I was messing around with .htaccess and php.ini files in my blog directory, trying to fix an irksome “HTTP error” that appears when I upload pictures. (Strangely, the pictures still seem to upload sometimes.) Lots of suggested fixes are floating around the internet, but none of them worked for me. I have a feeling that upgrading to PHP 5, as suggested here, would work for me, but I had built my theme (and the rest of my website) based on PHP 4, since that was the only version available to me when I first started. One day, when I have lots of time to check the entire site, I’ll see about upgrading.

Meanwhile, I deleted the .htaccess and php.ini files I had put in my blog directory, but then I realized that I was redirected to my main site’s 404 error page when I tried to view a single post, a category, or anything but the main blog index page. The problem didn’t clear when I emptied the browser cache, either. I panicked for about three minutes and then realized the issue might lie with my URL rewriting. So, I changed the settings for permalinks back to the default (which shows the query string, something like index.php?p=506) and then back to the permalinks I wanted. This appears to have corrected the problem.

Facebook offers a mechanism to import your blog posts as Notes in your Facebook account, but I don’t believe there’s a way to import the Facebook comments on those posts back to your blog. (If you’ve found a way, let me know!) So, because I like to do things the hard way, I created a simple set of scripts to add those comments to your blog with the original date, time, and the commenter’s first name only. It requires cutting and pasting a block of text from the email notification, which is the only way I ever learn of comments on my Notes (I otherwise try to avoid the timesink that Facebook is). Too janky for public release, but it works for me =)

I’m used to viewing websites on my laptop, so I haven’t really designed websites with large screens in mind. However, Chris has two 20″+ monitors, and he often has a lot of screen real estate that goes unused. He needed a theme for his blog, so I figured it was a good opportunity to experiment with a wide theme.

If I were really good, I’d make the dimensions resize with the browser. However, my idea for his theme involved background images, which IMHO don’t resize well (since the resizing is done on the client side by the browser, I believe). I prefer to make sites with fixed sizes whenever fixed background images (which I almost always use) are involved. If instead only CSS and tiled images were used, making the theme resize would be much simpler.

The wide theme was pretty straightforward; I encountered only one wide theme-specific problem. When the browser was resized to smaller than the width of the theme, the background image for the body tag shifted left of the page, so that the bottom of the page sometimes appeared displaced to the left. I fixed this by adding a wrapper div and placing the background image there instead of in body. I also set the the body CSS property display to table, which I thought had fixed the problem initially. So, two steps for the fix:

1. avoid background images in body
2. set CSS to body {display: table;}

Yesterday I made the WordPress gallery display all the post’s media according to the post_mime_type, e.g., pdf or msword. So if you want your post to have a gallery of images and then a gallery of pdf’s, or in my case msword’s and pdf’s, you can do that. However, I realized that it’s more useful to be able to create galleries according to some arbitrary common characteristic that the user designates (that is, the reason for dividing the gallery files). So, I came up with a different hack for the wp-includes/media.php file.

The first part is very similar to the previous solution, involving a revised definition of $attachments if the gallery shortcode parameter “linklist” is specified. Note that this parameter is merely one that I made up and could be called something else if it better suits your purpose. Under the default definition of $attachments, I added:

// ========================== anh hack 2010-05 =========================================
// get gallery to display list of links, eg for pdf's
if ( isset( $attr['linklist'] ) ) {
     $listfilegroup = $attr['linklist'];
     if ( !$attr['linklist'] )
     unset( $attr['linklist'] );

     $attachments = get_children( array('post_parent' => $id, 'post_status' =>
          'inherit', 'post_type' => 'attachment', 'order' => $order, 'orderby' =>
          $orderby) );
}
// ========================== end anh hack =============================================

Note that I didn’t use the value of linklist here at all; thus, the array $attachments contains all the media in the gallery (whereas the default fetched only images). Rather than limiting the results of my query for $attachments, I then added code (the next part) to limit the display of those results. Perhaps this is not the best way, since I imagine that limiting the query would be more efficient than limiting the display, but I was not able to limit the query according to post_content or post_excerpt, which correspond to editable fields for media (the “description” and “caption” respectively) in the default WP structure.

