WordPress Plugins / Hacks

I've been experimenting a bit with some of the plugins available on "the market" for Wordpress. It's nice to see that so many people participate in the enhancements of this great product. There is a BUT. Several plugins I tried were specially made for a none Windows platform. It would be nice if this was mentioned BEFORE I even downloaded them. It would save me a lot of trouble trying to get them to work. Anyway, I added some anti-comment-spam stuff (don't know yet if they work). Next 'project' will be to find a plugin (or hacks as they are sometimes called), which enables me to submit images by mail (or phone) to this blob. If I try to submit an image by mail, it just adds a bunch of gibberish (aka BASE64 encoded stuff) to the frontpage. The ones I found so far are non Windows-based :cry:. The quest goes on.

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Madonna in Concert (part 2)

The concert was awesome. I've had my fair share of concerts (Live, Robbie Williams, Coldplay, U2, Tina Turner, Genesis, Sting, etc.), but this one blew them all away (by far). It's the first time as well that I wouldn't mind visiting the same concert twice, and pay the full price again (€100 for a field ticket).

The concert itself was kinda split into two parts. The first part was mostly about displaying all the wrong doings in the world (cruelty to animals, hunger, aids and wars in Africa, Middle Eastern problems, position of women in the Islam). All these subjects were displayed on giant video screens, and supported by vocals, theatre etc. The combination of the music, and the multimedia on the giant displays was phenomenal. The second part was without a specific message (or the message would have been "Have Fun"), and lot's of great hits were played. The week before the concert, there were some protests about some Christian (extremist :) ) groups in the Netherlands. They wanted to "ban" the concert. During the concert, Madonna would appear nailed to a cross. The "event" took place during a revised version of "Live to Tell", which displayed all the horror taking place in the world, and those responsible for it (the Pope, our great friend George W. Bush, Rumsfeld, Tony Blair, Middle Eastern leaders, etc.). I don't think that anyone would protest against it (Madonna on the cross), if they would know the reason for doing it. I definitely didn't. The photos I made (20+) can be viewed on my Flickr page. Note that the quality is not that good, but that's what happends with a small digital camera (Canon Digital IXUS 400) with limited features for shooting in poor light, and an inferior flash (for large spaces). Anyway, I'll definitely visit her next tour if it comes along.

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Installing WordPress v2.x on IIS6.0

This entry describes the challenges I faced when I tried to install WordPress on a Windows 2003 webserver. The WordPress website has a page about installing WordPress in 5 minutes. Well, I know now that this is impossible. Especially, if you're trying to install it on a machine without PHP already installed and configured with MySQL. I started out with a webserver which had MySQL v5.x running. This server was configured correctly, since I used MySQL for ages. This post doesn't describe the MySQL installation. If you download the latest Windows installer, it shouldn't be that hard to install (Setup.exe -> Next -> Next -> etc. -> Finish). I started out with "installing" PHP v5.1.6 for Windows. Somehow I was hoping to get a nice installer, but all I got were some files in a zip container :(. Anyway, I extracted those files to "c:\PHP" on my webserver. All I needed to do now is to configure PHP by editting "PHP.ini" (I hate those long ini files :x). As a starting reference I used the recommended INI file in the PHP directory. Scrolling through the file (which is thouroughly documented inline) I changed the things that I needed. Since it was the recommended ini file I didn't bother much on all the possible features. I just wanted to get Wordpress to work. The following text is the result of a couple of hours trying, searching the Internet, and cursing that the (online)manuals failed in every single way. Step 1: Extract the PHP files to "c:\PHP". Editting the PHP.ini file is not necessary for PHP to work initially under IIS. This will be discussed later on. Step 2: Get PHP enable under IIS. I created a (standard) website under IIS which I called "Wordpress". After that I needed to enable PHP for that website. I used the ISAPI filter for PHP instead of the CGI processor. Open the properties of the "Wordpress" website, and open the ISAPI filter tab

Press the "Add" button

Call the filter name "PHP", and locaten the PHP ISAPI-filter (in my case "c:\PHP\php5isapi.dll"). When finished press "OK", and press "OK" again in the earlier screen. Now I needed to tell IIS what to do when it encounters .php files. This is done under the "Home Directory" tab.

Set the execution permissions to "Scripts only", after that, press the "Configuration" button.

Here I added the PHP extension by clicking the "Add" button.

The executable is (again) the ISAPI filter, which I configured as an ISAPI filter earlier on. Just click "browse" and locate the php5isapi.dll file in the "c:\PHP" directory. From this point on all open IIS windows can be closed by pressing "OK". The only thing left is to restart the Webserver.

