We currently use ancient (in android time) weblog and anti-spam software. While it used to work superbly, changes our host has made, that I will not attempt to explain except to say we now have hanging MySQL queries, are causing problems for folks trying to comment.

So, be advised that our websites will be non-operational at times, but that these glitches will hopefully be temporary.

Update (of same day): The upgrades went a lot smoother on this weblog than I expected. Now I have to watch how it reacts in actual operation. This weblog is the test box.

Update (Saturday, March 21 2009): Made it through the night without any apparent issues requiring manual maintenance! This is a tentative, “Yay!” Even if the current solution is not as good as the old one (it may be better), our need to make the change seems somewhat forced by realities of our current host’s and the recently-increased existence of the hanging queries that manifested as several different interactivity problems.

This post shows how to have more than one Post Preview section on the Write Post page in 2+ versions. It involves slightly altering the /wp-admin/post.php file with a small portion of ever-so-slightly altered code that was originally included in the same file from the earlier 1.5.2 versions. If you decide to try this, any WordPress upgrade you perform will overwrite these changes, and the programmers occasionally make changes to this file (version 2.0.5 to 2.1.2 had changes), so saving it from version to version is not a very good idea. You’ll also want to make sure you save a backup copy of the original file so you can easily undo these changes.

These instructions are specific to WordPress 2.1.2. This has also been tested to work in WordPress 2.0.5. Portions of this may seem redundant with the last post, which was specific for 1.5+, other portions will not, but it’s probably a good idea to read Improved Proofreading In Wordpress anyway, as that’s the post where I explain why this is a valuable technique.

Let’s get on with it.

Download post.php from your /wp-admin/ directory, and open the file in a text editor. After line number 69’s (explicitly specific to v2.1.2) close php, which reads as:

?>

Or right at the beginning of line 70, or the two lines that read as:

<div id='preview' class='wrap'> <h2 id="preview-post"><?php _e('Post Preview (updated when post is saved)'); ?></h2>

add two or three carriage returns (hit enter a few times). Please note the ‘less than’ and ‘greater than’ characters above are encoded, so you generally can’t copy them into search and expect to find the matching text.

Next, copy all the code in the text file named post.php212.modifications.txt and paste it into the blank line or lines you just added to the post.php open in your text editor. Save the file, then upload it to the /wp-admin/ directory of your weblog. This code is from the relevant section from WordPress 1.5.2’s post.php, except for a couple of small changes.

Because ‘post.php212.modifications.txt’ includes two nearly but not precisely identical sections, the changes to the CSS are slightly different than in my previous post.

Next, download wp-admin.css, located in the /wp-admin/ directory, then open it in a text editor. Find the line that reads as:

p, li, dl, dd, dt { line-height: 130%; }

Delete the “p” so it reads as:

li, dl, dd, dt { line-height: 130%; }

Find the line that reads, “textarea, input, select” (should be next). Skip to the bottom of that section, after the closing “}”, and add a few carriage returns or blank lines.

Copy the following:

/*alteration*/ .storycontentmonospace { font-family: “Courier New”, Courier, monospace; font-size: 14px; letter-spacing: .1em; line-height: 2.1em; } /*alteration*/ .storycontentsansserif { font-family: Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; letter-spacing: .07em; line-height: 2.0em; }

and paste it into the blank lines you just added. Save that file, and upload it back to your /wp-admin/ weblog directory.

That’s it. It is useful to remember that the font families listed in the CSS, as well as the order they appear in and whether your machine has them, control which one displays on your workstation. If you don’t have the first one listed on your local machine, it looks for the next one listed until it finds a matching font. Consequently, you may need to either download fonts onto your machine, or change the first font listed (with respect to the added CSS commands) to a complete set (regular, bold, italic regular, and italic bold) that you do have.

Regarding the additions you just made to post.php (the single cut and paste described above), note there are two sections added plus the default iframe section. This allows you to have a total of three (3) Post Preview sections displayed in your Write Post page, each one of which will have a different font for proofreading. This may be overkill for you. If so, you can delete all or either of those two added sections.

As a final note, the WP 2.1.2 modified Post Preview display shows the ‘read more’ tag, as well as the ‘code’ tag, which didn’t appear in earlier 1.5.2+ versions. I don’t know why this is, I’m not particularly familiar with the ‘under the hood’ changes to the 2.0+ series codebase.

Therefore, I wanted WordPress to show me the post text in several different fonts on the Write Post page as a proofreading aid. The following How To applies to WordPress 1.5.2. This will not work in the newer 2+ series because the Write Post page, specifically post.php, has been completely reworked in the newer version. It is possible to recode post.php to do this (I’ve tested it in 2.0.5); however, that goes beyond the scope of this post which is limited to a simple CSS formatting change.