The next part of the hack replaces the command part of the foreach loop that generates the gallery output. Under foreach ( $attachments as $id => $attachment ) { , I commented out all of the commands (up to its closing bracket } ) and added:

// ========================== anh hack 2010-05 =========================================
/* the code in this hack block replaces the commented-out code. works with hack block
above; basically, if $listfilegroup is set, then list files according to $listfilegroup
(which is set for attachments only; $listfilegroup must match post_content - on admin
panel, this field is the media's "description" */

if (!empty($listfilegroup)) {

     if ($listfilegroup == trim($attachment->post_content))  {

          $link = isset($attr['link']) && 'file' == $attr['link'] ?
               wp_get_attachment_link($id, $size, false, false) :
               wp_get_attachment_link($id, $size, true, false);

          $output .= "<{$itemtag} class='gallery-item'>";
          $output .= "
          <{$icontag} class='gallery-icon'>
          $link
          </{$icontag}>";
          if ( $captiontag && trim($attachment->post_excerpt) ) {
               $output .= "
               <{$captiontag} class='gallery-caption'>
               " . wptexturize($attachment->post_excerpt) . "
               </{$captiontag}>";
          }
          $output .= "</{$itemtag}>";
          if ( $columns > 0 && ++$i % $columns == 0 )
               $output .= '<br style="clear: both" />';
     }
} else {
     $link = isset($attr['link']) && 'file' == $attr['link'] ?
          wp_get_attachment_link($id, $size, false, false) :
          wp_get_attachment_link($id, $size, true, false);

     $output .= "<{$itemtag} class='gallery-item'>";
     $output .= "
     <{$icontag} class='gallery-icon'>
     $link
     </{$icontag}>";
     if ( $captiontag && trim($attachment->post_excerpt) ) {
          $output .= "
          <{$captiontag} class='gallery-caption'>
          " . wptexturize($attachment->post_excerpt) . "
          </{$captiontag}>";
     }
     $output .= "</{$itemtag}>";
     if ( $columns > 0 && ++$i % $columns == 0 )
          $output .= '<br style="clear: both" />';
}

// ========================== end anh hack =============================================

This second part looks complicated, but I really didn’t add anything fancy. All it does is check if $listfilegroup is set, and if it is, it runs through the default display algorithm for only those media whose description (stored as post_content) matches $listfilegroup. (The default algorithm is the command part I had commented out; perhaps there’s a way to do this without commenting it out, but the above implementation seems the simplest to me.) If $listfilegroup is not set, then it runs through the default display algorithm for all media in $attachments (which are probably all the images).

So, the usage is the same as for yesterday’s hack: just use the gallery shortcode and set the linklist option to a gallery identifier, e.g., . Then use that identifier as the description for all files to be included together that gallery.

What if you want to use a gallery file in more than one gallery? Well, for images, you can try this multiple galleries plugin – I haven’t tried it myself, but it seems straightforward with a simple GUI change. For non-image file types, with the hacks I’ve described above, you could add the file again and give it a different description, so that each can be displayed in a gallery.

Thoughts? Always room for improvement.

I run the Penn Med UltraSounds website, and I needed a way to display a list of pdf’s. As far as I know, you can upload non-image media (e.g., pdf’s and word docs) to the gallery, but its baseline allows you to display only images; you have to individually insert other media types rather than inserting the whole gallery.

The advantage of using the gallery to display media is that you can update the media list and display it sorted in various ways, for example by title or by date. Each gallery is unique to the associated post. So, you’d think that someone would have made a plugin or made this functionality accessible for other file types. I couldn’t find any, though. I just want a simple list of links!

So what did I do? After a mean monster breakfast of steak (that’s what Chris eats for breakfast, so that’s what I get), I decided to see if I could modify the code to enable me to do what I want. The solution, though in rough form, is surprisingly simple: I take advantage of the existing gallery shortcode by adding the following to the wp-includes/media.php, just below the $attachments = get_children..., around line 643:

// ========================== anh hack 2010-05 =========================

	// get gallery to display list of links, eg for pdf's
	if ( isset( $attr['linklist'] ) ) {
		$listfiletype = $attr['linklist'];
		if ( !$attr['linklist'] )
			unset( $attr['linklist'] );

	$attachments = get_children( array('post_parent' => $id,
		'post_status' => 'inherit', 'post_type' => 'attachment',
		'post_mime_type' => $listfiletype, 'order' => $order,
		'orderby' => $orderby) );
	}
// ========================== end anh hack =============================

Then, using the gallery short code, specify the type of file in the option linklist. This file type can be found in the details for the media item, underneath its title. In the MySQL database table wp-posts, it is the value under post-mime-type. Here is a screenshot:

For example, to display pdf’s and order alphabetically by title, use [gallery linklist="application/pdf" orderby="title"].

Hope this helps! Let me know if you have questions. Time permitting and curiosity motivating, I will attempt to make this into a plugin. I foresee that dealing with the myriad ways people might need the plugin will make the task exponentially more difficult, but still, it could be fun =)