Category: Wordpress

Automated Scripted Install of WordPress on CentOS8/RHEL8 Linux

I have written a couple of installation scripts to install WordPress throughout the years.  This is the latest in that series to install WordPress 5 on a minimal install of CentOS8. Among the differences between this script and previous ones, is that this will be installed in it’s own directory /wordpress rather than /. Basically, write the script as seen below,…

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Automated Scripted Install of WordPress on CentOS7/RHEL7 Linux

Sometime ago, I wrote an automated script to install WordPress on a CentOS 5 install of Linux. Over the years, the repos and WordPress requirements changed as did CentOS upgrades through CentOS 6. The script was modified accordingly. The script had to be modified considerably for CentOS 7 which facilitates the need for a new article. Here is an automated…

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Add SyntaxHighlighter Evolved Plugin Third Party Brushes To Your WordPress Installation

SyntaxHighlighter Evolved allows you to easily post syntax-highlighted code to your site without losing it’s formatting or making any manual changes. It uses the SyntaxHighlighter JavaScript package by Alex Gorbatchev. It is prepackaged with a select handful of brushes, which includes several third-party brushes. There are many more third-party brushes that are available and not part of the plug-in package….

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Making background image fit any screen resolution with CSS

The usual approach for placing a background image is by placing the background within the body using CSS. No modifications are needed to the HTML file for the background to be displayed. However, what if instead of a small repeating image, a much larger, single image is desired. In some resolutions this approach with some slight modifications to the CSS…

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How to use multiple blockquotes in WordPress using CSS

There was a need to use blockquotes for different uses. Warning, Informational, Stop, Go, or as a blockquote. The possibilities are endless. This is possible by giving the blockquote element a class attribute within your (X)HTML or post, and define the class in the style.css file of your theme. This technique was found here. In this example, where the following…

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WordPress SQL Queries for database cleanup

With time your WordPress database may grow out of control. A couple contibuting factors are post revisions, RSS feeds fed through the dashboard. There are plugins that handle basic database optimizations, however, the command line is a quick and dirty way to handle some of these. I have always been aware of the transient RSS entries in the wp_options of…

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Useful Tools that May Help Determine and Fix Hacked WordPress Installations

For one reason or another, your WordPress site may get hacked. Code may be attached to various files throughout the site that could do a wide range of things including site redirection. There are many different types of hacks, however, there are several tools and commands that may prove useful for remediation. If these tools do not re-mediate, then these…

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WordPress Plugin WP-Ratings error [Resolved]

There is a plugin called WP-Ratings. It has worked well over the years until recently. It may have been as a result of a WordPress upgrade. Whatever the cause, WP-Ratings failed to work. The symptoms is that the rating stars were visible, until the user clicked on them. The ratings would become invisible or blank and result in an error…

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Automated Scripted Install of WordPress on CentOS/RHEL Linux

Many WordPress users have enjoyed WordPress using an Internet host provider or on an XAMPP installation on a Windows installation. This exercise is a combination of several guides with some personal tweaks to install WordPress 3.5.1 on a fresh install of of CentOS 5/6 or Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) 5/6 using PHP 5.2.4+. Install Packages Using yum install MySQL,…

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Get Rounded Edges in IE with PIE!

Recently created a WordPress theme where I wanted rounded corners around text boxes, buttons, and forms. Being not too patient with the creation of little corner images to satisfy this requirement within Internet Explorer, I decided to use the -moz-border-radius within the stylesheet. The drawback is that this -moz-border-radius will only work within Mozilla based Internet explorers and not the…

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Resolved: Could Not Backup Website with CPanel

For years the practice had been to backup the website using the Full Backup functionality from within CPanel. It has worked valently until recently. Recent backup attempts would proceed as usual and upon completion send out an email alerting the administrator that the backup had succesfully completed. However, the backup did not successfully complete. The backup was far from complete….

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WordPress: Display Recently Updated Posts with Shortcode

Floating around the Internet is a piece of PHP code that is designed to display recently updated posts/pages in WordPress. For some reason or another, I was unable to get the code to work with the expected results. I attempted to convert the code for use with functions.php and shortcodes with little success. After submitting a request to experts-exchange for…

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Solution to the WordPress Plugin WPTouch Returns a 404 Error when the Category is Empty.

There is an excellent plugin for WordPress called WPTouch. It’s purpose is to format web content to display more appropriately on portable devices such as the iPhone, BlackBerry, and other similar interfaces. It is extremely customizable. One of the nagging issues that I had had with this plugin is that it contains it’s own function for displaying categories. The problem…

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WordPress plugin Simple Tags fix for WordPress 2.9

Simple Tags is broken with the upgrade to WordPress 2.9. Simple Tags offer many advanced tagging features, that include mass tag editing, embedded tagging, auto tags, dynamic tag clouds, and many other feature. There is a “simple” fix to make it work. The author had hardcoded WordPress versions. Here is the original line of code, found in the file simple-tags.php…

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WordPress 2.9 Add Post Image

WordPress 2.9 among other things offer built-in support for post-thumbnails. Although it is available, there are two things to change to the theme. Add the following line to the functions.php file. In many cases, the index.php file will contain the loop. Add the following A great reference: wpengineer.com and ulyssesonline.com

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WordPress Tip: Add modified dates to posts

On more than one occassion, I have read through an article that seamed relevant until I realized that the date of the article maybe years old. In many cases, the authors have made changes to the article, but the reader really isn’t sure about the content of the article because of the age, so they simply pass over the article,…

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WordPress Plugin: Paypal Donate (Version 1.1)

The original WordPress PayPal Donate is a plugin written by Mikhail Esteves in 2006. This plugin allows for the easy inclusion of Paypal Donate buttons in WordPress posts and pages. On the option page the generated donate button code provided by PayPal can be saved to a form and the pre-defined tag may be applied to individual posts or pages….

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