Turn on Chrome Frame for Internet Explorer in WordPress (and bbPress)

Google is promoting their Chrome “frame” enhancement for Internet Explorer users that allows people to stay with the IE interface but run the much faster and safer Chrome browser inside it.

However ChromeFrame has to be turned on for each website they visit.

To turn it on in WordPress and bbPress you should be able to add this single line as a mini-plugin, or in header.php or even in functions.php.

<?php if (strpos($_SERVER['HTTP_USER_AGENT'],"chromeframe")) {header("X-UA-Compatible: chrome=1");} ?>

Update: the above will not work, apparently Chrome needs it to be a META tag and not in the page headers 😦 – thanks Matt

If you want to just put it in header.php use this (before </head>)

if (strpos($_SERVER['HTTP_USER_AGENT'],"chromeframe")) {echo '<meta http-equiv="X-UA-Compatible" content="chrome=1" />'}

If you want it to be a real plugin, use this:

<?php
add_action('bb_head','chromeframe');
add_action('wp_head','chromeframe');
function chromeframe() {
if (strpos($_SERVER['HTTP_USER_AGENT'],"chromeframe")) {echo '<meta http-equiv="X-UA-Compatible" content="chrome=1" />';}
}
?>

September 23, 2009 | Categories: WP fixes | 8 Comments

How to get email through to hotmail users (and maybe aol)

You may have noticed (or discovered after some complaints) that hotmail (hotmail.com hotmail.co.uk) users are not getting their WordPress or bbPress registration emails from your server. Try not to get too frustrated, Hotmail and AOL email accounts are the worst.

This is essentially because microsoft wants your server to conform to their own system and if they don’t like something, it’s your problem. If your users are on AOL and not getting your emails, you are mostly screwed short of paying them major $$$ to get off their bad email list (or paying a lawyer to pester them) but with Microsoft you can try to fix the issue yourself if you are patient.

Essentially make sure your server has reverse DNS (rDNS) (ie. it’s IP address resolves to the same domain name you use) and that it has a proper SPF. Ask your host’s technical support for help if you don’t know how to do that, it’s definitely something they should cover.

But with Microsoft that’s not enough. They cache that info for awhile, so if it’s changed (ie. you sent emails to hotmail users before you put in a proper SPF) you’ll need to send an email to
senderid@microsoft.com with the domain name(s) in the text of the message on new lines.

Then you have to wait, sometimes up to two weeks, to get an automated reply.
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February 25, 2008 | Categories: WP fixes | 1 Comment

It’s “Content-Type” not “Content-type”

I accidentally discovered some of my feeds were not validating, not because of content, but because of the headers!

Upon inspection, I noticed some of them were being formatted nicely as RSS feeds and others looked like a dump of text or html.

It was driving me crazy, started blaming all sorts of things like eaccelerator and/or wp-cache.

Guess what, it comes down to a single uppercase/lowercase typo that a search found in a few plugins and some older RSS templates I was using from pre WP 2.1

If you find anything sending “Content-type” (note “type” vs “Type”) then some browsers, readers, feeders will break and not know what that means. Why? Because the RFC2616 specification says the case matters and some programmers follow the rules without allowing room for others that (accidentally) don’t.

You’ll need a good search/replace tool that’s case-sensitive. I use this old program and have been too lazy to see if there are any replacements around. It works fairly well so there’s never been a need.

One latent bug fixed, 1000 more to go… sigh…

May 5, 2007 | Categories: WP fixes | Leave a comment

more feed fixing including text super-sanitizer

If you like the idea of serving up all your content in a way that makes it super easy for search engine spammers and other nasties to grab it all, and/or allow a human reader to never actually visit the pretty website you worked so hard on – well then the default WP feeds are for you.

Unfortunately I’m not in the above group. The default WP feeds for posts, comments, rss and atom formats, all give up EVERYTHING in ugly, CDATA wrappers that aren’t correct technique. They also ignore any plugins you have active to manipulate your text before it’s seen (ie. [poll=2] )

It kills me how people spend hours and days making things validate on their website which does nothing for human visitors but don’t think twice about how they appear via their feeds.

So I wanted the feeds to
1. actually process any plugins used for the posts (ie. [poll=2] )
2. only give teaser excerpts (50 words or less)
3. not use ugly CDATA wrappers
4. not include the images
5. not include javascript, embeds or active-x

WordPress doesn’t do ANY of the above by default!

First I had to create a way to completely process the posts (#1) but scrub them clean of #2-#5.
Below the break you’ll find the function to do that “function scrub_text()”

Then you have to go into wp-rss2.php and replae where it dumps the description/content with:
<description><?php echo scrub_text(apply_filters(‘the_content’, $post->post_content) ,50); ?></description>

Repeat with similar technique for wp-commentsrss2.php wp-atom.php and wp-commentsatom.php
ie. for wp-commentsrss2.php
<description><? echo scrub_text(get_comment_text(),50); ?></description>

The nice thing about the scrub_text is it will convert foreign entities to unicode which will pass virtually all xml parsers including IE6’s ancient code.
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August 27, 2006 | Categories: WP fixes | 2 Comments