After several years of using Inanis’s I7 theme (Styled after Windows 7), I decided to go for a cleaner, more modern look – stepping away from the slower and chaotic I7 to WordPress’s own Twenty-Twelve. I’m really enjoying how it makes the content stand out more, rather than get lost in the distraction the theme itself creates. It also loads faster and by being responsive, looks a lot better on all of my devices. I’m sure that over the next year, I am going to end up creating a child theme based off of it as I find small things I would like to customize but for now, I’m exceptionally happy with how it’s working and I’m absolutely loving the clean, minimalistic view!
Category Archives: WordPress
Quick Maintenance Update
I recently became aware of several problems with the website’s contact form system leading it to purge all incoming messages (or leave them hanging without pulling them in). I’ve made several changes today which should resolve that series of problems. If you’ve tried to send me an email recently and noticed that it didn’t go through, I apologize. It should be working at this point.
What I Like (And Dislike) About WordPress 3.0
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A couple of weeks ago WordPress (the software that powers this site), popped up a notification that version 3.0 Thelonius was ready to download and install. I held off on the upgrade for a while because of many problems I have had upgrading from version to version with WordPress. I have to admit though I was very pleasantly surprised with the ease of the installation. I simply hit upgrade, entered my ftp information and waited for it to think. A little less than a minute later, I was running WordPress 3.0. It was absolutely amazing, there were no problems, it just worked. This was a great change from version upgrades before, many times they have broken compatibility with lots of plugins (WordPress 2.8 for example) and broken the theme. This time, all of my plugins worked, the theme worked and there was absolutely nothing that needed changing at all. What I found incredible is that they were able to combine WordPress Multiple User directly into WordPress 3.0. On my one internal testing site (on localhost), I was able to update directly from WPMU to WP 3.0 also with no problems.
WordPress 3.0 ships with a new theme called TwentyTen. Kubrick (which has been the default theme for a while) has finally been replaced with something that is fully compliant with Web 2.0 standards and looks amazing. The only reason that I’m not using it myself is because while it is an amazing theme, it isn’t “techie” enough for my liking. It’s still a great theme, but I probably won’t be using it, at least not for this site.
However, as amazing as WordPress 3.0 is; it still (like everything) has it shortcomings. Namely compatibility with BuddyPress 1.2.4.1. While the basic install of BuddyPress is still as easy as ever, the combination with bbPress is broken again. Now attempting to enable the bbPress portion of BuddyPress results in a bb-config.php being created, no database tables being created, and an overall total mess. Basically the forums function is completely broken and this makes a large portion of BuddyPress and by extension WordPress useless. This is a rather large bug and whether it is with WordPress 3.0, BuddyPress 1.2.4.1 or with the version of bbPress included in the BuddyPress install, it needs to be found and fixed quickly.
Automattic is rather good at putting out bugfixes and I’m sure that once they know about it, they and the full team of Open Source Developers behind WordPress, BuddyPress, and bbPress will patch this bug and everything will be working again. It will just take a little bit (more) time!
Why I Switched Back to Intense Debate for Comment Management
Previously, I wrote Why Intense Debate Still Isn’t Ready for WordPress Use! Since then, my view on Intense Debate has changed. As I mentioned earlier, I’ve always been a big fan of Automattic’s attempts to combine user accounts between various services allowing us as blog holders to simplify the number of logins we need to remember. Nearly two months back, Intense Debate attempted to add themselves to the Autommatic “account combined” list.
It had mixed success because while it allowed those of us with WordPress.com accounts to comment through Intense Debate, we still had two profiles. There was an Intense Debate profile and a WordPress.com profile. This created confusion because we now had two accounts instead of just the one that we were supposed to. The intentions were to fix this soon, but it still hasn’t happened. Here’s why it affected me:
I decided to try out Intense Debate myself to see if it would fit the needs of this site. I ended up creating a new Intense Debate account, not realizing that I could just sign on with my WordPress.com login and password. I linked this site to and my comments synced perfectly with Intense Debate. Then of course, I read this post and decided that I wanted my Intense Debate profile to be the same as my WordPress.com one. Of course, I deleted my Intense Debate account and then reset the plugin. I tried to connect it to my “new” account but of course, it wouldn’t let me do that. It seems that you need to disconnect your WordPress blog from Intense Debate before deleting or switching accounts. Now I’m stuck, without Intense Debate. My hope is, that when the merger goes through properly, they will realize that my orphaned blog belongs to my WordPress.com account and attach the two together. That would save a lot of hassle for all of us who don’t read directions properly before beginning.
Since then, Intense Debate support have looked into my accounts and have combined the two of them under my wordpress.com account and I no longer have two accounts, 🙂 They believe that all other accounts should be combined by the end of the year, which with the volume of accounts they have is understandable.
