RewriteRule . /error404 [L]

# Standard WordPress rewrite
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule . /index.php [L]

Onwards, I thought a possible way to fix bug by adding mod_rewrite rules in .htaccess which would do a redirect all requests to http://www.our-company-domainname.com//contact-us/ to http://www.our-company-domainname.com//contact-us/ etc. like so:

RewriteRule ^/(.*)$ /$1

This for unknown reasons to me didn't worked either, finally thanks God I remembered to check the variables in wp-config.php (some month ago or so I added there some variables in order to improve the wordpress websites opening times).

I've figured out I did a mistake in one of the variables by adding an ending slash to the URL. The variable added was:

define('WP_HOME','http://our-company-domainname.com/');

whether instead it should be without the ending trailing slash like so:

define('WP_HOME','http://our-company-domainname.com');

By removing the ending trailing slash:

define('WP_HOME','http://our-company-domainname.com/');

to:

define('WP_HOME','http://our-company-domainname.com');
fixed the issue.
Cheers 😉

Fix Null error in WordPress comment reply with wordpress-threaded-comments plugin enabled

Friday, April 6th, 2012

I'm running WordPress for already 3 years or so now. Since some very long time. The first wordpress install, I can hardly remember but it something like wordpress 2.5 or wordpress 2.4

Since quite a long time my wordpress blog is powered by a number of plugins, which I regularly update, whenever new plugins pops up …
I haven't noticed most of the time problems during major WordPress platform updates or the update of the installed extensions. However, today while I tried to reply back to one of my blog comments, I've been shocked that, I couldn't.
Pointing at the the Comment Reply box and typing inside was impossible and a null message was stayed filled in the form:

To catch what was causing this weird misbehaving with the reply comments functionality, I grepped through my /var/www/blog/wp-content/plugins/* for the movecfm(null,0,1,null):

# cd /var/www/blog/wp-content/plugins
# grep -rli 'movecfm(null,0,1,null)' */*.php
wordpress-thread-comment/wp-thread-comment.php

I've taken the string movecfm(null,0,1,null) from the browser page source in in my Firefox by pressing – Ctrl+U).

Once I knew of the problem, I first tried commenting the occurances of the null fields in wp-thread-comment.php, but as there, were other troubles in commenting this and I was lazy to read the whole code, checked online if some other fellows experienced the same shitty null void javascript error and already someone pointed at a solution. In the few minutes search I was unable to find anyone who reported for this bug, but what I found is some user threads on wordpress.org mentioning since WordPress 2.7+ the wordpress-threaded-comments is obsolete and the functionality provided by the plugin is already provided by default in newer WPinstalls.

Hence in order to enable the threaded comments WordPress (embedded) reply functionality from within the wp-admin panel used:

Settings -> Discussions -> Enable Threaded (nested) comments (Tick)

Enable Nested Comments WordPress default wp comments enable reply functionality screenshot

You see there is also an option to define how many nested comments subcomments, can be placed per comment, the default was 5, but I thought 5 is a bit low so increased it to 10 comments reply possible per comment.

Finally, to prevent the default threaded comments to interfere with the WordPress Threaded Comments plugin, disabled the plugin through menus:

Plugins -> Active -> WordPress Thread Comments (Deactivate)

This solved the weird javascript null "bug" caused by wordpress-threaded-comments once and for all.
Hopefully onwards, my blog readers will not have issues with threaded Reply Comments.