So I was just trying to update some WordPress plugins and the new automatic update system went all fubar on me. It claimed my ftp info was incorrect and sent the site into permanent “maintenence mode” which might be frightening for someone updating their site obviously as you simply get that nice message above on a blank page…no way to access the admin again. Here are the solutions. First to get the site back, look in whatever directory is your root install for a hidden file .maintenance (note you’ll need to be able to view hidden files in your ftp program). Once you find it just delete that bugger and the site should be back. I found I had to go into the wp-settings.php file and comment out line 50 which runs the function “wp_maintenance();” in order to be able to update the plugins…for some reason it kept not accepting my ftp info and adding that file…wonky.

So it’s fairly common knowledge that it’s a bad idea to put your email address in a mailto: tag unprotected on your website right? The wicked spammers have nasty little web bots that will scan the code of a page looking for that tag, or even your unlinked email address (they can tell from the formatting of it). One way to protect yourself is to use javascript to encode your address and hide it. There are a few plugins for WordPress that will automatically do this for you. One we have used for a few clients is CryptX (http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/cryptx/). All you need to do is install it and activate it, then it will filter through all your pages and cloak your addresses for you. Excellent work, hats off to plugin developer and spam warrior Ralf Weber.

While WordPress obviously wasn’t initially designed to be a full featured CMS, and it still has a ways to go in competing with Drupal or Concrete, this is a great trick you can use to expand your ability to add content which is editable from the admin area. WordPress Custom Fields will allow you to add data below the post area when you are creating a post (or a page which uses “post” info basically). You can create a Custom Field “Name” and “Value”, the name is basically a key that you can use to call the content in your template…which is the great part of this as it allows you to place editable content outside of the main post area on a page. Here is a screen shot where you can see I have added two Custom Fields, one for a picture (I didn’t add the picture value yet, but you can add a pict via the main content area then just copy the HTML info and paste it in) and one for a quote the client wants to change on each page (click the thumb for full size).

You need to actually edit your templates a bit, but it is fairly easy. Once you have created your Custom Field Name and added some content (value) you can use the get_post_meta() (click here for more detailed info) function as demonstrated below, just swap out Custom Field name where indicated and you can place this in your template-

<?php $key=”YOUR CUSTOM FIELD NAME”; echo get_post_meta($post->ID, $key, true); ?>

You can play around with adding html in the custom field or your template to get styling correct. This is how it looks in my template where I want the quote to show up.

I also recently discovered a nifty plug-in which will add tinyMCE toolbar functionality to the Custom Fields! Very cool.