Geek Tips

Just storing these in the blog for future reference.

WordPress Rich Text Editing

When upgrading wordpress (Hebrew wordpress, 2.3), there can be a problem where the rich text editor doesn’t show up.

First, check if the rich text editor javascript is being loaded (you can do this with firebug, or just view source). There should be javascript files calledtiny_mce_config.php and tiny_mce_gzip.php loaded into the post-editing page.

If those files show up but are damaged, you might have luck with removing bad old locale files (delete the wp-includes directory and upload it fresh instead of copying over an existing one), and scrubbing out any cached javascript.

If the files don’t show up, then check the database. in the *usermeta table, make sure that the user has a property called “rich_editing” with a value of “true“.

Firefox multiple instances

Say you have both Firefox 2 and a nightly build or beta release installed. You know about having separate profiles for each, so you don’t mess with your settings, bookmarks, extensions, etc. You run one of them using the -P flag to specify the alternative profile, like so:

 /home/dotan/software/firefox-nightly/firefox/firefox -P minefield

But you can’t run both at once, and when you click a link, it will open in the currently running firefox.

There’s apparently a simple solution to this, though, which I found on a page explaining how to set up a working environment for developing firefox extensions: setting an environment variable called MOZ_NO_REMOTE.

So, on my (Ubuntu) desktop I changed the shortcut to run the firefox nightly build to use this script:

#!/bin/bash
export MOZ_NO_REMOTE=1
/home/dotan/software/firefox-nightly/firefox/firefox -P minefield

Tricky angles to consider are that if minefield (nightly firefox) is running, I can’t properly launch firefox (it doesn’t have the MOZ_NO_REMOTE setting, so it will look for a running process to delegate to, find minefield and do strange things). So I need to have firefox running before starting minefield.

I could set firefox to use the MOZ_NO_REMOTE environment variable too, but then (I suspect) it might have problems opening links I click elsewhere.

Hmm.