So, here I am: running Intense Debate again except this time with only 1 account!
Why Intense Debate Still Isn’t Ready For WordPress Use!
Intense Debate is definitely one of the best debate/comment systems out there. There’s no question of that here! Automattic has done a brilliant job with Intense Debate but it still needs a lot of work. I love the fact that one Intense Debate account allows you to login to many different sites to post comments because of their diverse and widespread plugins for many different platforms. It certainly is easier to users and to webmasters because they don’t have to worry about pruning for spam and checking on their spam plugins. Sure, a webmaster still needs to look into those but with Intense Debate, the pruning is all handled by them and not by you. The time needed to clean up the spam is greatly reduced.
I for one was very excited when Intense Debate announced WordPress.com Sign In. I don’t know if you have noticed but Automattic has slowly been implementing that across all of their platforms. However, across their other platforms, they have also included account mergers, merging accounts between services with the WordPress.com account with identical email addresses. That is where they really shine. I’ve had a WordPress.com account for a while, because I needed the API Key for Akismet. I’ve also had a Gravatar because I love not having to set my avatar up on every site I start up. Late last year, they merged the databases of Gravatar with WordPress.com and my two accounts became connected. There was no longer a disconnect.
However, the Intense Debate implementation failed in this context. Account Mergers are not possible at this time. The Intense Debate Team said:
If you already have both IntenseDebate and WordPress.com accounts, don’t worry – we will be merging your accounts in the next phase of our integration, so keep commenting!
That’s good, it means that integration is coming but it’s still not quite ready for mainstream use. Let me give you my own story.
I decided to try out Intense Debate myself to see if it would fit the needs of this site. I ended up creating a new Intense Debate account, not realizing that I could just sign on with my WordPress.com login and password. I linked this site to and my comments synced perfectly with Intense Debate. Then of course, I read this post and decided that I wanted my Intense Debate profile to be the same as my WordPress.com one. Of course, I deleted my Intense Debate account and then reset the plugin. I tried to connect it to my “new” account but of course, it wouldn’t let me do that. It seems that you need to disconnect your WordPress blog from Intense Debate before deleting or switching accounts. Now I’m stuck, without Intense Debate. My hope is, that when the merger goes through properly, they will realize that my orphaned blog belongs to my WordPress.com account and attach the two together. That would save a lot of hassle for all of us who don’t read directions properly before beginning.
Therefore Intense Debate isn’t quite ready for WordPress use. It’s very close and it’s getting closer, but there is still a short ways to go. Once they manage to complete the merger, I for one will be quite pleased with them. I’m just hoping the “next phase of [their] integration” happens soon!
Domain Change…
When I first started this blog, I owned the domain http://rohan-kapoor.com. I wanted the domain https://rohankapoor.com but unfortunately for me (at the time) the domain was owned by another Rohan Kapoor who co-incidently wasn’t using it for anything. Strangely enough, when I checked the whois records last June, I surprising found that the domain https://rohankapoor.com was available! I bought it at that time and have since been redirecting it to http://rohan-kapoor.com. Some of you may have noticed that now the exact opposite has happened. Instead I’m now redirecting from http://rohan-kapoor.com to https://rohankapoor.com. My reasoning behind that change was that the domain https://rohankapoor.com looks much better than the same domain with a dash in it. It also makes it easier to find according to many of my friends. Therefore to make it easier for friends and colleagues to find me online, I decided to move my blog over to https://rohankapoor.com. On the webserver end, this is actually so easy it’s almost a joke! As I’m running Domain Mapping to map the blog to the domain, I just simply removed the dash that the domain was mapped to and it just works! I’ve requested google to make the needed changes on their end to move the site over within their database. According to Google’s Webmaster Tools, this process is likely to take 3 months to get completed! Additionally, I need to change out the links on many of the sites I’ve worked on to say https://rohankapoor.com instead of the old address. There should be no problem contacting me because of the domain change as the two email addresses and domains are run seamlessly through Google’s Apps Service! My plan is to keep everything on https://rohankapoor.com for now!
In regards to the many subdomains of http://rohan-kapoor.com, currently they are going to stay at http://rohan-kapoor.com though at some point I will transition them over to https://rohankapoor.com. The old addresses will be seamlessly redirected with 301 Redirects which should cause no problems to the end users!
It’s good to finally be moving everything to the https://rohankapoor.com domain name! It seems more professional, you know?
Added A Page for WordPress/MU Favicon
After being told off by mercime for not having a page for WordPress/MU Favicon, I finally got around to pulling it’s page out of Drafts and updating it to show the latest information regarding version 1.1. 🙂
It appears that it took me long enough to pull it together, but hey, I was busy. Anways better late then never.
The homepage for WordPress/MU Favicon is here.
