There are countless posts in the WordPress.org forums about errors that occur when using the media uploader.

Otto does a pretty good job of outlining the main issues and solution in this post.

In my experience these errors usually occur because of your server setup or memory issues. To help you diagnose where your problem lies:

1. If the file appears to upload and then you get an HTTP Error, this is most likely your server settings preventing you from uploading or processing large files in some way.

2. If you get as far as “Crunching…” being displayed, this is most likely a memory issue – the image is so big that the server struggles to create the other images sizes. Also note that it is often the actual physical dimensions of the image not the filesize that is too big and causes the memory issue.

MaxLen

The most recent occasion when I ran into this issue was on a 1&1 Virtual Server. None of the fixes I could find solved my issue and I eventually tracked it down to needing to increase to MaxLen setting on the server.

The Solution

To do this I needed to add the following into the vhost.conf file on the server. My vhost.conf file was located here:

/var/www/vhosts/domain.com/conf/vhost.conf

The following sets to value to 31457280 bytes which is 30MB:

<IfModule mod_fcgid.c>
FcgidMaxRequestLen 31457280
</IfModule>

I also added some additional settings to help with timeout issues:

<IfModule mod_fcgid.c>
FcgidMaxRequestLen 31457280
ProcessLifeTime 7200
IPCCommTimeout 7200
IPCConnectTimeout 300
</IfModule>

Then I needed to tell Plesk to update it’s information but running the following:

# /usr/local/psa/admin/sbin/websrvmng -u --vhost-name=domain.com

This configures Plesk only for one single domain, in this case domain.com. If you want to configure it for all sites run:

# /usr/local/psa/admin/bin/websrvmng -a

All done.

Reference

• Image/Media Uploader problems? on WordPress.org
• MaxRequestLen Issue on Parallels Forums

Please take a look at these brilliant graphic art prints by Susie Huson.

View more at www.susiehuson.co.uk

The latest version of WP e-Commerce (3.8.x) for WordPress is a significant move on both in terms of stability and extensibility.

This is partly down to an extensive re-build on the codebase to take advantage of some of WordPress’ latest features; custom post type and taxonomies. This has the added benefit of making it much easier for plugin developers to create add-on plugin to enhance WP e-Commerce functionality.

The key objectives now seem to be to keep WP e-Commerce ‘lean and mean’ to provide a solid platform on which to develop WordPress-based e-commerce sites, and provide additional functionality through plugins.

Part of this process includes stripping out some of the less-used parts of WP e-Commerce and turning them into plugins. Once such example is the automated ‘Also Bought’ functionality which can be found in the Marketing tab of WP e-Commerce settings.

I have worked extensively with WP e-Commerce over the last 2-3 years and frequently try to get involved wether it be fixing the odd bug or helping out on the forum – when I have time ;) so I jumped on board to help separate the ‘Also Bought’ functionality into a WordPress plugin.

Also Bought > Cross Sales

The ‘Also Bought’ functionality is now available to download as the ‘Cross Sales’ plugin on WordPress Extend.

The plugin will function exactly the same way as the current Also Bought feature in WP e-Commerce. When someone buys multiple products, this information will be saved so that we can identify that “someone who bought this also bought that”.

There are few small additions though:

You will be able to set a limit for the amount of cross sales you want to show – what looks best may  depend on the theme you are using.

By default, cross sale product images will be the same size as product thumbnail images, but there are now settings to override this if you want.

Installing/Upgrading

In WP e-Commerce 3.9 the also bought functionality will not be available by default, you’ll need to install the plugin. For those of you who are already using that functionality, don’t worry, I’ve made it easy for you… you’ll be able to install the plugin directly from the Marketing tab in WP e-Commerce and have it back up and running straight away.

You can even install the plugin now if you like. It won’t do anything until you upgrade to WP e-Commerce 3.9 and the transition will be seamless.

I recommend that you change the wpsc_also_bought() references in your single product theme template to the following:

<?php if ( function_exists( 'wpsc_cross_sales' ) ) wpsc_cross_sales( $product_id ); ?>

This will ensure compatibility in the future if you deactivate the plugin, and ensure it works with future versions. You don’t need to change this as the wpsc_also_bought() function should work for the time being, but it will cease to work in a future version of this plugin so do get around to changing it sooner rather than later.

What next…?