This was first implemented as a project on another 1.5.2 blog that I participate in as co-administrator, and it seemed like it had been quite awhile since I had posted anything here, so I thought why not share the template modification. The WordPress 1.5.2 Write Post page in the administration area offers the ability to see the written post in two separate fonts, yet the default CSS is not set up to show more than one font. In both the textarea box where a post is written, and in the Post Preview area where the whole text is visible after a save, the default font is Georgia. Additionally, the title in Post Preview is an active hyperlink that applies the blog’s template regardless of whether the post is a draft, published, or private post. So, because of the three separate areas where the draft can be viewed, the blogger or writer has the ability to have three separate fonts for quick proofreading without needing to do anything more than write, save, read, click again, and read again — this last proofread uses the font assigned to the blog template.

I decided I wanted the Post Preview area to show in Courier with increased whitespace and letter spacing, both for readability. Courier, an old-fashioned font that came with many typewriters in the pre-computer era, has the proofreading advantage of being non-proportional or monospaced. So I went into the wp-admin directory, downloaded wp-admin.css (note that this is not the themes or templates directory), then opened it in a text editor. I looked (or searched) for “textarea”, it was around line 145. Beneath it I added: .storycontent { font-family: "Courier New", Courier, monospace; font-size: 14px; letter-spacing: .1em; line-height: 2.1em; }

Your eyes may not require as large a font as 14px, if so reduce it to a smaller number such as 10, or 12, or some other choice. Play around with the letter-spacing and line-height as well if you wish.

However, this was not the only change I needed to make. The line-height command was being overwritten by, or conflicted with, another section a few lines above that read as: p, li, dl, dd, dt { line-height: 130%; } I deleted the “p” so it reads as: li, dl, dd, dt { line-height: 130%; } So far I have noted no undesired effects from deleting the p, though there are likely other ways of approaching this conflict, possibly including deleting the whole command or changing the sequential ordering (but I haven’t tested these latter ideas, it works well enough for me as explained). I saved this file and uploaded it back to its original location. It’s always a good idea to save the original, unaltered file somewhere.

Now, the Post Preview section reads in Courier New with the individual characters slightly spread out on each line, as well as each line appearing to be double spaced. Since the template on this blog uses the proportional Verdana or sans-serif font family as it’s main display font, and since the textarea box where a post is written is assigned Georgia or serif font family, I can quickly proofread a post in three distinctly different fonts including a non-proportional one before pressing the final “publish” post button.

As a warning, Courier New, a True Type font, also comes in italic and bold font versions. If your workstation only has Courier, your italics will possibly be simulated, and quite unclear, or they won’t show that formatting at all. If that’s the case and you use italics and or bold in your posts, you may wish to choose another non-proportional or monospaced font set that you know you have on your system.

“In due time, I’ll shut down rbldnsd too, but that’ll be a while yet. If you’re using the SpamKarma2 plugin for WordPress, or any other RBL lookup plugin on any blog software at all, please remove blbl.org from the lookup list (bl.blbl.org and uri-bl.blbl.org).”

Thanks for all the help, Jamesoff. Your decision seems a good one: if your heart is no longer in a project, then what’s the point?

\wp-content\themes\default\header.php \wp-includes\functions.php \wp-includes\template-functions-category.php \wp-includes\template-functions-general.php \wp-includes\version.php

Please note that the above is not an official WordPress list. It was made using the win32 program WinMerge, from zip downloads of WordPress versions that I have saved.

While the older templates below for Wordpress 1.2.x are still available, they will not be updated. I’ve updated the basic template for WordPress 1.5.x using newer versions of Ruthsarian’s Skidoo Too HTM templates. Portions of these templates have been copied from the WordPress Classic theme by Dave Shea and Matthew Mullenweg, covered by the GNU GPL.

Disclaimer: I’m not a programmer, nor a commercial site designer. I will change the template used on this site somewhat from time to time, and the files below will probably not be updated. If you notice any bugs, feel free to make a comment here to tell me, but consider that the files are offered “as is”, and any features that you don’t believe are working correctly are your problem to figure out.

Update of 12/12/2005: Fixed a left-column rendering issue for visitors using Internet Explorer 6.0. This issue was related to WordPress’s calendar and my lousy CSS skills. Please note that this update only applies to WP version 1.5.x. The template for the older WP version, 1.2.x (see below) was not updated as I no longer use that older WP version.

One file below, comments.txt, has only one or two minor changes versus the released WordPress 1.5.1.2 Classic theme.

index.txt style.txt comments.txt

Save the three links above by renaming each one:

1. index.txt as index.php
2. style.txt as style.css
3. comments.txt as comments.php

Create a new directory in your WordPress 1.5.x theme folder, I have assigned the name “bluejay” to that directory:

/wp-content/themes/bluejay/

Move the three files you saved from here into that directory on your blog using an appropriate tool such as FTP or a file manager of some kind. You can change your blog’s active template in the Presentation > Theme administration area of your blog.

Simply open the two links above then save the index.txt file as index.php, and the wp-layout.txt file as wp-layout.css. Before uploading them to your server, make sure you backup the files of the same name used on your current Wordpress 1.2.2 blog: rename them to something like index_backup.php and wp-layout_backup.css. Then upload the files you saved from here to your blog.