And for anyone interested, here is the changelog:
—————————- Changelog: —————————-
1.1
- readme.txt fixed
1.0
- First Release
- Working with 2.8.4
New bbPress Admin Updated… Again!
I released version 3.0 of New bbPress Admin today! This version is mainly a bugfix release with no new functionality. You can see the changelog for more details.
—————————- Changelog: —————————-
3.0
- Successfully stops the Login/Logout Problem
- Successfully stops the Headers Being Sent Problem
- As Far As I Can Tell, It Is A Bug Free Release
- Works with WP/WPMU 2.8.x and bbPress 1.x
2.1 Beta
- Attempts to solve the Login/Logout Problem
- Attempst to solve the headers Being Sent Problem
2.0
- Second Version of bbPress Admin. It has been adapted to have a backend interface to set the forums directory.
- Looks Neater and is much easier to use.
- Works with WP/WPMU 2.8.2 and bbPress 1.0.1
1.0
- First Version of bbPress Admin. It is very simple and rudimentary at this point.
- Working with WP/WPMU 2.8.1 and bbPress 1.0.1
You can view the plugin page here. Or download directly from the WordPress Plugin Repository here.
Currently version 3.0 is the most stable version with no bugs that I know of!
Enjoy 🙂
Current Spam Protection for WordPress/WordPress MU
Currently there are (in my mind at least) four good spam protection plugins for wordpress and wordpress mu. Each one has their merits and I have used/am using all of them across sites.
First is Akismet. Akismet is created by Automattic, the team behind the creation of wordpress.org, wordpress.com, buddypress.org, and bbpress.org. All projects listed above are opensource except for wordpress.com and akismet. Akismet is probably the number 1 spam blocking tool for wordpress blogs and is truly amazing. It has just 1 problem, it requires an API key to use. So no problem, just go to www.wordpress.com and get one, right? Well yes, if you are running a small enough number single user blogs. The problem happens when you try to create a blog network or use a WPMU installation. You could hardcode your API Key into your plugin file but then you will get banned, very soon. Instead you need to purchase on of the Akismet Business or Organization Keys. Those are expensive and as I am using multiple sites with different wordpress and wordpress mu, I chose to use Akismet only on www.biologypowerpoints.com because it is a single site with only 1 blog installed.
Next is reCAPTCHA! In my informal testing on http://wpmu.zyrot.com it appeared that reCAPTCHA caught 99.9% of the spam. It works well as a spam prevention tool however the fact that it uses captchas is a really good reason to choose another spam protection tool. It also requires an API Key to function with however the API Key is available for free from http://recaptcha.net/. If you prefer a captcha based approach, reCAPTCHA is the tool for you.
After reCAPTCHA comes one of my favorite tools for Spam Protection, Bad Behavior. Bad Behavior seems to be doing a reasonably good job blocking spam on this wordpress mu site. It also requires an API Key which is free to get from it’s own website. It has worked well at blocking spam for me however it seems to be blocking quite a few legitimate users as well. It appears for my needs to be working but I may need to reconsider at some time.
Finally, the last plugin that makes this list is WP-SpamFree. Out of all the plugins on this list, WP-SpamFree is the only one that doesn’t require an API Key to function. This means that you just install the plugin and it works. WP-SpamFree has the most user-changeable options and has an extensive help system built into the plugin. For standard WordPress (single blog) users it works perfectly outside the box. However for WordPress MU users, it unfortunately allows the administrator of any blogs the options of the plugin. Most site owners don’t want this and as such I have modified WP-SpamFree so that it only uses the options that the site admin sets as the global options and that the options configuration page is invisible to all users except for the site admin. I’m waiting on a response from WEBGEEK before I officially release as a modified plugin.
To anyone with a Standard WordPress blog, I would recommend WP-SpamFree as the Spam Deterrent off Choice and for those using WordPress MU, I would recommend WP-SpamFree MU (will be released soon)!
New bbPress Admin Updated!
New bbPress Admin was officially updated last week to version 2.0. This adds a lot of stability along with a few other functions. The changelog details more…
—————————- Changelog: —————————-
2.0
- Second Version of bbPress Admin. It has been adapted to have a backend interface to set the forums directory.
- Looks Neater and is much easier to use.
- Works with WP/WPMU 2.8.2 and bbPress 1.0.1
1.0
- First Version of bbPress Admin. It is very simple and rudimentary at this point.
- Working with WP/WPMU 2.8.1 and bbPress 1.0.1
You can find the plugin at it’s homepage. Right now Version 2.0 is stable however there are a few small bugs that are being worked on! Version 2.1 is in BETA on SVN!
Additionally, the homepage of New bbPress Admin has been updated so that it shows the most recent information (almost identical to the information on the http://wordpress.org plugin page.