Expect to see other areas of WP e-Commerce being moved to separate plugins. My guess is the following features may at some point find themselves moved to external plugins:

• Social Integration, Like, Tweet etc…
• Intense Debate comment integration
• Custom survey
• Off site product links
• Personalisation options

This is my contribution towards the Hare Styling project, raising money for Great Ormond Street Children’s Hospital.

My canvas “Harecule Poirot” is just one over 200 canvases being auctioned including contributions from Helena Bonham Carter, Alastair Campbell, Cheryl Cole, Tracey Emin, Sir Alex Ferguson, Stella McCartney, Jamie Oliver, Mark Quinn, Sir Paul Smith, and Jack Vettriano.

The canvases are being exhibited at Heartbreak Gallery:

Date: Saturday 16th April – Sunday 8th May
Opening times: Mon to Sat 10am – 6pm / Sun 11am – 4pm
Admission: Free

Address: 17 Bulstrode Street, Marylebone, London W1U 2JH
Nearest Tube: Bond Street (Central and Jubilee line)
Website: www.heart-break.co.uk

Pop down there and take a look…

PS. You can bid on my canvas here…

Since being able to easy add new taxonomies to any post type in WordPress, I have had a little gripe about the UI…

Creating taxonomies can be a really useful way of categorising and navigating your content but what happens if I want to add many taxonomies to my post type?

You have the choice of specifying when a taxonomy is ‘hierarchical’ or not. If set to false then the UI is the admin will display in the same way as it does for tags; a text field which you can use to add terms. If set to true then the UI displays in the same way as categories; a box with a list of checkboxes for each term.

So what’s my issue?

My issue is all that space if you only have a couple of categories.

It’s not so much of an issue if you only have categories but if you add multiple hierarchical taxonomies it can make your edit screen really long for no reason.

…and the solution?

To solve this issue I would suggest using the css property max-height to limit the height of the hierarchical taxonomy box. This way if you only have several terms the box will collapse to fit them. If you have many terms the box will become scrollable at a certain maximum height.

Look at all that space you can save…

One problem though is that Internet Explorer 6 does not support the max-height property and will display the box long enough to fit the content – it won’t restrain the height to 200 pixels and make it scrollable.

If this is an issue for you you could use a css hack to get IE6 to support max-height.

How do I fix this?

You’ll need to update the WordPress admin stylesheet:
/wp-admin/css/wp-admin.dev.css

(You’ll also need to patch the minified version /wp-admin/css/wp-admin.css)

In the following two instance I have changed “height: 200px;” to “max-height: 200px;”.

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.wp-tab-panel,
.categorydiv div.tabs-panel,
.customlinkdiv div.tabs-panel,
.posttypediv div.tabs-panel,
.taxonomydiv div.tabs-panel,
#linkcategorydiv div.tabs-panel {
	max-height: 200px;
	overflow: auto;
	padding: 0.5em 0.9em;
	border-style: solid;
	border-width: 1px;
}

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.categorydiv div.tabs-panel,
.customlinkdiv div.tabs-panel,
.posttypediv div.tabs-panel,
.taxonomydiv div.tabs-panel,
#linkcategorydiv div.tabs-panel {
	max-height: 200px;
	overflow: auto;
	padding: 0.5em 0.9em;
	border-style: solid;
	border-width: 1px;
}

So what do you think?

Would you like to see this change make it’s way into WordPress core? Let me know what you think by voting below or leaving a comment.

I have also added a trac ticket so if you want this to be included in WordPress core please support it there too.

So after finding that one of my dock icons appeared pixelated, I recently experienced some of my dock icons become invisible.

I’m not sure what caused it although I think I was running low on disk space at the time so it may have been memory related. All I did to fix it was re-drag the application into the dock and the icon reappeared. There’s also a discussion in the Apple support forums about disappearing icons.

I recently received feedback from people saying that some web sites I had worked on were loading slowly and freezing for a second or two in Internet Explorer on each page load.

After checking that images were well optimised I guessed the next thing to check should be any JavaScript the pages were loading.

I removed all JavaScript includes and the pages loaded fine so I added them in again until I was able to re-create the ‘hanging’ issue – FancyBox seemed to be the culprit.

I’ve not yet figured out why, but the hang appears to happen around the same time that the HTML DOM structure finishes loading. During the ‘freeze’ the browser hangs completely and you cannot click any links, scroll, or interact with the page in any way.

