ptvguy

Nevermind, podz, I was overthinking it. Now I’m set up to have accessible external links even where the comment author’s name links to their site, and I’ve eliminated my username in my own comments from having any kind of hyperlink:

function get_comment_author_link() {
global $comment;
$url = get_comment_author_url();
$author = get_comment_author();

if ( empty( $url ) || 'http://' == $url || 'ptvGuy' == $author || 'ptvguy' == $author )
$return = $author;
else
$return = "<a href=\"$url\" class=\"externalLink\" rel=\"external\" title=\"$author\">$author</a>";
return apply_filters('get_comment_author_link', $return);
}

Onward to my next battle, how to do the same thing to external hyperlinks contained within the text of a comment…

Without changing anything, go to Options >> Permalinks and click the “Update Permalink Structure” button. Every once in a while, WP loses track of where things are–especially after editing or renaming a post or page.

If that doesn’t work, double-check all of your post, page, and category titles to see if they match the “post slug.” The post slug is the “folder” name where that link goes to and should contain every word in your title separated by single dashes. I’m noticing that your “Civil liberties” category is actually linked to “uncategorized.”

Hope this helps. Someone had to help me with this problem a while back too.

Tom, there are numerous Admin plugins available for WordPress. I caution you, however, to be extremely careful in the use of these. Playing with the WP Dashboard has a lot of potential for hard to correct mistakes. If you do try it, back up everything including your WP database first.

Also, please consider the fact that you’ve posted a (limited access) username and password into a very public forum, and, once a user gets to your site, they have access to all of your student’s email addresses. Depending on your school’s policies, that could represent a violation of student privacy. Just thought you should know.

BTW, you might want to check out Andy Carvin’s educational technology blog for his very positive write-up on the use of blogs for teaching.

Everything from here down is personal opinion and you’re, of course, free to ignore it:

The kind of “dumbing down” of the WordPress interface that you’re considering would, I think, be a disservice to your students in the long run. The WordPress dashboard is actually quite intuitive. Students that haven’t already mastered at least this limited level of technological interaction by college are facing a future of even more limited prospects.

Also, one could make the argument that the ability to categorize one’s writing into specific subjects (categories) is an essential part of the writing process itself and failure to do so shows both a lack of thought and focus on the part of the writer. If nothing else, college-level writing should be about doing some hard thinking, and basic categorization just isn’t part of that–unless this is some kind of remedial program you’re teaching.

Some of your CSS is FireFox and Mozilla specific, so that kind of thing will probably never validate. It’s a personal style choice, anyway. I’m seeing some code in the primary style sheet that I would have formulated a little differently. It’s not a big deal, but you could try replacing this:

h1 a, h1:visited { color: #fff; text-decoration: none; }

with this:

h1 a, h1 a:visited { color: #fff; text-decoration: none; }

And there’s a lot of non-IE code in use in the LIGHTBOX plugin stylesheet. IE doesn’t support the outline attribute for one thing:

#hoverNav a{ outline: none;}

Although it doesn’t do the same thing, you’ll probably have to stick with the border attribute for IE. In fact there’s some CSS3 stuff going on in that entire style sheet that is only haphazardly supported in browsers. Believe me, I’d love to make more extensive use of the before and after features of the content attribute, but it just doesn’t work well enough yet.

Also, using display: inline-block to set a width on an inline element is pretty iffy at best.

* html>body .clearfix {
display: inline-block;
width: 100%;
}

Even with all that said, it all seems to work fine for me in both IE 6 and FF 1.5.0.4. So, personally, I wouldn’t worry about it.

For any of you that may be interested in web accessibility and current standards, the better method for opening a new window is to use accessible JavaScript. The “target” property has long been deprecated.

An “externalLink” class attribute tied to the anchor tag as outlined by Paul Boag over on boagworld.com is far more accessible and standards compliant. You can set the function up as outlined above, only using class='externalLink' in place of target='_blank'

The only problem with using this method is that it will force your own user name in comments to open in a new window as well. The workaround for that is to add an extra OR condition to remove the hyperlink from your own user name. The code outlined below should work for you if you’re using that type of JavaScript pseudo-class.

function get_comment_author_link() {
global $comment;
$url = get_comment_author_url();
$author = get_comment_author();

if ( empty( $url ) || 'http://' == $url || get_bloginfo('name') == $author )
$return = $author;
else
$return = "<a href='$url' rel='external nofollow' title='$author' class='externalLink'>$author</a>";
return apply_filters('get_comment_author_link', $return);
}

If, for some reason, the get_bloginfo('name') isn’t excluding your username, then just encase your user name in single quotes in place of that function and remember that it’s case-sensitive. In other words, I could accomplish the same thing on my blog by putting 'ptvGuy' in that position.

On a side note, you could potentially add more OR conditions to that line and exclude other user names from getting a hyperlink as well.

That happened to me once when I post-dated a post. In other words, I created a post and added the appropriate categories (making sure they were checked to be used) and then used the Edit Time-Stamp function to make sure that the post wouldn’t appear until I wanted it to. When it did finally appear right on time, it had only the categories that were in place prior to that posting. None of the added categories were associated with it or would even show up when I went to edit it. I had to re-add them to the post in the edit window. This resulted in all of those categories being correctly associated with that post, but there were, strangely, just a couple of them that ended up in the category list twice, once associated with the post and once empty. I then had to go back through the Manage Categories list to delete the duplicate, empty categories.

Anyway, I know this is kind of long, but I thought it might either help your situation or someone else looking through the forums for a similar problem.

If your planning to move the blog to a subfolder later, you might as well start it out there. (Moving it later can be a pain.) You can always make the homepage in the root folder into a cover page lead-in for your blog while you build the rest of your non-blog site.

Go back to the phpMyAdmin and make sure that you’ve already set up a mySQL database for WordPress and created a user for it with appropriate permissions to access and modify it. Then make sure that you have modified the wp-config.php file appropriately:

define(‘DB_NAME’, ‘YOURDATABASENAMEHERE’); // The name of the database
define(‘DB_USER’, ‘YOURDATABASEUSERNAMEHERE’); // Your MySQL username
define(‘DB_PASSWORD’, ‘YOURDATABASEPASSWORDHERE’); // …and password