Today, I spent the time I usually spend drawing a new Geeks episode trying to fix the back-to-front bug I mentioned in my previous post.
All my research into fixing this invariably led to this cranky post on the WordPress site which in essence, says it’s a MySQL bug, to call your ISP to tell them to upgrade or downgrade their MySQL or to switch ISP’s, and stop bugging us.
When your ISP is the biggest ISP in France serving millions of customers, that’s not an especially helpful recommendation.
I spent all morning trying various hacks and fixes, and nearly broke the Geeks irreversibly a couple of times.
In the end, and in desperation, I upgraded WordPress to the latest version (2.5.1) and… It seemed to have fixed the problem!
So all was well.
Except that the comment link wasn’t showing up on the posts.
And that’s when I did something really stupid.
Remembering the bugs I had when I upgraded sknoblog to WordPress 2.3.3, I decided to force an upgrade of the database a second time.
And I pretty much destroyed everything.
I managed to get things back in working order (more or less and I hope) by cutting and pasting sql code from my database backup into phpMyAdmin to recreate lost tables and other such niceties that I barely understand myself.
But I still had the comment bug.
And the kicker is that after snooping around the WordPress Web, it turns out that « it’s not a bug, it’s a feature ». I have my comments in a pop-up window and WordPress won’t allow that behavior anymore on single post views for some philosophical reason that makes no sense to me.
So I Googled some more and found some inspiration to hack WordPress back to the behavior I wanted and had.
Note to self, I commented out these 2 lines:
if ( is_single() || is_page() )
return;
In the comments_popup_link function of the comment_template.php file in the wp-includes folder.
So the bad news is there will be no new Geeks this week.
But the good news is the Geeks are hopefully back to normal (so to speak, and for the time being, until some terrible corruption rears its ugly head, or I do something else to ruin everything, which is entirely possible, since there is one small bug that I haven’t yet managed to squash)…