Order of the Bath

Putting comments in code is a well established, if not rigidly employed method of documenting what the thing does. At best it tells future maintainers how it works and at worst it reminds you when you come back to it later. It doesn’t do anything else. With WordPress it does!

I wanted to make one page in a blog type application look different. The WordPress documentation says that first it looks for a template called pagename.php

Any custom Page Template selected for the page – If the page slug were about, WordPress would look for about.php

failing that then one called page.php and finally index.php working down the hierarchy until it finds one that exists. Now you would think that “pagename” was the name of the page—wrong!

After rootling through the forums I discovered that you have to select a custom “Page Template” on the write/manage page admin panel, THEN it directs it to use the right one.

Looking at the panel—no sign of a “Page Template” menu as promised. Further deep hunting on the forum and even resorting to Google I discover that you have to declare your custom templates—by adding a comment to the beginning in the form

<?php
/*
Template Name: templatename
*/
?>

Now the menu appears and you can chose between “Default Template” or the one you have declared “templatename” That is what I meant. These are not comments, even if they look like comments because the theme integration code is reading and interpreting them. They are effectively executed. I wonder if that is true for any others?

Doing a search with those keywords reveals a number of guides but most are now either old, incomplete or refer to the Ubuntu Server Build which has most of it pre-installed. My requirement was to put Linux (Ubuntu), Apache (web server), MySQL (database) and PHP (programming language) onto an existing desktop build (under VMware Fusion on a Mac) to serve as a WordPress development test-bed to save me having to keep uploading to a sandpit region on my web host.

The references used to achieve (and write) this were LAMP Installation On Ubuntu, Installing LAMP on Ubuntu 7.10 and Installing and configuring LAMP on Ubuntu.

The process will will mostly be done in a terminal (shell) window and a browser. The latter can be on a separate system on your network, in which case subtitute the Ubuntu IP address for “localhost” in the instructions below.

sudo apt-get install apache2
Change the ownership of the web area using
sudo chown -R [your Ubuntu account] /var/www
and test it by pointing a browser at http://localhost/

sudo apt-get install php5 libapache2-mod-php5
Restart Apache (sudo /etc/init.d/apache2 restart), create a file /var/www/phpinfo.php containing the line <?php phpinfo(); ?> and test from the browser (http://localhost/phpinfo.php).

sudo apt-get install mysql-server mysql-client
sudo apt-get install libapache2-mod-auth-mysql php5-mysql phpmyadmin
During this process you should be asked to set the MySQL root password. It is very important.

Edit /etc/php5/apache2/php.ini and insert the line extension=mysql.so (watch the spelling, the comment in the file is wrong) so that PHP can see MySQL. Also Apache needs to be told where myphpadmin is so edit /etc/apache2/apache2.conf and add the line
Include /etc/phpmyadmin/apache.conf
Restart apache again and test by going to phpmyadmin (http://localhost/phpmyadmin/). The login is root and the MySQL root password (I think).

My immediate requirement was to use it for WordPress. Although you can download a WordPress package using apt-get, I found that this was rather out of date so I did it manually. You will need a database so login to phpmyadmin, create a database by entering the name (e.g. WordPressDB) in the box and click the create button. Now click the SQL button and execute the following command where WordPressDB, WPDBaccount and WPDBaccountPW are your choices.
GRANT ALL ON WordPressDB.* to WPDBaccount@localhost IDENTIFIED BY ‘WPDBaccountPW’;

Now in the WordPress directory (say /var/www/wordpress) copy the wp-config-sample.php file to wp-config.php and edit it thus

// ** MySQL settings ** //
define('DB_NAME', 'WordPressDB');
define('DB_USER', 'WPDBaccount');
define('DB_PASSWORD', 'WPDBaccountPW');


Now finish the install by surfing to http://localhost/wordpress/wp-admin/install.php
It will give you a WordPress admin password on the way.

That is it—the only problems I found were keeping track of which password was which and went where.

By the way, it is only for use on your home network, there are other things you will need to do if you are planning to set it up as a real internet visible server.

As my “caught spam” counter rapidly approaches the 100,000 milestone I have noticed that there seems to be a discrepancy. Currently I get between 200 and 300 spam comments a day on this blog. This high figure really kicked in over Christmas last year but I have been using the Akismet anti-spam plugin since the previous May when the problem was significant, but a lot less.

The way Akisment works is that, as each comment arrives, details of it are checked against a central database at Automattic and an opinion is given as to whether it is spam or not. If it thinks it is spam it is put in a separate bucket and doesn’t get displayed; if not it goes for moderation as normal (I am a bit more paranoid than some and every time I consider taking off the moderation, I get a flurry of misses). The spam comments are kept for 15 days unless deleted manually and I have an opportunity to override the decision, though I haven’t seen a single false positive yet.

So every comment that arrives is given a unique number in the blog database, there doesn’t seem to be any way of bypassing that as they are all kept for a period and need to be referenced. As I write the latest spam message has been given number 62,407. This is 150 a day since I started, which seems reasonable. So how do Akismet reckon that they have stopped 99,315 on my behalf, almost 100 a day more?

The faq says

Some versions of the Akismet for WordPress plugin will hide duplicate comments, making it appear to be a different number caught than displayed.

but I can see no evidence of that and I am using the standard issued plugin.

It is not particularly important as there is no doubt that it does a good job, but it would suggest that their web site claim of nearly 2 billion spam blocked is also inflated.