The hang even happens when viewing the FancyBox web site in IE although is it for a much shorter period of time – maybe the duration of the hand is influence but the amount of HTML or links on a page?

As I don’t have enough time to investigate further, for the moment I shall continue to use jQuery lightBox or one of the other image popup scripts. Shame, as FancyBox is the nicest and cleanest I have found so far.

You may (or may not) have noticed that in WordPress if you want to insert an image gallery into your post it does not give you the option of insert a gallery only 1 column wide.

This seems like an oversight. I have seen loads of photo and inspiration blogs around that often include multiple images in a single column so it would seem that being able to easily insert a single column gallery would be a useful feature.

Fortunately it is possible to insert a gallery one column wide, just not through the popup media window. Here’s how…

How to insert a single column gallery

It’s just a simple shortcode:

[gallery columns="1"]

Unfortunately in the Visual editor, when you go back to edit your post the gallery shortcode will be displayed as a gallery preview. If you click the gallery edit button (top left) then the media window will pop up but the columns menu will default to 3 as there is no value of 1.

So, what’s the fix?

It’s a change to WordPress core code but it’s really simple. Just edit wp-admin/includes/media.php and around line 1818 insert an select menu option with a value of 1.

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<select id="columns" name="columns">
	<option value="1">1</option>
	<option value="2">2</option>
	<option selected="selected" value="3">3</option>
	<option value="4">4</option>

I’ve submitted a WordPress patch here. If you would like this change to be made to WordPress please add your support to the Trac ticket.

When registering a new custom post type in WordPress, there are a whole array of labels you can set for how your post type will be displayed in the admin.

The post type I was creating had quite a long descriptive label which was fine in most scenarios but in the case of the main admin menu it pushed the menu text onto several lines.

See the example on the left below – I have deliberately shown any extremely long title to illustrate the point.

It would be really useful to have an extra label for ‘menu-name’ so that you can use a different title for the menu item as illustrated in the example on the right.

I have submitted a WordPress patch which Andrew Nacin seems to have taken under his wing. You can follow the progress of the patch here.

I frequently install HeadSpace, the WordPress SEO plugin by John Godley, when I work on a WordPress site.

Recently I have been making use of the new custom post type features of WordPress 3.0 but found that the HeadSpace meta box for editing the title and description tags did not show on my custom post type edit screens.

After a bit of delving through the code I figured out the way to do this – note that this may only work if your custom post type uses the default post capabilities.

It checks that the HeadSpace class is available and if so adds the meta box to your custom post type edit screen. Just add the following code into your plugin or theme’s functions.php file replacing ‘myposttype’ with your custom post type.

/**
 * Add Headspace plugin support for myposttype
 */
function myposttype_headpspace_add_custom_box() {
 
	global $headspace2;
 
	if ( function_exists( 'add_meta_box' ) && is_object( $headspace2 ) ) {
		add_meta_box( 'headspacestuff', __('HeadSpace', 'headspace'), array( &$headspace2, 'metabox' ), 'myposttype', 'normal', 'high' );
	}
 
}
add_action( 'wp_print_scripts', 'myposttype_headpspace_add_custom_box' );

I recently tried out Joost de Valk’s Google Analytics for WordPress (version 4) and was happy to see it supported ecommerce tracking for WP e-Commerce.

I had the latest version of WP e-Commerce installed, version 3.7.6.7, and configured the analytics plugin to track transactions but for some reason my ecommerce purchases were not being tracked by Google Analytics.

I did a bit of digging around and discovered the Analytics plugin was looking for the global variable $cart_log_id from which it could get the transaction details, but this variable did not seem to exist (it did seem to be in pre 3.7.6.x versions of WP e-Commerce though).

I have submitted a patch for this for the forthcoming WP e-Commerce version 3.8 (which is currently in beta and looking great, by the way).

In the meantime, if you’re having this problem here’s how you can fix it…

The Fix

You’ll need to get your hands a little bit dirty, but fortunately you only have to edit one file. In the WP e-Commerce plugin folder open the transaction_results.php file.

Step 1

Change the first line that defines global variables to add the $cart_log_id variable:

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global $wpdb, $user_ID, $nzshpcrt_gateways, $sessionid, $cart_log_id;

Step 2

At the end of the file just before the closing php tag we’ll query the database to get the $cart_log_id that will be used by the analytics plugin:

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$cart_log_id = $wpdb->get_var( "SELECT `id` FROM `" . WPSC_TABLE_PURCHASE_LOGS . "` WHERE `sessionid`= " . $sessionid . " LIMIT 1" );
?>

…and hopefully that should fix it.

