Suddenly the admin page looked slightly different (round corners in opera, that kind of rubbish), yet still exactly the same.
Oh well. They have a better updates overview now though. So I also decided to update the theme. Which restored a stupid
“swear at wordpress” box that I molested in the previous version. “Oh yeah, now I remember…”. (note that this is simply the theme
that has that stupid box there).

WordPress 3.0 Pixel Theme v2.0.2 with stupid welcome box

… when trying to insert an image here I found out that the new wordpress actually destroyed the image upload dialog.
Obviously it’s only broken in the Opera version I’m using, so it’s probably them… but still… *rage*…

In other words, a good time to try out what they call Child Themes.
If done correctly this supposedly prevents further updates to the theme from reintroducing this box. Unless they do something
silly of course, like adding a new box in a different template.
Here goes!

First we create a dir for the theme, it can be named whatever you like.
Then we create a style.css file.

The style file can be very empty, basically it imports the parent theme and optionally overrides things:

Make sure to correctly name the template (case sensitive) that you base the theme on, in our case pixel.

Well, so far so good, but this doesn’t actually change anything. What we want to get rid of is a stupid box that apparently is in the
welcome.php file of the pixel theme. In fact, welcome.php pretty much is the entire thing that annoys me.
So let’s create our own welcome.php file:

Easy huh?

Now you can go to the Admin panel -> themes and then you’ll see your child theme right there.

BenV's WordPress Pixel Child Theme

However, things never work as intended, so this fails. *sigh*. Nice try WordPress.
When we look into this matter, we notice that the pixel theme doesn’t really have a welcome.php template.
What it does have is a sidebar.php template, which includes the welcome.php from its own template path.
In order words: we can’t override welcome.php (until they fix the Pixel theme), but we have to override the sidebar.php file.

Here goes:

Yay! It works!

New features include “automatic database optimization support”, which you can enable by putting define('WP_ALLOW_REPAIR', true); in your wp-config.php file.
The rest you’ll run into yourself, it’s a ton of new stuff and fixes but some cool stuff like a built-in image editor and easier embedding of your favorite youtube junk.

Needless to say the automatic upgrade failed AGAIN for me:

Fortunately, my previous patch still works. Get it here if you want.

After patching that single line the automagic upgrade ended with: WordPress upgraded successfully. Jeeeej.
However, they still left the timeout at 60 seconds in the newer version

Failers. They deserve a 56k6 modem for their servers so they can find out about these issues themselves

Either patch it manually:

• Edit wp-admin/includes/file.php and change line 448 to a more reasonable default.
• The line sould become something like: $response = wp_remote_get($url, array('timeout' => 600));

Or use this patch:

When I tried adding the above patch as a download (using the download monitor plugin) I got this failure:

What the fuck guys, this is a TEXT file. Grepping through the sources I find the wp-admin/includes/file.php file to be the nazi. Apparently I’m not allowed (as site admin) to pass this current_user_can( 'unfiltered_upload' ). Security hardening, yeah… against idiots perhaps.
I’m expecting an update of either wordpress or the download monitor plugin soon.
Meanwhile I simply uploaded the file manually and added an existing download. Pfffrt, the hassle.

As for the upgrade, once again I had to manually increase their timeout to more than 60 seconds.
Just for reference:
Edit wp-admin/includes/file.php with your favorite editor and change line 448 so it has a more reasonable timeout, I put it to 300:

I felt like updating my shit today. Somehow I enjoy updates so I do it whenever I see interesting stuff.
So glancing through the slackware changelog I noticed a new Apache2 version (2.2.12 with a bunch of security updates). Meh, not my favorite piece of garbage to upgrade, but local upgrades were easy enough and also the remote (slackware 11, custom builds) ones went without hickups.

Then there was a new version of Irssi - 0.8.14. Fine, updated that too. Good to see it didn’t break my scripts

Meanwhile I checked out if the apache upgrade broke my notes, but it didn’t. While on the notes page I decided to write this little snippet,
and found out that also WordPress had a new release – 2.8.3. More security stuff.
And the codecolorer plugin that I use for the code snippets also had an update.
Updating wordpress was easy enough btw, just go to admin – tools – upgrade and hit the upgrade automatically button. I like features like that in a product.
Note that this failed at least two times because of a 60 second timeout on the download. Guess they need to invest in faster servers
“Download failed.: Operation timed out after 60 seconds with 1226456 bytes received”…. too bad they don’t give me other options when that happens.
And while I’m moaning about their ‘automagic upgrade’, how about some ajax progress indicators etc guys?
In case you also run into the timeout issue:
Don’t bother downloading the file yourself and putting it in the /your/wordpress/path/wp-content/ dir. Hitting the button over and over will
only swamp their servers even more and won’t make it any better either.
I tried increasing the php timeout on the sockets, but that didn’t seem to help. Pity guys, real shame… in fact, it angers me. *grumble*morons*grumble*
You might as well go for the manual upgrade.

At some point I got pissed enough to grep and read through the source for half an hour (AAARGH MY EYES) and distill this patch:
Edit wp-admin/includes/file.php with your favorite editor and change line 448 so it has a more reasonable timeout, I put it to 300:

Now it finally worked

While on the update tour I also updated my MPD to version 0.15.1, although I’m running the git
version of course, but that went fine (through slackbuild.pl of course).

Well, that’s enough updates for today. Time for some coding on slackbuild I think