WordPress Woes

By | June 9, 2006

I have been using this blog software for about two days and I am almost at my limits. I am not sure why I am having so many problems with it, maybe its because I’m running it with php5? Maybe its because I don’t use Internet Explorer, but either way, its got to go.

I’ve had to open up the source twice now to hack fixes to problems that have been bugging me. First, I had to open up the source to get the admin section to run. With a default install, the class that they were using to load the “Dashboard” RSS feeds would mysteriously crash PHP. It caused it to die with no error; I just got a blank screen. A quick mod to the main admin file fixed that by simply commenting out the line that loads all the nonsense RSS that’s displayed be default.

Next problem: Rich Text Editing. Apparently unsupported by Safari, I didn’t notice this until today when trying to post to my blog from work. I am all for rich editors on one condition; they are easy to override when neccessary. After messing around with the rich text editor for a while trying to get it to format my post the way I wanted, I decided to disable it from the options section. I unchecked the box and saved the preferences, but to no avail, the rich text editor still appears. This called for source editing round two.
Finally, after getting back the regular editor, problems began cropping in with html entities and other characters; when you put a character such as &nbsp; into your post it isn’t parsed correctly so when you edit again in the future, it shows up as a space. Also I think that WordPress is trying to parse my HTML to make “improvements” (perhaps this is needed to clean up the output of the rich text editor?). For instance, if I put in hard break tags, <br> at the end of a block of text, they are replaced and don’t end up being displayed.

Also, there have been many little things that have been annoying; the file uploads feature doesn’t seem to work too well. The photo that I uploaded yesterday of my mp3 player project was around 500Kb. After clicking the upload button the browser churne away for about two minutes, at which point I get a php error saying that the script tried to allocate more than 8Mb of memory; not sure what it was doing but I thought maybe the image was too big, so I went and cropped/resized the photo and tried again. Once uploaded, there doesn’t seem to be any obvious/simple way to include the image in the post. I ended up copying the URL to the image and just putting it in my own img tag.

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