Simplicity is not Simple

Setelah ngobrol-ngobrol sama Kang Deny, saya dapet sebuah pelajaran cukup berharga. Berawal dari keluhan Kang Deny yang selalu telat membaca feedburner saya. Wah, saya berasa jadi Seleblog, karena yang mbaca blog katrok dan ecek-ecek kayak punya saya ini sekelas Kang Deny yang notabene salah satu guru saya..

Beliau sempat menyarankan melakukan ping secara manual ke FeedBurner dengan mengetikkan URL dengan format seperti ini:

http://www.feedburner.com/fb/a/pingSubmit?bloglink=http://alamat.blog.kamu

Saya pun sempat berpikir untuk ngoprek WP supaya bisa melakukan semacam “autoping” ke FeedBurner setiap kali kita posting.

Setelah klinong-klinong ke sana ke mari akhirnya saya menemukan metode bahwa ternyata si WP telah menyediakan fasilitas ini. Dan ternyata caranya sangat amatlah mudah bin eces.

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I was getting bored with my default login interface page. It’s really simple and less interesting compared with login interface page of blog hosted by WordPress.Com.

Could we have a nice login interface page like on WordPress.Com? After looking around on WordPress.Com’s login page, I copied the CSS and made some modifications to suit with my login page.

The login page (wp-login.php) uses wp-admin.css located in wp-admin directory. It also handles all style on admin pages. Making mistake on this stylesheet, your admin pages will mess up! So, I suggest you to have a copy of this file before you make changes. The images used on this stylesheet are located in images directory under the wp-admin. You should have a copy of this directory too.

The (x)HTML structure of WordPress and WordPress.Com login page are little bit different. So I made some addition to CSS I’ve stolen from WordPress.Com to make it looked similar.

Get the modified stylesheet, unpack it, then upload it into your wp-admin directory. You’ll get the soul of WordPress.Com on your login interface and also on your admin pages.

And of course, feedbacks are welcome..

I found some annoying things in WP admin dashboard. When we logged in with a lowest level, for instance we logged in as subscriber who don’t have any access to some pages, clicking Write a post link in the dashboard will generate: You do not have sufficient permissions to access this page. error message.

There is no problem here. WP handled this behavior normally. But user who don’t have access to those pages (especially subsribers) will be dissapointed when accessing those pages. So do Add a link to your blogroll and Change your site's look or theme pages that only editors or administrators who could access those pages.

But it would be better if these special links were hidden from users who don’t have any access to these pages. It avoids users access those pages.

I just made some changes on this dashboard page. You can download the file from here. After downloading, extract the file and index.php file will be created. Just copy this file into wp-admin directory and overwrite any existing file. Ups, of course it’s suggested you made a back-up old index.php file first.

It’s usefull for a multiple users with multiple user level weblog. If you use WP as your own weblog, this hacking seems useless. And as usual, comments and feedbacks are welcome.

I implemented it in CAHANDONG.ORG blog.

in Bahasa Indonesia: Read more…

Have your blog been spammed with unspaced words in commenting system? Unspaced words can be dangerous because it will destroy your layout!

Want to try? Oke, try to insert unspaced words into your commenting system. You can do this simple test by holding a character on your keyboard as input on your comment form. After that, just press the submit button and see what happen.

Tada! Your layout successfully destroyed! What an anoyying things, right?

Based on that case, I wrote a simple plugin to sanitize those unspaced words. This plugin splits unspaced words into 20 characters per word. Although this plugin doesn’t split words into right spells, it avoids your layout destroyed by this damn unspaced words.

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A lot of plugins provide spam-controlling system using CAPTCHA. It used OCR system to avoid the spambots make comments. The system used image to display the words so only human can read the words and fill the form using the words provided in the image. Of course it need image processing library like GD Graphics Library or ImageMagick.

But how about the users who don’t have image-processing library installed on their server to generate those image words? And how about the people who turn off the image loading option on their browser or using text-based browser, like Lynx, reads those words?

Introducing matriphe! KeyCode which provide a simple plain text as a keycode. The main idea was helping users who don’t have any image-processing library installed on their server. It is also usefull for people who disable the image loading capability on their browsers or using text-based browsers.

Based on my opinion, a random machine generated keycode was annoying. I prefer human-friendly words as keycode to random machine generated words. It’s easy to write hello rather than h3ll0, right? So do this plugin. This plugin use the name of animal in Indonesian language as keywords. But don’t worry, you can also specify your own words as keycode from the admin panel to suit with your language.

This plugin was based on Comment Keycode made by Elzan Yahya. Thank you to Monika Windriya Satyajati who requested this plugin.

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