MAKE SITES .CC

I found a plugin for wordpress I was searching for to separate the entries of each author – you can download it here.

The problem was that it was a bit outdated when I downloaded it, and didn’t work with the recent WordPress v2 series. I spent a couple of hours tuning it up and finally got it working as I wanted for this website.

I wanted this up and running as soon as possible, so I patched it up quickly without necessarily choosing the best solutions.

But just because there seem to be many people with the same problem I’m recording here what I did.

At first I came across this big MySQL error:

WordPress database error: [Unknown column ‘user_nickname’ in ‘field list’]
SELECT wp_users.ID, user_nickname, user_firstname, user_lastname, user_nicename FROM wp_users WHERE user_login ‘admin’ ORDER BY user_nickname

As WordPress v2.X has a different database structure this is to be expected. Specifically there are neither “user_nickname”, “user_firstname” nor “user_lastname” in the user table.

To fix this…

Open the “level10_blog_matrix.php” from your plugins folder with your favorite text editor

1. Search and replace “user_nickname” with “user_login”

2. Remove all “user_firstname” and “user_lastname” database calls

3. Go to line 516:

if ($show_fullname && ($author->user_firstname != '' && $author->user_lastname != '')) {
$name = "$author->user_firstname $author->user_lastname";
}

I personally didn’t mind the full names not appearing so I just replaced the above with this:

if ($show_fullname && $author->user_login) {
$name = ucfirst ( "$author->user_login" );
}

Optionally you can use the same ucfirst() function anywhere we have inserted the user_login to make the first letter capital.

In addition I had problems with my permalinks. Specifically, the category links didn’t have the required “category/” in the path as well as the author links didn’t have the “author/”.

To fix these problems…

1. Go to line 335:

if(($l10bm_data[permalinkCategory]==1) || $l10bm_data[matrixPrimeSubdirectory]) {
$url = str_replace("/category/","/",$url);
}

Comment out the entire condition:

//if(($l10bm_data[permalinkCategory]==1) || $l10bm_data[matrixPrimeSubdirectory]) {
// $url = str_replace("/category/","/",$url);
//}

2. Go to line 526:

if(($l10bm_data[permalinkAuthor]==1) || $l10bm_data[matrixPrimeSubdirectory]) {
$url = str_replace("/author/","/",$url);
}

Comment out this entire condition as well:

//if(($l10bm_data[permalinkAuthor]==1) || $l10bm_data[matrixPrimeSubdirectory]) {
// $url = str_replace("/author/","/",$url);
//}

Other Bugs:

- There is a bug with the category listings when you select to see the posts of an author for a specific category. In specific, it returns the display to the default category listing and not the category listing for the author. To fix this, goto line 82:

if(is_author() && !is_category()) {

and remove the second condition,

if(is_author()) {

- There is a misspelled word: “Catagories” (instead of “Categories” – just search and replace)

- I had problems with the “Uncategorized” category showing up in the category listings. In my database that category had cat_ID=1 with no other category having a smaller number than that. In the plugin though it has database queries searching for “cat_ID > 0″ so I searched and replaced them with “cat_ID > 1″, just to bypass that category all together.

Overall it was kinda easy but had a bit of work to do . Hope this helps you.

Last 5 projects by Makis

• Twitter Status v1.0 (with JSON and cURL in PHP) - December 2nd, 2009
• OptusZoo - Restructure - October 20th, 2009
• inSing.com: New website - May 18th, 2009
• Script: Post-load banner ads - May 17th, 2009
• Flash-antics: New website - May 6th, 2009

This entry was posted on Tuesday, August 14th, 2007 at 8:30 am and is filed under Programming. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.