Customize the WP-Instant Plugin for your theme

All of you have already tried or at least heard of the great new feature of Google, the “Instant Search”. Since this really is a great feature, I decided to program such a plugin for the WordPress community. But despite the enormous extensibility of WordPress this wasn’t an easy task. Unfortunately, for a layman, who previously had no contact with themes, it is probably difficult to get the plugin to work, as he has to go a little deeper into the source code at least twice.

First of all, the original “search loop” must be copied into a file named wp-instant-search-template.php. This file must then be copied into your theme directory. The “search loop” can usually be found in a file called search.php in your theme directory. It might for example look like this (from the old “default” theme):

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WordPress 3 is right around the corner

A third release candidate for WordPress was just announced. On the developer blog post for RC3 of WordPress you can even find a small Haiku:

Last call; final bugs
Itch, scratch, contort; calmly wait
For now: RC3

There is also a request to plugin developers. They are asked to test their plugins with the new release candidate. I already checked my 3 current plugins and I couldn’t find any errors.

As there are only 9 open and active tickets left, I hope that we can use WordPress 3 very soon on our blogs. I am least looking forward to it.

All plugins works with WordPress 3.0

Today I tested the current beta (3.0-beta2-14526) of the upcoming WordPress version. The good news for all users of some of my plugins is, that I could successfully tested all my plugins with the current beta.

As I stick to some standards while implementing my plugins and I didn’t use any DEPRECATED functions, I am pretty sure that all of the plugins will still work with the final version of WordPress 3.0 but I will check the compatibility with the latest NIGHTLY BUILD from time to time. If I find any issues with these builds, I try to solve them before the final version of WP 3.0 will be released.

If any of you has already found some issues with my plugins in combination with WP 3.0 or if you have issues with your current version of WordPress, please leave a comment on the plugins pages or on this post.

I wish all of us a lot of fun with the new upcoming features of WP 3.0 and I hope that we can enjoy the final version soon.

Enable syntax highlighting for Vim editor

From time to time, you have to edit a file through the console on the server. Most of the time you probably use the Vim Editor
(“Vi IMproved”). I also use this editor on two servers and I am doing quite good in using it.

But on one server the syntax highlighting in the Vim editor is disabled. You can enable it by typing “:syntax enable” but this setting gets lost each time you close the editor. To activate the syntax highlighting permanently you have to edit the “vimrc” file. You can either use the file in your home directory or the system vimrc which is usually located at /etc/vim/vimrc. In that file you should find the following line:

"syntax on

The double quote comments the syntax command out. After removing the double quote, saving the vimrc file, the next time you open a file with source code, it should be highlighted automatically. In the Vim editor’s documentation you may find more useful tips on how to work with the editor.

I hope that this post was helpful for you. I always wanted to buy me a little book about the vi editor, but as it only has one chapter about the Vim editor, I am not sure if it will be helpful. So I put it on my wish list and maybe someone will buy it for me one day 🙂

Start programs as administrator within user profiles

I am more a web developer than an administrator. But from time to time I have to take care of my colleagues PCs. A very common task is to install or update programs. As most of the users don’t have administrative rights I have to do these things as admin.

At the beginning of my admin career I used to sign of the users because I didn’t know how to start programs as admin. But now I learned to right click a program and choose “Run as…” to start an installation as administrator.

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The Internet Explorer is dead. Long live the Internet Explorer!

Some time ago Google announced to discontinue the support of Internet Explorer 6.0 for most of his services. Now they have announced a date for that discontinue. The day we are waiting for is March 13, 2010. I couldn’t find out if users of Internet Explorer 6.0 will then be able to use the services.

As I mentioned in the post Internet Explorer 6 unter Windows 7 nutzen mit dem Windows XP Mode I still have a running Version of IE6 on my laptop. So as soon as the day has come, I’ll report about the usage of the services with IE6. On the YouTube home page users can find a notice about updating their browsers:

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(Deutsch) Zeilen-Duplizierer mit AutoComplete Felder nutzen

(Deutsch) Ich bekam heute in einem Kommentar die Frage gestellt, ob mein Zeilen-Duplizierer aus dem Beitrag: Einfacher Zeilen-Duplizierer mit Prototype auch auf Feldern funktioniert, die die Scriptaculous Ajax.AutoCompleter Funktion verwenden.

Ich nutze den Duplizierer selbst in einem Formular, das solche Felder enthält. Meine erste Fassung entsprach dabei dem Einzeiler aus dem vorherigen Beitrag. Das Problem dabei ist allerdings, dass die AutoCompleter Funktion beim Erzeugen mit dem Felder verknüpft wird, auf das sie angewendet werden soll. Wenn man nun dieses Feld kopiert wird nicht eine neue Instanz des Ajax.AutoCompleter erzeugt, sondern die Referenz auf das alte Feld mit kopiert. Ein Eintrag im neu erzeugten Feld aktiviert also die AutoCompleter Funktion des vorherigen Feldes.

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Limit the number of backups in the Plesk backup manager

In the post Setting up the Plesk Backup Manager on a 1&1 Linux Root Server I explained how to set up the backup mechanism in Plesk. But using this setup I ran into really big trouble.

As a backup of my domain has more than 20GB and the 1&1 backup FTP server only has 250GB capacity, it could only store 10 backup. As soon as the FTP backup server was full, the backups will be stored on the web server. But that was fatal because then there will be soon no more space left on the web server. In worst case that means that the MySQL database can’t create a temporary table which means that your server could not request the client responses. So in short: Your server doesn’t work anymore.

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