Category Archives: Software Development

Experiences with programming in Java, NetBeans, and C/C++ as well as web development in PHP, JavaScript and XHTML.

No mail notifications from WordPress

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For some reason WordPress stopped sending email notifications of new comments on one of my sites, even though all the options regarding such notifications were checked.

There are two such options under Settings->Discussion in the WordPress backend:

  1. Notify when any comment is posted
  2. Notify when a comment is held for moderation.

Some Googling around got me to a forum thread at the WordPress.org support site.

It turns out that some hosts require a valid “From:” address in an email before it allows the mail to be sent.

Since all comment notifications are sent from wordpress@YourDomain.YourTLD, this means that you’ll need to create a wordpress mail account before your host will allow the notification mails to be sent.

I just created an alias for one of my existing email addresses and that was enough to get comment notifications working again.

Second rebirth

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This is the second time I’ve attempted to relaunch Entropy.

The first attempt was stillborn. I chose a theme that simply required too much work to be simply functional. This time, along with an upgrade from 2.7.1 to 2.8 I’ve selected dfBlog as my base theme. It’s proven versatile, easy to modify when its versatility isn’t enough, and compatible with browsers as ancient as Internet Explorer 6.

Since the relaunch, WordPress 2.8.1 has been released, so I’ll need to update the Entropy WordPress installation soon as well.

I also butchered the accordion category list component from the very nice theme, Sliding Doors (by Wayne Connor at Mac-Host). I’d love to widgetise it one day but I’m skeptical of my own ability to make time to do so.

For those of you that followed W.A.M., fear not for it has been assimilated into Entropy. As the juicy news that pique public interest in South Africa breaks I’ll be sure to pass running commentary on it. I’m also working on getting a WordPress RSS plugin to work that will imp0rt RSS feeds as blog posts for The Extremist. He writes over at Hellforge now (as well, hopefully) in a column/blog he calls Extreme Opinion. Check him out there in the meantime. Hopefully his articles (with appropriate links back to the source) will be live soon.

Anyway, welcome to Entropy 1.0. Where the site’s not in beta but the writing probably is.

Upgrading WordPress (2.1.0 to 2.6.2) – what a mission

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Here’s the short of it for those that don’t want to read my whole epic.

While trying to upgrade from WordPress 2.1 to 2.6 I was presented with the database upgrade page when trying to get to the backend (/wp-admin). Upon clicking the Upgrade button/link a half-ream long list of “Table doesn’t exist” errors were displayed.

WordPress failed database upgrade - Table doesnt exist error messages.

WordPress failed database upgrade - Table doesnt exist error messages.

The reason WordPress can’t find the tables is because it fails to create them during the database upgrade. For the full reason behind why this happens you’ll have to read the whole post. If you’re only interested in what to do to get it working the next three paragraphs and two code samples should explain all.

In WordPress 2.2 two new settings were introduced in the wp-config.php file namely DB_CHARSET and DB_COLLATE. By default, that is in the wp-config-sample.php file, it sets these variables to ‘utf8′ and ‘utf8-general’ respectively.

define('DB_CHARSET', 'utf8');
define('DB_COLLATE', 'utf8-general-ci');

If you added the DB_COLLATE option to your old wp-config.php file and retained the default option as given in the sample file then it is highly likely you experienced this error since utf8-general-ci is not a valid MySQL collation. The silly little error that causes so much grief lies in the dashes — they should be underscores.

Most MySQL installations use utf8_unicode_ci as the default collation. You’re likely to get joy by setting the DB_COLLATE option to

define('DB_COLLATE', 'utf8_general_ci');

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