Add a screenshot to your WordPress theme
There are some files that you need to include when building a theme, especially if you’re intending to release that theme into the wilds.
One of these files is the screen shot.
WordPress skewing Analytics stats
The other day I was checking my Google Analytics stats and I came across a strange thing.
In my stats there was a page URL showing which didn’t look right to me. The URL looked like this
/?page_id=213&preview=true
Change WordPress’s nasty maintenance message
When WordPress goes into maintenance mode your site will display a horrible plain text message which reads
“Briefly unavailable for scheduled maintenance. Check back in a minute.”
The message is functional but little else. Thankfully you can change it.
Where’s the code?
Open the load.php file which resides in the wp-includes folder.
Scroll down to line 164 as at WordPress Version 3.1 and you will see the following code
<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd"> <html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml"> <head> <meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8" /> <title><?php echo /*WP_I18N_MAINTENANCE*/'Maintenance'/*/WP_I18N_MAINTENANCE*/; ?></title> </head> <body> <h1><?php echo /*WP_I18N_MAINT_MSG*/'Briefly unavailable for scheduled maintenance. Check back in a minute.'/*/WP_I18N_MAINT_MSG*/; ?></h1> </body> </html>
If the code above doesn’t appear at line 164, it is entirely possible that things could move in future releases of WordPress. In that case just search the load.php file for
<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC
This should lead you to the correct code.
Making changes
As you can see the code is a very simple HTML page.
You can now edit this part of the code, being careful not to edit anything beyond the bounds of the <?php and ?> tags.
You could go as far as to build an entire page there with as much design as you like.
Have fun!
Does anyone else have any cool WordPress tricks?
Configuring WordPress’s permalink structure
If you use WordPress then I’m sure that you’re aware that you can change the structure of the URL’s that WordPress creates. No?
Well I’m glad I wrote this post then.
On some blogs you will see URL’s that look kind of like this
http://smileyhappycoder.co.uk/?p=85
Well to be honest, and I’m sure you’ll agree, that’s not too pretty to look at. And worse, what would Google and other search engines make of it? Not a lot is the answer. Read More >
How to put WordPress into maintenance mode manually
Sometimes you’d like to put your wordpress blog into maintenance mode for a while. Say you’re doing a crucial update and you want to take the site down just for a few seconds. Here’s how to do it.
- Log into your FTP site and browse the the site’s home folder.
- Create a new file called “.maintenance”
Don’t include the quotes and ensure you include the dot at the start - Open up that file and add the following code to it
<?php $upgrading = time(); ?>
So now your site should be in maintenance mode for a while or basically until you remove the file.
The function uses the following sum to work out how long to stay in maintenance mode for
The time now = The time specified – 10 minutes
So in the above example when we are using the time() function the sum will always be within 10 minutes.
If for some reason you’d like to take your site down until a specified time you can do that by adding a time to the function.
<?php $upgrading = '123123123' ?>
In the above example 123123123 is the unix time stamp for the time you’d like to site to come back to life minus 10 minutes.
