If you aren’t familiar with the plugin, it duplicates the image management dialogue to permit you to attach images to a post as metadata using a simple graphical interface — instead of having to locate, copy, and paste the URL into a custom field.

The new version allows fields to be accessed properly outside the Wordpress Loop as well as on archive and category pages. It fixes several bugs including broken template tags and some data loss bugs that were related to post revisions, autosaves, and scheduled / future posts. It’s been tested with Wordpress 2.8.6 and will likely still work with earlier versions going back to 2.7.

I’d like to extend a big thank you to everyone who submitted bug reports and fixes for the plugin — I hope you’ll contact me so that I can give you credit (name and URL) in the documentation.

UPDATE 2/9/09: This plugin has been updated to version 0.3.1 and is available for download from the Wordpress site.

Have you ever wanted to add a custom field to a Wordpress post or page that contained an image URL — for instance, to use in a template?

You’ve probably noticed that it’s a real pain in the rear: you have to find the URL for the image and then copy and paste it into a field. If you have non-technical users managing the site, chances are they have a lot of trouble with this process.

You’re not the only one who’s been frustrated.

Well, good news. I’ve just released a plugin that allows you to use the Wordpress 2.5 media gallery to build custom image fields with a friendly graphic interface. It’s now available for download, and should be hosted on the Wordpress site shortly.

Important Update 9/26/08: Versions prior to 0.2.3 have an installation bug that causes any attempt to create a new field to fail. Please download and install version 0.3.1 instead.

The Flowers theme is free to use and distribute, as long as you retain the design and photography credits in the footer. Please do not distribute any modifications to the design.

Flowers has been tested in Wordpress 2.3 and 2.5, and may also work with earlier versions. Please report any problems you run into in the comments on this post.

Download Flowers here.

Now, although SlimStat installed and ran without a hiccup on a couple of other blogs I administer, when I tried to add it to Triopter, it completely borked my blog, aborting the rendering of any page after the first post heading and before the content. The SlimStat dashboard panel was also coming up empty.

A few other people on the author’s blog had reported this problem, but without anyone offering a solution, so I decided to look into it on my own. Here are my quick-and-dirty fixes.

Fixing blank posts

The first problem, the blank posts, was occurring because SlimStat had added a content filter function, but for reasons I can’t fathom, when WordPress called the function, it was never entered. The filter implements an optional feature anyway, replacing a specially-formatted HTML comment with a recent referrers list within the blog.

If you don’t use that function, just comment out the line that applies the filter. At the bottom of the plugins/wp-slimstat/wp-slimstat.php file (line 3606), change

add_filter('the_content', 'slimstatTagReferers');

to

//add_filter('the_content', 'slimstatTagReferers');

Fixing blank stats

The blank stats page turned out to occur because SlimStat relies on localization to output all of its results, but the code that WordPress needs in order to process this is included only if you’ve defined your locale (which most people don’t, and which requires adding a language pack).

To make the stats show up properly, find wp-includes/wp-l10n.php. Change line 3 from

if ( defined('WPLANG') && '' != constant('WPLANG') ) {

to

if ( defined('WPLANG')) {

And there you go – SlimStat should work, without breaking anything else on the blog.
I have to say, I have no clue why these problems don’t break SlimStat on the other blogs I run. Presumably it’s some sort of PHP or Apache configuration issue. In any case, I’ve now got it working everywhere, and I hope this helps someone else!

Wordpress’s famous “five-minute installation” is great. In fact, a lot of web hosts even have a “one-click” installation process available that takes even less time and doesn’t even require you to find out things like your database login.

And a default Wordpress installation is very useful, and very close to ready to use. Its defaults for posting, commenting, and everything are very useful.

But there are always a few things I like to change. There are the obvious, such as setting up a tagline, changing the example “Hello World” entry, and deleting the example comment. Then there are the not-so-obvious things like permalinks and the blogroll. Here are the first three things I did with this blog after installing and changing the tagline:

Setting Up the Blogroll

Wordpress comes with a default “blogroll”, a list of links to other people’s blogs – in this case the blogs of the Wordpress developers. Since those links are useful to have (your dashboard will keep you updated on their posts and thus on updates and tricks about Wordpress), but you don’t really want links to them, I set them all to be “invisible” (i.e. not shown on my public blog pages), and move them to a “default links” category to keep them out of the way.

Once you’ve done that, you can add your own friends’ blogs to your links list, and make them visible. Or you can wait and do that later.

Customizing Permalinks

What are permalinks? Well, usually when you write a post, it appears on the front page of your blog. As you write more, eventually that post will be bumped off the bottom of that page, and become just an archived post. A permalink is a permanent link to that post, a URL that will always reach it, regardless of whether or not it’s still on the front page.

Wordpress allows you to set up your permalinks (go to Options => Permalinks, in the admin menu) to look however you want them to (although to do so, you really need to be on UNIX-based hosting, and to make sure your host has enabled something called mod_rewrite). I use a friendly format that includes the post title, which is also great for getting your site ranked well in search engines.

You can also add other things to the URL, such as the word “archive”, the year, month, or day of the post, the author’s name, or more. Wordpress then lets you know if you need to update a special file called .htaccess in order to make sure that it can pull up the appropriate post for each link.

Changing Your Name

Finally, I like to go to the “Users” menu and add a “Nickname” to my profile. Once you save the nickname, the profile panel will give you the option to use it when displaying your name on the blog (for instance, when indicating who the author of a post is). This way, it doesn’t say that each post was written by “admin”, or whatever your username is.

Start Writing

That’s it! Just these few steps should be enough to get you started writing. After that come themes and plugins, which are wholly optional, but will give your blog more personality and make it a richer experience. And which are a topic for another post. Or three. Or thirty.