problem posts page 24

WordPress: Comment Approval Email Address

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[Update 6/11/2009] See comments for resolution of this issue.[/update]

Had a weird problem that might point to a weird semi-bug of WordPress.

I just recently received an email asking me to approve a comment on the Stearns site. I haven’t touched the admin part of the site in two months. We had set them up to need to approve every comment, and to have WordPress email the administrator whenever a comment was submitted. When I left I had made sure the address in the >Settings>General pane was set to one of the Stearns people, and it still is. This is the address I thought would receive the comment approval mailings.

I went looking for information on where the address for comment approval mailings is pulled from. According to this thread, the mailings are sent to the address of the “admin” account. I had deleted the “admin” account for security purposes (getting rid of a known user name) and may have transferred that account’s posts to mine. Or maybe it’s because my ID is the next closest to zero. So my account may be considered the “admin” account now.

The other possibility that I thought of is that the mailings get sent to the post author. I’m set as the author of the post the test comment was set to and a number of others. I would have to change them all over to one of the Stearns people if this were the case.

Choosing the easier solution first, I changed the email address of my account to that of one of the Stearns people (modified with the “+” syntax to avoid duplication). I did a test comment on the same post as the previous one was sent to and did not receive an email, so the suspicion of that thread may be correct (have to verify with the Stearns people).

I think that is a silly place to pull the address from if true. It would certainly make sense to have this settable and not tied to one particular account. The comment moderator might not necessarily be the “admin” user, as with Stearns. It doesn’t seem to be unreasonable to have the comment approval mailings sent to the same person who receives mailings about user registrations (the one on the “General” tab). Or, to be a bit more fancy, either have a separate address or user set for comment moderation on the >Settings>Discussions pane.

I’ll update this post if I find out more.

[Update: 6/10/2010] At this point I am thinking that the author of the post receives the comment approval emails, as it would certainly make the most sense. For the Samba Soccer Club site I did a while back, I received a comment approval message for a post I wrote as myself rather than admin. I do have the lowest current ID, so that can’t be ruled out, but it really doesn’t make any sense for that to be how it works. I’ve realized that my changes on Stearns shouldn’t tell anything, because the lowest user id and post author are both the same for the relevant posts.[/update]

Stearns: Internet Explorer workarounds

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We’ve had to do a bit of work to get our site working properly in IE, mostly version 6. I’ve recently started using a conditional stylesheet just for IE6 on my own site, like:

<!--[if lte IE 6]>
<link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="<?php bloginfo('template_url')?>/styleIE6.css" />
<![endif]-->

and we did the same for Stearns.

Box Model

One issue we dealt with for IE6 in the conditional stylesheet was box model issues. IE6 handles margins, padding, and borders differently than other browsers, so we compensated for this in some places. One big issue was with our floated columns: The third would float below the second on some wide pages.

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iTunes CDDB info for the Yars

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In January, my former band The Yars released their first full album (they were all shorts or live while I was there). I’ve had a copy of it since then, but haven’t imported it. I had heard the songs tons of times as Dwight was working on them, so was certainly burned out on them. I also don’t entirely like the sound direction the songs have taken, and it’s a little weird listening to another drummer play them. And it wasn’t in the iTunes store, so they had no CDDB data. I wanted to wait for that. So I never got around to importing it.

Today I decided to. It’s been in the iTunes store and other venues for months now. But still, there was no CDDB in the Gracenote database that iTunes uses. I could go to the store and see all the track info, but there was no way to get it to the album. But I found this article describing how you can copy store songs to a playlist, then use one of Doug’s scripts to copy them to another set of songs. So I went to the iTunes store to copy them to a playlist. Unfortunately, the new fancy iTunes song playlist doesn’t allow this to happen. The songs are like HTML elements on a page. And I had planned to boycott getting new versions of iTunes because they had cut off support for third party access. But just recently I think the very features that were now causing me trouble, plus the full new version number, had enticed me. I found the “Column Browser”, which does have a Cocoa style list of the songs, but I searched every possible genre with no luck at finding the Yars.

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wORDprESS Capitalization

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Hmm, an interesting discovery I just made:

wOrDpress seems to change the capitalization of all instances of its own name, ie “woRdpreSS”, within the title and content of posts. Since URLs can be case sensitive, this caused a problem for one of the links I had on a previous post. It was changing the lowercase “p” to uppercase “P”. To solute the problem, I used the HTML escape sequence “p” in place of that “p”, and the link works just fine. I’ll have to watch for that next time.

[Update] Interestingly, the capitalization wasn’t changed on this post at all, but it was on the other. I’m not sure why.[/update]
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