My Move To WordPress 2.5 & The Popularity Contest

June 1st, 2008 by A.D. Odom | Filed under General. | 206 views

If you haven’t noticed, I have returned to WordPress. I returned because it is easier to work with. Joomla is great but I have had too many instances where I was booted out of Joomla while in the middle of posting an article. If you were wondering why I stopped posting, that’s the reason. Too many posts were lost because Joomla timed out.

There were other issues as well. Uploading images in one menu for posting in another menu just was not the most efficient use of time. I initially thought Joomla a wonderful CMS, particularly for FemmeNoir. However, after finding myself waiting for one screen to load just to upload images then waiting for another to load that would allow me to post an article, not only did I find myself waiting to collect social security, I often found myself forgetting what I was trying to do.

As for the articles I had on the old State & Lake under Joomla, at some point I’ll find the time to reinstate those posts. Unfortunately, I found no good way to export posts from Joomla into WordPress. Bah Humbug!

With that, I’m back with WordPress and hopefully the only change you’ll see here will be in the design of the site, not the posts.

Moving on. One of the plugins I am most fond of with Wordpress is Alex King’s Popularity Contest. However, after installing the brand spanking new version 2.5 of Wordpress I discovered the Popularity Contest simply would not work without giving me fatal errors. A little research and I found a supposed fix which did not work.

I gave up on finding a fix because I really had no time to really investigate the problem. Instead, I went with a Wordpress.com plugin which seemed to love listing my posts as drafts and not by their titles. Don’t know what that was about but there you have it. I eventually removed that plugin when I got tired of seeing “Draft dated . . . .”

This weekend, I received a frantic phone call from a former client wanting to know if I found a fix for the plugin and he told me the plugin worked fine after the upgrade but, when he did a new install of WordPress on another site the plugin did not work. At that point a bell went off in my head.

On Alex King’s site, he mentions the earlier fix — where you remove one of the “/..” from the php file — stating it is not the fix he is using. I realized King’s site was updated to 2.5. He does not have a new install of 2.5. Another former client called to tell me he did a new install for his sister and though the plugin is working on his upgraded site, it is not working on his sister’s new site. Since my site is a new install, the problem had to be somewhere within the database meaning, another line of code needed changing to activate the database.

Short of going into MyPHPadmin and manually changing the database — which I may still have to do, we’ll see — I changed some line of code within the plugin and so far so good.

Opening the popularity-contest.php file, search for the following:

if (isset($_GET['activate']) && $_GET['activate'] == 'true') {

and change it to this:

if (isset($_GET['action']) && $_GET['action'] == 'activate') {

Since I did this I found The WP Guy has an updated plugin for download on his site which corrects the problem. The fix addresses both the direct to “../../wp-blog-header.php” and the database issues. I suggest you read his post and download the new plugin there. I uninstalled my fix and installed his and it is working just as beautifully.

Tags: Popularity Contest, Wordpress