I have upgraded my blog to WordPress v3.0 which was just released a couple days ago. As I always do, I backed-up all my files and database before proceeding. I have a local copy of my blog on the PC so I upgraded it first. I did the auto upgrade option again which seemed to have worked well. Even so, once again I had to edit the /wp-includes/vars.php file to force $is_apache to true (see below) since the SERVER_SOFTWARE variable comes back as WebServerX instead of Apache.
/**
* Whether the server software is Apache or something else
* @global bool $is_apache
*/
//$is_apache = ((strpos($_SERVER['SERVER_SOFTWARE'], 'Apache') !== false) || (strpos($_SERVER['SERVER_SOFTWARE'], 'LiteSpeed') !== false)) ? true : false;
$is_apache = true;
/**
* Whether the server software is IIS or something else
* @global bool $is_IIS
*/
$is_IIS = (strpos($_SERVER['SERVER_SOFTWARE'], 'Microsoft-IIS') !== false) ? true : false;
I also had to edit the /wp-login.php file and add session_start(); at the beginning for the Register Plus plug-in to work properly as PHP sessions are not automatically started at my webhost (I could make them auto-start if I wanted but I’d rather have control of it via my scripts):
Now I could have stopped here; however, I wanted to use the new default WordPress theme, Twenty Ten which had a wider footprint and additional functionality beyond the previous default theme. I also figured it would be the most stable and up-to-date theme to work with the new WordPress version. I made of a copy of the theme and placed it into its own directory, giving it my own name.
Since this was a new theme, I had to modify some of the PHP files to add my custom code. All I really had to do was add a JavaScript code snippet to the /mytheme/header.php file that some of my archived pages use to show and hide parts of their content. I also had to add a piece of code to the /mytheme/comments.php file for the Math Comment Spam Protection plugin to function; however, this theme’s coding of the comment form was much different and from what I could tell would have to do a lot of hacking around with the code to get it to work. So, I decided to look for something else. I came across the Block-Spam-By-Math plugin. This one worked with the new theme and I didn’t have to add any additional code anywhere to make it work! During this time frame where I did not have a functioning Math protection plugin, Akismet caught around 55 spam comments! This was in less than a day and a half. Since adding in the new plugin, Akismet has only seen one new spam comment. This just proves how many spam comments a plugin like this will stop.
Update: August 24, 2010: The Math Comment Spam Protection is now compatible with WordPress 3.0.1 and have switched my blog back to using it.
At this stage all I’m really doing is playing around with CSS styles to get the blog to appear how I want. This is where things like Firebug for Firefox come in real handy by telling me where an element is getting its style from. It will tell you about the element’s inheritance, which file(s) contain the CSS, and the line numbers within those files. By the way, I found the CSS Tutorials at W3Schools to be rather helpful in testing out various font-size and line-height combinations which this theme seems to use heavily. I may change its use of fixed pixel sized line-heights in favor of relative values so that they scale properly with changes in font size, we’ll see. 🙂
Before I close and while there’s still 30 minutes left in the day, I just wanted to wish my dad and all the other dads out there a Happy Father’s Day!! 😀