sjdalf Blog

I have just come across this neat Wordpress plugin called Structured Blogging, which I think is so cool that I needed to post about it.

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Today I was working on my band’s website, which is based on Wordpress. The site contains two different sidebars, 1 and 2. I encountered a problem when after I added the Search sidebar widget to sidebar 1, it was ‘used up’ and I could not add it to sidebar 2 also. After some brief searching and thinking, I realised what I could do.

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I recently started working on a review site based on Wordpress. It was clear that the easiest way to achieve review functionality was to use the Wordpress comment system. Basically, items were added to the site as posts, and post comments would serve as reviews for the items.

Having made the decision to use the comment system, I needed to then add some extra fields to the comment form, which would accept pieces of information that were part of the reviews. I searched around briefly for some information on the web regarding how to modify the Wordpress comment system, but could not find much, hence I have written the following short account of how to add custom field to the Wordpress comment system.

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There seems to be an issue with Wordpress 2.5 and greater regarding the inability of Contributors to upload media to their posts. When someone with Contributor permissions tries to upload, say, an image, they are greeted with the following message:

You do not have permission to upload files.

Well, I am not sure if this is a bug; it might be a design decision. Either way, versions of Wordpress prior to 2.5 do allow Contributors to upload media to their posts, so people who upgrade from pre 2.5 to post 2.5 might be affected by this difference.

A neat way to get around this issue is by installing the Role Manager plugin, activating it and granting contributors the right to upload files.

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I was recently writing some code for an application based on Wordpress when I realised that I would need to retain data across pages. Naturally, I opted to use PHP session handling. A quick search for the string ‘_SESSION’ suggested that Wordpress does not use the $_SESSION superglobal array. Therefore, if you are going to simple user $_SESSION in your code, you will need to place session_start(); somewhere in the code, either in a core Wordpress include file, a plugin file or in a specific file(s).

Finally, if the session handling is used as part of the Wordpress administration backend, you will probably want to terminate the session when the user logs out. To achieve this, you can simply create a function that destroys the session and call this function during the ‘wp-logout’ hook.

function clear_session() {
session_destroy();
}

add_action(’wp_logout’, ‘clear_session’);

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