Resetting IIS can be done by the commandline by entering "iisreset.exe" in a dos-box.

Step 3: Testing PHP Create a file called "phpinfo.php" in the root of the Wordpress website. The content of this file should be:

< ?php // Show all information, defaults to INFO_ALL phpinfo(); // Show just the module information. // phpinfo(8) yields identical results. phpinfo(INFO_MODULES); ?>

After saving this file, go with your browser to your website and open the phpinfo.php file. I received a nice page displaying various settings etc. from PHP. Note that the first table displays the location of the PHP.ini file used for the PHP engine. It points by default to the Windows directory. More on this in Step 4.

Now I needed to enable MySQL support for PHP

Step 4: Edit the PHP ini file

IMPORTANT: move the PHP.ini file to the Windows directory, and than start editting it. Somehow, the PHP engine expects the file over there. When I didn't get it to work initially (you get an error "Your PHP installation appears to be missing the MySQL which is required for WordPress." when you try to install/configure Wordpress. Wordpress relies heavy on the MySQL database, so I needed to tell PHP to use the MySQL extensions. Extensions were disabled by default, so I needed to remove the semicolon infront of the extensions line, and point to the location of the "ext" directory within the PHP tree:

extension_dir = "c:/php/ext/"

Note that, eventhough I'm installing on a Windows server, I used forwarded slashes "/", instead of the regular backslash "\". If you use the backslash in the PHP.ini file it won't work!!!!

Now I needed to enable the MySQL extension itself. Around line 630 in the ini file are the supplied Windows extensions. Remove the semicolon from the following lines:

extension=php_mysql.dll extension=php_mysqli.dll After this reset the webserver (again) with "iisreset.exe" command from the commandline. Step 5: Verifying MySQL support Open the phpinfo.php page again in the browser to verifiy that MySQL is enabled. Some where on the page should be a table called "Mysql". If it's not there, than there's no MySQL integration, and the installation of Wordpress won't work.

From this point on, you can use the famous 5-minutes-installation guide on the Wordpress website. Step 6: Enable the upload of files though Wordpress When I tried to upload the images used in this post I gort an error stating that WordPress wasn't able to create the folders and files. It seemed that I needed to add the anonymous account to create/write files. Since I didn't want this on all my directories I added the IUSR_ account with write and modification right only to the wp-content folder of the WordPress installation.

This might impose some security risks. I will try to find out if there is an other (more secure) way of dealing with this.

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Madonna in Concert

A while ago, the sales of Madonna tickets started for her concert in the Amsterdam Arena. Madonna is one of those artists which you need to see live at least once in my opinion. I tried to get myself a couple of tickets, but failed. The two concerts were sold out in less than an hour :(. Last Friday I received a call from my brother that a friend still had some tickets available, so my luck was changing :-). Thankfully the tickets are field-tickets, so the audio should also be pretty decent. The last concert I attended in the Arena was a concert of Robbie Williams, and back then, we had seats somewhere up in the Arena. This resulted in hearing the concert 3 times through the terrible echoing in the Arena :(. Anyway, I'll be bringing my Canon Digital IXUS along, so pictures will be available some time after the concert on my flickr page.

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Opening post

After years of developping my own website in Macromedia Adobe Coldfusion, it was time to leave those sort of things 'to those who do it best'. I tried to make my own blog, and, somewhere along the way, it worked (surprisingly). Although it was nice to use something you created yourself, it lacked some of the cool features the 'professional' blogs have. I just didn't have the time to keep developping those things. So, I downloaded 'Wordpress', and unfortunatelly it needed PHP as a scripting engine. The alternative would have been 'Movable Type', which uses Perl. I'm a n00b at both those languages, so I decided to take the most popular scripting engine... PHP. Thank god, that I can use both Coldfusion AND PHP on the same webserver, so I can still do a little development in Coldfusion. The nice thing about Wordpress is (and I'm sure Movable Type and all the others have similar features) that you can add plugins to the blog. I'm not yet familiar with them (hey, I got this one operational last night 8) ), but additional features, and some redesign, will be on their way in the next couple of weeks. I will also try to "port" (and translate :( ) my original post from the 'old' Redelijkheid.com website to Wordpress. So that the old info won't be destroyed. In the mean time, the "old" blog is available under http://www.redelijkheid.com/oldblog. For the time being both my public websites (redelijkheid.com and switched2mac.com) will be pointing to this blog. This means that you might even catch some of my adventures on the Apple platform. Actually, I'm writing this on my Mac Book Pro :-) So, stay tuned.

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