Thought Garage

One of the best features of Wordpress is the ability to upgrade to a newer version by just clicking on a link from the dashboard. So, whenever I see a new version available, I just go ahead and upgrade to the latest version.

Just a couple of days of back I upgraded to 2.8.5. Everything went smooth, no issues what so ever. Later in the day, when I published a post from Windows Live Writer, I suddenly found that the post actually lost all HTML formatting. Didn’t know what happened. I quickly searched for any 2.8.5 problems with XMLRPC. But did not see anything other than some comments that XMLRPC has been updated to work better.

I did a full reinstall. But didn’t fix the problem. I did a full installation of latest Wordpress in a separate folder, but that also had this problem.  I checked an old blog I hadn’t upgraded in a while, but I found that also had this issue.

I was quite baffled. Before I did the upgrade everything was working fine. I published a post on 30th of October 2009 from WLW. No issues. And now I find issues not only in this upgraded blog, but all blogs on my host. Not sure how did that happen.

Anyways, today while searching on the internet, I found a solution.   Thanks a ton to Joseph Scott. It appears it has something to do with libxml version on my host. Didn’t understand how my wordpress installation worked all the while until 2.8.5 with the same libxml version but failed after the upgrade.

Link to the wordpress Plugin Libxml2 Fix:

http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/libxml2-fix/

Anyway, I installed the plugin and still didn’t work. Later I found on the plugin developer’s blog a comment by another user on how to check for libxml version on the host and update the plugin code accordingly to use it.

Original blog post where I found the comment talking about updating the plugin to a different version :

http://josephscott.org/code/wordpress/plugin-libxml2-fix/

I just checked it on my host SiteGroud and found that it got 2.6.3 and I updated the plugin file to include this version as well. Now all works fine.

Thanks a bunch.

When it comes to rendering, the world’s fastest browser, my favorite Google Chrome still has some rough edges. I mean, really some rough edges. It has trouble rendering rounded corners on WordPress login page. See how a WordPress login page is rendered on different browsers. I am on Microsoft Vista.

Google Chrome : Not happy with round edges and shadow

Issues: Round corners are not transparent enough and shows thick black edges. And somehow shows a much wider shadow (compared to Apple Safari)

Apple Safari : The Best

Finest and quite crisp when it comes to rendering content. See how the it stands out from the page and just enough shadow.

Firefox : Just Fine

Renders round edges fine but completely misses out on the shadows. So the form looks more like embedded in to the page rather than standing out floated (like in Apple Safari)

Internet Explorer 7 : Completely ignores round edges, but better than Google Chrome

IE completely ignored round edges and has the same problem with shadows (like Firefox). But looks much better than Google Chrome as there are no black edges.

Apple Safari is the best when it comes to rendering. Its even much better (compared to all others) to render indic scripts (like Telugu). See a clipping of the home page of Andhra daily news paper, Eenadu in Apple Safari. Its beautiful. (Google chrome is worst for rendering Telugu)

Upgrading Wordpress installation is now just a breeze. Just one click away. I logged in this morning to the dashboard and it alerted me that a new version is available and gave a nice sweet button to automatically upgrade. It just took 5 seconds. No downloads, absolutely. I love it.

I use a shared hosting service, and normally it takes a week before they make a new version of the software available so that I can use their one-click upgrade. Now no more waiting. Just click a button. It is easier than anything else you do on Internet. How cool!

Thank you Wordpress team.