After getting the suggested changes to the PHP code courtesy of Andrew at Geeky Weekly. . . I spent a few more hours playing around editing the Powerblogroll PHP code – down in the area below the big “DO NOT EDIT BELOW THIS LINE UNLESS YOU KNOW WHAT YOU ARE DOING” remark….. (insert screen capture of the really nasty errors here – I didn’t even know my blog spoke Japanese!)
“DO NOT EDIT BELOW THIS LINE UNLESS YOU KNOW WHAT YOU ARE DOING”
Code Hacker Tip #3,298 – when editing code that you have no idea what will happen… always, and I repeat, always, keep a copy of the original code in a different directory to move back real quick when you hose everything up! (I saw an article on how to create a local copy of Word Press for experimenting on… which would be really cool, but again… I need the Ultimate Dummy directions for something like that, so all my changes go out live to see what happens being prepared to make a quick reversal if it is really bad. – get back on focus here George)
I wonder different times as I play with plugins, and reading the FAQ on the authors web site, or the “readme.txt” file with the plugin in, do they have any idea how confusing this is for many people?
Hey after all I took Fortran back in college!
While I joke about being completely illiterate, I do have some degree of familiarity with code and at least vaguely understand the principles, (Hey after all I took Fortran back in college!) but still this is difficult. So when an author documents, or replies to an already confused person trying to implement their plugin by just writing “just add < !-YouAreDense$&%20##.PHP> and it will work”, what I think they do not understand is
a) If I am having to write you for help I am obviously already confused
b) that I have no idea WHERE to add this
c) The code is maybe garbled since it was converted to HTML and back again inserting bogus characters into the “very simple statement to be added”.
I think this is no great revelation here, anyone that has never written a plugin or widget probably understands what I am talking about. So authors, please, comment your code carefully, then in your instructions show related code so we know where to put that little line… Even in one plugin you are to “change the option from false to true” to do something else… how about adding “This is easily done by removing the “remarks code” “//” from the line you want to activate and adding it to the line you wish to de-activate.” Maybe, you argue, if the user does not even have that degree of knowledge they should not be doing this… I disagree. I am willing to try, but need more hand holding to get me started. Maybe some day I will learn this and would not need to refer to a step-by-step direction, but until then help us out!
Getting to the conclusion – eventually: Taking the offered lines of code, figuring out where to replace them (another aside… drat I am never going to get to the end… the author really did do a good job of explaining, even adding the line number to be replaced. That helps, IF I am using a “real PHP code editor” that lists line numbers, but if I am using Note Pad to edit… I got no line numbers! See how this is all confusing to newbies? Anyway… I compared the suggested code to the original, figured out where it went, converted the mangled characters to the proper syntax and saved the modified version. I uploaded it, and boom, trashed web page. Oops, put back the original, check changes, save again and upload again. Success!! A great looking web page, ordered the way I want it, not how it want to. Went into the Admin Panel again, changed some links around and checked the results…ooops, nothing again. What the #$@%^! is going on. In the Admin Panel for MyLinkOrder when I selected a category to order I was getting extra entries showing. I carefully checked the listing of entries, opened each one up, verified each one had the correct category assigned and tried again… No luck. I kept playing around for a while, I finally found that I had to open each blogroll entry up, select the proper category again, even if it looked correct, save it, then tried again. Success! Only the proper links assigned to a category appeared in the “order links here” field. I set the order the way I wanted them to appear, updated, and went out to view the BlogRoll Page for the 257th time. TA-DA!! I am one happy camper now! It is a work of art, a sight to behold (or is that site to behold), cooking with gas, better ‘en sliced bread. I pwned it (honestly I have never figured that one out.) W00T W00T.
TA-DA!! I am one happy camper now! It is a work of art, a sight to behold!
Check it out!
Now… since this is so long, I think I am going to try out the “continued on page” plug in…. cross your fingers!
Until the final link opens,
Good remark, I’ll keep it in mind :-)