I haven’t tested this for all versions of WP e-Commerce but it should certainly work on the latest 3.7.6.7 version.

Was just browsing WordPress.org and got this server error message.

Matt, if there’s a WordPress problem is it always your fault?
Made me chuckle ;)

I recently noticed that WordPress does not seem to add style classes to the body tag for custom taxonomies in the same way that it does on category archives.

You can fix this by adding the following to your functions.php file.

function taxonomy_body_class( $classes ) {
	if ( is_tax() ) {
		$tax = get_query_var( 'taxonomy' );
		$term = $tax . '-' . get_query_var( 'term' );
		$classes = array_merge( $classes, array( 'taxonomy-archive', $tax, $term ) );
	}
	return $classes;
}
add_filter( 'body_class', 'taxonomy_body_class' );

I don’t know why WordPress doesn’t do this automatically – I guess it should be added to core. What do you think?

Getting to grips with custom post types in WordPress 3.0?

I am, and am finding they’re a great way to organise different content on your site and very easy to implement in just a few lines of code.

However, the challenge now is for plugin developers to make their plugins play nice with custom post types. The main thing I’ve noticed so far is that most plugins only tend to add meta boxes to posts and pages, so here’s the first step – getting your WordPress plugin meta boxes to work with custom post types.

A Real World Example

I needed to set some of my custom post type pages not to be indexed by search engines so I picked out the Robots Meta plugin by Joost de Valk – the best plugin for the job in my opinion – installed it, and found it was only showing a meta box when editing my posts and pages.

I’m going to use Joost’s plugin (version 3.3.1) to illustrate how you can get meta boxes to show for custom post types so download it and continue reading below.

The Meta Boxes

The file you’ll need to edit is robots-meta.php. The meta boxes are added to posts and pages by the meta_box function on line 24:

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function meta_box() {
	add_meta_box('robotsmeta','Robots Meta',array('RobotsMeta_Admin','noindex_option_fill'),'post','side');
	add_meta_box('robotsmeta','Robots Meta',array('RobotsMeta_Admin','noindex_option_fill'),'page','side');
}

Meta Boxes for Custom Post Types

Firstly we’re going to check that the ‘get_post_types’ function exists. If it does then we’ll loop through all the post types and add meta boxes. If not we’ll continue just to add for posts and pages.

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function meta_box() {
	if ( function_exists( 'get_post_types' ) ) {
		// Handle posts, pages and custom post types here
	} else {
		add_meta_box('robotsmeta','Robots Meta',array('RobotsMeta_Admin','noindex_option_fill'),'post','side');
		add_meta_box('robotsmeta','Robots Meta',array('RobotsMeta_Admin','noindex_option_fill'),'page','side');
	}
}

The next step is to get all the post types that have been registered – this will include the built-in post types for posts and pages. We then loop through them:

$post_types = get_post_types( array(), 'objects' );
foreach ( $post_types as $post_type ) {
	// Handle each post type here
}

Then for each post type we are going to add a meta box. It is import to note that when you add a custom post type you can choose wether or not to automatically create the WordPress UI in the admin. We only want to add meta boxes if the UI is generated by WordPress so we add in an ‘if’ statement to check.

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if ( $post_type->show_ui ) {
	add_meta_box( 'robotsmeta', 'Robots Meta', array( 'RobotsMeta_Admin', 'noindex_option_fill' ), $post_type->name, 'side' );
}

The Finished Function

So put all that together and this is what you get:

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function meta_box() {
	if ( function_exists( 'get_post_types' ) ) {
		$post_types = get_post_types( array(), 'objects' );
		foreach ( $post_types as $post_type ) {
			if ( $post_type->show_ui ) {
				add_meta_box( 'robotsmeta', 'Robots Meta', array( 'RobotsMeta_Admin', 'noindex_option_fill' ), $post_type->name, 'side' );
			}
		}
	} else {
		add_meta_box('robotsmeta','Robots Meta',array('RobotsMeta_Admin','noindex_option_fill'),'post','side');
		add_meta_box('robotsmeta','Robots Meta',array('RobotsMeta_Admin','noindex_option_fill'),'page','side');
	}
}

Please Note: This only deomstrates how you can add meta boxes for custom post types. There are other aspects such as checking user capabilities for different post types that may be applicable when you are saving your meta box data. See the capabilities arguments you can set in the register_post_type function.

