The move to a new version of the web site is running… there may be some issues as we change settings here and there, please bear with us. It should iron itself out over time, as we spend more time ‘fine tuning’ it all.
WordPress bug, format.php, invalid wordpress html code
It may come as a surprise to some (but not many) folk to know that there has apparently been a long running bug in wordpress from about version 2.1 which will cause your website to fail validation. It only happens in certain situations, such as when you try and add a plugin to capture form based information from your site users. When the form code is passed to the browser, a spurious ‘p’ tag gets added in to the ‘div’ tags and therefore the code is not valid… Keep in mind that the ‘doc type’ declaration is important here too, and that in my case I was using XHTML 1.0 transitional.
So what to do? Well, on the wordpress.org website there are several threads about it, including this one where I posted a response earlier today. It seems that the issue is at least ten months old, and various solutions have been speculated. Indeed, some of these solutions seem to work for some folk, but they sure as heck didn’t work for me. Largely, they involve editing one of the core wordpress files – ‘format.php’ and either adding in a new line, or taking some away. The new line is supposed to be inserted as line 67 and reads:
$pee = preg_replace( '|(</div[>]*>\s*)</p>|', "</p>$1", $pee );
This did nothing for me at all. Other solutions included commenting out lines 66 through to 68… still nothing. However, when I asked my colleague Alex Blanc to look at the code he very quickly spotted that there was a simple fix – in his words ‘a bit of a sledgehammer approach…’ but it seemed to work.
Add this as line 91:
$pee = preg_replace( '|</p></form>\s*</p></div>|', "</form></div>", $pee );
(one line only, folks, no carriage returns…)
The placing within the function in ‘format.php’ is important – put it at the bottom of the function!
Now, it may be that you don’t need this, or that it doesn’t actually work for you – it worked for me today though. The point is that this is a known issue in wordpress and has been around for nearly a whole year, and survived several updates of the software. It really ought to have been sorted out properly by now… but hey – this is open source, right? 🙂
Cleveratom Website makeover
The Cleveratom website is having a gentle lick of paint. Well, actually it’s having a restructure, and the paint will look very much the same as before! We are moving it into a different kind of technology so as to be able to easily pull in RSS feeds and generally be able to manage the information more effectively – it’s fair to say we really need to do this, as it has been a long time since we created the current version.
We will no doubt move house again in the near future – perhaps into the New Year now, but in the mean time we hope that the refreshed version will serve our purposes better.
BCSE, British Council for School Environments, Industry Awards 2008
It is a great honour to have been asked to help evaluate the entries for the first BCSE Industry Awards and on Friday I received a pack of entries from three categories: Innovative design for Primary Schools, Innovative Design for Secondary Schools and Best Architect. I have spent the weekend reading these and am confident that the formal evaluation day (Tuesday 27th) will be extremely difficult. The quality of the entries appears to be very high indeed and choosing the top entries will be no easy task.
It speaks volumes about the quality of the designs for new schools around the country, and the opportunities that thousands of children are getting now that they weren’t getting before. I’m delighted to be involved in BSF work throughout the country and once again it has been emphasised to me just how important this work actually is.
I can’t say which of the entries will go forward to the final evaluations, of course, but I can comfortably say that innovation is thriving!
Cleveratom gains a new director
It is a great pleasure to welcome Nick Platts to the board at Cleveratom. Nick is a renowned technical expert who specialises in mobile applications. His expertise will complete the senior team of the company and ensure there is a greater depth to the technical development side of Cleveratom.
Nick has recently left WeComm in London, where he has been working on several exciting pieces of work. Most recently, Nick was part of the team that built the functionality that lets you program your Sky box using your mobile phone.
Prior to this Nick was regularly found haunting the centre of Ultralab where he worked on some equally ground breaking applications, one of which was the delightful ‘JellyOS’ – a piece of community software that to this day has not been replicated but that offers significant improvements on the functionality of many commercial offerings. Sadly, JellyOS was shelved as funding ceased, but remains as an exemplar online space. The core technology for JellyOS has been adapted and developed for the ‘Rafi.ki’ project by Gemin-i.org.
So welcome, Nick 🙂