I found out some interesting changes in my recent upgrade of WordPress. They’ve added drop-down controls for Archives and Categories, something I wrote widgets for quite a while back. They seem to work well with one exception—the Links still aren’t XHTML 1.0 Strict compliant! Since those are the standards I hold my blog up to, I will be maintaining my strict_links widget as well.
Well WordPress just released their latest version, 2.5, to the public. I, being the generally techy guy that I am, instantly upgraded without fear. And I was justified. It took me under 2 minutes to back everything up by hand, unpack the new files, copy them, re-apply my comment spam patch, and now I’m up and running. Yay for upgrades!
The WordPress plugin for Google Analytics by Rich Boakes works great except for one small part: it rewrites a link under comment_author_link and doesn’t add a space between elements in the a tag, which causes a validation problem with XHTML.
It’s simple to add a space on the proper line (272 in v0.68), but I created a diff file you can use to patch it. Hopefully the author updates the file and nobody else has to deal with this problem.
Get the diff file, copy it into your plugins directory where the googleanalytics.php file is, then run the following command:
patch -p1 < googleanalytics.diff
If this is too confusing for you, or you use Windows, change the line (272) from:
return $matches[1] . "\"" . $matches[2] . "\"" . $coolBit . $matches[3];
to
return $matches[1] . "\"" . $matches[2] . "\" " . $coolBit . $matches[3];
You may not have noticed, but I upgraded to WordPress v2.3 today. The upgrade was smooth and painless. Just like all my other WP upgrades have been. I now have native tagging support (yay!), as well as a host of other features I’ll probably never abuse.