It is now fairly common to see Google insert jump to anchor links for popular pages in their search results. For example, a search for “wordpress loop” returned 3 anchor links.

Inline Jump To Links

Then I did a search for “wordpress multiple loops” and noticed an additional jump to link within the description text.

Google has picked that section of the page as being more relevant to my search terms and has included a link to that anchor. Not only that but the description is taken from the page content immediately after that anchor point and heading. Clever.

Let’s look at the source code

In this example, looking at the page source code reveals an anchor tag followed by a heading tag followed by a paragraph of content.

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<a name="Multiple_Loops_in_Action" id="Multiple_Loops_in_Action"></a>
<h4><span class="mw-headline">Multiple Loops in Action</span></h4>
<p>The best way to understand how to use multiple loops is to actually show an example of its use...

It’s unclear wether Google in picking the “Multiple Loops in Action” link text from the anchor name or the following heading text.

Interestingly the ‘mw-headline’ class applied to the heading seems to be a fairly standard class applied to headings in Wikis, so maybe this is what Google is picking up on.

I think I may have to try out some of this HTML markup and see what happens…

Further Reading

• Official Google Blog: Jump to the information you want right from the search snippets
• Google “Jump To” Links Within Search Snippets
• Google Jump To Links in Snippets

WP e-Commerce 3.7.6 now includes better support for paging on category pages.

The latest release contains a suite of functions (my little contribution) to help you customise how pagination is displayed in your WPSC templates.

You can find an in-depth look at these functions and how to use them in the WP e-Commerce Documentation.

Below are some quick examples of what you can do…

Basic paging

Some fairly standard paging with linked page numbers, previous and next links, and arrow links to take to to the first and last pages. You can customise the text that is used for previous, next, first and last links.

<?php echo wpsc_first_products_link( '&laquo;', true ); ?>
<?php echo wpsc_previous_products_link( 'previous', true ); ?>
<?php echo wpsc_pagination(); ?>
<?php echo wpsc_next_products_link( 'next', true ); ?>
<?php echo wpsc_last_products_link( '&raquo;', true ); ?>

Limit the amount of pages

You can limit the amount of page links to show at one time. The above example shows what happens if there are 10 pages of products, but only showing 7 page links at a time. Notice also the text describing which page you’re on and that the previous and first links are greyed out when not applicable – you can also choose to hide them instead of showing inactive links.

Page <?php wpsc_showing_products_page(); ?>:
<?php echo wpsc_first_products_link( '&laquo;', true ); ?>
<?php echo wpsc_previous_products_link( 'previous', true ); ?>
<?php echo wpsc_pagination( 7 ); ?>
<?php echo wpsc_next_products_link( 'next', true ); ?>
<?php echo wpsc_last_products_link( '&raquo;', true ); ?>

Total number of products

There is a function to easily display the total number of products. You can detect if the category has multiple pages and if it doesn’t display something like this instead.

<?php if ( wpsc_has_pages() ) : ?>
   <!-- Insert pagination for multiple pages -->
<?php else : ?>
   Showing <?php echo wpsc_total_product_count(); ?> products
<?php endif; ?>

Number of products showing

You can display an indication as to which products are showing depending on which page you’re viewing.

Showing <?php echo wpsc_showing_products(); ?> of <?php echo wpsc_total_product_count(); ?> products:

What next?

The new WP e-Commerce default themes contain examples of pagination so hop into your templates and create some nice pagination…

I had a bit of a problem recently trying to convert a WordPress .htaccess file to a rewrite.script file for a Zeus server. My knowledge of the syntax for rewrite.script was non-existant so I tried the .htaccess converter provided in the Namesco admin.

This managed to get me part of the way there but the permalinks included “index.php” before the custom permalink setting.

Hunting around I found this blog post by Adam Christie in which he documents a rewrite.script for WordPress – and it works! I have provide the code below for your reference.

