First, any hit on the OpenID /openid/server url (I am using non-default permalinks) generated the following :

Fatal error: Call to undefined function add_options_page() in
/path/to/wp-content/plugins/wp-contact-form/wp-contactform.php on line 200

This was pretty obviously a conflict with WP-Contactform. Disabling this plugin made the above error go away, so I’ll be looking for a replacement for it soon.

Once the contactform error was worked around by disabling the plugin, the following appeared:

Fatal error: Call to a member function needsSigning() on a non-object in
/path/to/wp-content/plugins/openid/Auth/OpenID/Server.php
on line 1495

This would happen when I tried to specify my URL (whether main blog or wordpress author url) as an openid – it would seem to be working, go through the logon process then generate the error and the authentication process would abort.

After much googling (not much out there but this was helpful, sort of) and a good period of waiting and trying new versions of the OpenID plugin as they were released, the solution / workaround turned out to be extremely simple. It was a plugin conflict (doh) and a process of elimination identified the culprit and main show stopper: the cryptographp plugin.

No idea why but once it was disabled things worked fine. I was using this plugin to generate protective captchas for my comment forms. I replaced it with Simple CAPTCHA. (Its worth noting that in the 15 minutes or so I had no CAPTCHA active, I had already received a bot comment spam – and my site isn’t heavily trafficked by any means). I might choose another solution at some point from the plethora available, but for the time being, Simple Captcha gets the job done fine.

So thats about it. In a nutshell, some seemingly unrelated plugins were conflicting, disabling them and replacing with alternatives fixed it.

Now I can use glenscott.net as an OpenID, and my visitors have a nice simple OpenID login option on comments pages =)

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The deal is, I’m wanting to publish stories and other standalone type pieces of writing on this site, and I want to create them as nice friendly text wordpress pages, but I don’t want each and every story to appear as a default pages link. The titles are long, there’ll be a few of them, and they’ll screw up my page layout if included in the pages menu(s), especially in the top nav bar where theres limited space.

To change this behavior, you just need to go into your theme template files and add some parameters to wp_list_pages(). The definitive list of parameters is over here and is worth a read:

http://codex.wordpress.org/Template_Tags/wp_list_pages

The most useful ones for this task are ‘include’, ‘exclude’, and ‘depth’. You can string multiple parameters together using the ampersand & character like so: wp_list_pages(foobar=1&moobar=2);

Include and exclude will do as they suggest, given a comma delimited list of page numbers. If you use include it will only include the specified pages, if you use exclude it will include all except the specified pages.

I decided a better way to get it done, actually ideal for my purposes, is to create all my ‘hidden’ pages in a subcategory, and set the depth parameter to ’1′. This means any page created as a subcategory will not appear in the navigation menus, though it can be explicitly linked to, or appear in a list of links for that subcategory (exactly what I want).

The Widgets file

I managed to sort out the top nav bar page listing on my template pretty easily by making the change to the header.php file, but I couldn’t find anything immediately obvious generating the page listing in sidebar.php, or any of the other theme includes. After some bumbling around trying to figure this out, I discovered the sidebar listing was being handled by wordpress widgets . This was pretty easy to fix once I found out where the widgets file is (/wp-includes/widgets.php), although since it uses an array for the parameters its slightly different than the edit above.

You have a few options for changing how the pages display through the wordpress widgets control panel, but sadly no way to exclude sub-pages by default. This would be a cool thing to have available, and I’d write it into the widget file and make my version available, but my php is far too rusty at the moment for this even though its pretty simple.

Ok, how to do it manually. Open up the widgets file for editing and find the section which defines function wp_widget_pages and add to the line which starts as follows:

$out = wp_list_pages (array ('title_li' => '', etc etc and add to it the parameter ‘depth’ => 1, so it ends up looking something like this:

$out = wp_list_pages( array('title_li' => '', 'depth' => 1,'echo' => 0, 'sort_column' => $sortby, 'exclude' => $exclude) );

Thats it. save the file and your side menu should hide all pages in sub-categories.

Also, there is this plugin I found over here which interferes somehow with wp_list_pages(); to cause the change everywhere the function is called. Might save having to mess with multiple places in the template / widgets file depending how your theme is set up. (Mine has pages listed in a top nav bar as well as a side menu, for example).

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These are the kind of enhancement which IMO improves the experience in general and you only notice when they are missing: I imagine they provide the kind of fucntionality which may find its way into the wordpress core package at some stage.

Anyway, here they are:

Admin Drop Down Menus
This plugin converts the menus in the admin panel to dhtml dropdowns. Once I’d used it I didnt want to go back.

Leprakhauns Word Count
Provides a simple wordcount at the bottom of the edit box for a post/page.

WordPress PDA
Formats your wordpress blog nicely for mobile devices. Makes your site really accessible using clients such as pocket IE.

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I think I went through 900 or so themes from wordpress, winding up with a shortlist of 50 or so for testing. I had to pass on a few nice looking ones because they had ‘no deriv’ licensing combined with built in links to the theme sponsors (marketing, stock trading etc sites), but the current mutation is working out pretty well. The sooner I stop faffing about with all the frill, the quicker the rest of it will get done.

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I’ve traditionally shied away from any website effort involving other peoples engines or templates: my first series of websites were hand coded in php / html / css, used my own blog engine and eventually became themable when I realised that would temporarily sate my thirst for a new look to the site without the need to scrap an old design and start again.

However, practicality calls, I’m currently indisposed to wheel-reinvention, and with the plethora of themes, wordpress is looking to meet the needs of my new site nicely. A big element here is practicality – now I’m no longer particularly interested in getting my hands covered in HTML: I can have a nice clean site up, not have to run through testing and tweaking, and generally forget about everything that distracts from what I’d like to think about, in corporate drone-speak, the core business ;)

The core business is a whole other box of fun, which I’ll be getting to shortly.

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