RULE_0_START:
# get the document root
map path into SCRATCH:DOCROOT from /
# initialize our variables
set SCRATCH:ORIG_URL = %{URL}
set SCRATCH:REQUEST_URI = %{URL}
 
# see if theres any queries in our URL
match URL into $ with ^(.*)\?(.*)$
if matched then
set SCRATCH:REQUEST_URI = $1
set SCRATCH:QUERY_STRING = $2
endif
RULE_0_END:
 
RULE_1_START:
# prepare to search for file, rewrite if its not found
set SCRATCH:REQUEST_FILENAME = %{SCRATCH:DOCROOT}
set SCRATCH:REQUEST_FILENAME . %{SCRATCH:REQUEST_URI}
 
# check to see if the file requested is an actual file or
# a directory with possibly an index.  don’t rewrite if so
look for file at %{SCRATCH:REQUEST_FILENAME}
if not exists then
look for dir at %{SCRATCH:REQUEST_FILENAME}
if not exists then
set URL = /index.php?q=%{SCRATCH:REQUEST_URI}
goto QSA_RULE_START
endif
endif
 
# if we made it here then its a file or dir and no rewrite
goto END
RULE_1_END:
 
QSA_RULE_START:
# append the query string if there was one originally
# the same as [QSA,L] for apache
match SCRATCH:ORIG_URL into % with \?(.*)$
if matched then
set URL = %{URL}&%{SCRATCH:QUERY_STRING}
endif
goto END
QSA_RULE_END:

By default the terms and conditions link on the checkout page in WP e-Commerce activates an overlay popup containing the terms and conditions text you have specified in the admin.

But what if you want the link to redirect to a page instead of triggering this popup? You just need to make a small change to your checkout template. Here’s what you need to do…

In The Admin

In the admin, instead of specifying terms and conditions text we are going to enter a URL. Make sure your URL is a full path including ‘http://’ as this will make it easier to detect wether the content is a URL or plain text.

Changes in your WP e-Commerce Theme

Instructions for WP e-Commerce 3.8:

If you have customised your theme, the shopping cart template will be in your active WordPress theme folder called ‘wpsc-shopping_cart_page.php’. If you have not customised your theme you should copy the ‘wpsc-shopping_cart_page.php’ theme file to your active theme – you can do this from the Presentation section of your store settings.

In this file look for the terms and condition code. It will be near the bottom and should look a bit like this:

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<?php if(wpsc_has_tnc()) : ?>
<tr>
   <td colspan='2'>
      <label for="agree"><input id="agree" type='checkbox' value='yes' name='agree' /> <?php printf(__("I agree to the <a class='thickbox' target='_blank' href='%s' class='termsandconds'>Terms and Conditions</a>", "wpsc"), site_url("?termsandconds=true&amp;width=360&amp;height=400")); ?> <span class="asterix">*</span></label>
   </td>
</tr>
<?php endif; ?>

What we will do is change this code so if the contents of your terms and condition is a link (beginning http://) it will write a link to that page rather than a popup. The new code with the if statement should look like this:

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<?php if(wpsc_has_tnc()) : ?>
<tr>
   <td colspan='2'>
      <label for="agree">
         <input id="agree" type='checkbox' value='yes' name='agree' />
         <?php
         if ( 'http://' == substr( get_option( 'terms_and_conditions' ) , 0, 7 ) ) {
            printf(__("I agree to the <a target='_blank' href='%s' class='termsandconds'>Terms and Conditions</a>", "wpsc"), get_option( 'terms_and_conditions' ));
         } else {
            printf(__("I agree to the <a class='thickbox' target='_blank' href='%s' class='termsandconds'>Terms and Conditions</a>", "wpsc"), site_url("?termsandconds=true&amp;width=360&amp;height=400"));
         }
         ?>
         <span class="asterix">*</span>
      </label>
   </td>
</tr>
<?php endif; ?>

Instructions for older versions:

Your WP e-Commerce theme files usually reside in the ‘wp-content/uploads/wpsc/themes/your-theme’ directory. To change the terms and conditions link to link to another page rather that popup you will need to edit the ‘shopping_cart_page.php’ file.

In this file look for the terms and condition code. It will be near the bottom and should look a bit like this:

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<?php if(get_option('terms_and_conditions') != '') : ?>
<tr>
   <td colspan='2'>
      <input type='checkbox' value='yes' name='agree' /> <?php echo TXT_WPSC_TERMS1;?><a class='thickbox' target='_blank' href='<?php echo get_option('siteurl')."?termsandconds=true&amp;width=360&amp;height=400'"; ?>' class='termsandconds'><?php echo TXT_WPSC_TERMS2;?></a>
   </td>
</tr>
<?php endif; ?>

What we will do is change this code so if the contents of your terms and condition is a link (beginning http://) it will write a link to that page rather than a popup. The new code with the if statement should look like this:

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<?php if ( get_option('terms_and_conditions') != '' ) : ?>
<tr class="terms">
   <td colspan='2'>
      <input type='checkbox' value='yes' name='agree' /> <?php echo TXT_WPSC_TERMS1;?>
      <?php if ( substr(get_option('terms_and_conditions' ), 0, 7) == 'http://' ) { ?>
         <a target='_blank' href='<?php echo get_option('terms_and_conditions'); ?>' class='termsandconds'><?php echo TXT_WPSC_TERMS2;?></a>
      <?php } else { ?>
         <a class='thickbox' target='_blank' href='<?php echo get_option('siteurl')."?termsandconds=true&amp;width=360&amp;height=400'"; ?>' class='termsandconds'><?php echo TXT_WPSC_TERMS2;?></a>
      <?php } ?>
   </td>
</tr>
<?php endif; ?>

And that’s all there is to it.

Just released an update to the List Pages at Depth plugin for WordPress.

This update fixed a pretty major bug which prevented the list showing the correct branch of subpages when the start depth was greater than 1 (secondary level pages).

Now this is fixed you’ll be able to display a list of only tertiary level pages – Useful if you have a site with a horizontal navigation with drop down menus for secondary level navigation, and want to show and subpages of the secondary level as a list in your sidebar.

What’s more the plugin now includes a widget so you can easily add a list of subpages into your sidebar.

Widget Examples

The following configuration will display a list of secondary and tertiary level pages (depths 1 to 2) for the currently selected primary navigation item. The list of pages will show for all pages that are subpages (or sub-subpages) of that primary page.

The widget below will only display the tertiary level (depth 2) of navigation for subpages of the currently selected secondary level page.

Recently I upgraded my Adobe Suite to CS4 and upon launching one of the application this dialog box appears…

I have been using Adobe products for many years. From my early days in design I was using Photoshop and Illustrator, and also using Macromedia’s web design products like Flash, Dreamweaver and Fireworks which were then acquired by Adobe in 2005.

In recent years I have found the the quality of the Adobe products, particularly their web development applications, Flash, Dreamweaver and Fireworks, has been slowly getting worse.

I can’t put my finger on exactly when things started to go downhill but I have a feeling it was around them time they introduced a JavaScript API into their products. The benefit of the API is that it allows users to create add-ons for Adobe applications that can automate common tasks or create new edit panels etc, enhancing the application’s functionality and streamlining workflow. A nice idea.

Now, the JavaScript API may not be to blame at all, but how many times do so see a little ‘x’ in your web browser indicating that there is a JavaScript error on the page? And how many times has your browser hung or crashed due to a timeout error caused by a JavaScript? I can’t help thinking that the JavaScript API may be the reason the my Adobe applications seem to be less stable and crash more often than they used to. I might be wrong, this is just how it feels as a long-time user of the products.

So, back to the dialog box…

Does this mean that Adobe have now finally recognised that the stability and quality of their products needs to be addressed?

Is spying on our attempts to use their software (with permission, obviously) an indication how desperate they are to act on their users’ feedback to improve the robustness of their faltering web suite? If this is what it takes to gather enough useful data for them to be able to get things back on track then count me in.

Of course it could be that they only want to study user behaviour so they can improve the UI of their products but I seriously hope that one of Adobe’s main objects is to use the data to gather more accurate details about crashes and errors so they can focus on making their applications rock solid and stable.

In the meantime, I know there are now many other high quality affordable or open source web development applications available that I could turn to, but I don’t want to. I like using Dreamweaver. I like using Flash. I like using Fireworks.

I really hope that any data Adobe manages to collect through this program helps them resolve the issues with their products. If they are able to figure out why Fireworks crashes on me incessantly throughout the day I will be much happier (and much more productive).

Further Reading

• Adobe Product Improvement Program
• An open letter to software developers RE Adobe Fireworks
• Extending Fireworks (using the JavaScript API)
• Extending Dreamweaver (using the JavaScript API)
• Extending Flash (using the JavaScript API)