terrywassall.org work in progress

Digress.it is a development of a WordPress theme called CommentPress, now no longer being developed. The original author of CommentPress, Eddie Tejeda is behind its new incarnation and Digress.it. The original idea of CommentPress, and now Digress.it is to be able to turn “a document into a conversation” The main difference seems to be that Digress.it is a WP plugin plus theme. This allows a great deal more flexibility and customisation. So far I have only used the plugin with the default Digress.it theme and I have no idea if it will work with others yet.

The process is as straightforward as installing any other plugin – unzip the contents of the download zip file and copy the lot to the plugins folder. Then go into plugins in the Dashboard and activate it. My problem was that the resulting Digress.it blog had no formatting and just displayed in unstructured and unformatted plain text. Joss Winn told me about the Digress.it Google Groupwhere I posted a message about my problem. Eddie responded soon after with the explanation of the problem and how to fix it. When the plugin folders and files are installed (in the wp-content/pluginfolder) the structure had a folder called ‘theme’. On activating the plugin another folder is created in the wp-content/theme folder named digressit. I’m not sure how this works but there is a symbolic link between wp-content/plugin/digressit/theme/ and wp-content/theme/digressit. However, a particular Apache setting has to be in place for this to work – FollowSymLinks. This is not set on the host I am using. Eddie suggested a temporary fix -  to copy the wp-content/plugin/digressit/theme/ folder into wp-content/theme/ and rename it digressit. (I renamed the original wp-content/theme/digressit/folder first in case I needed to reinstate it). And this worked absolutely fine. As Eddie pointed out, this has consequences for upgrading but he intends to sort the FollowSymLinks issue out for the next release. It seems to have this Apache setting is not necessarily the default with some hosting services so organising the plugin-theme coupling so it doesn’t need it would no doubt save others having the same problem.

PS Broke the fix by deactivating the plugin and then reactivating. Had to reinstall whic I did by deleting the plugin and the theme and installing from the plugin page. It looks different from the last installation in that it has the sdiebar on the home (contents) page and a set of buttons along the top as a mani menu. These are labelled:

Table of Contents, Comments, Commenters, General Comments

The first is the home page but the others go to the home page of http://terrywassall.net rather than somewhere in http://terrywassall.net/documents/

PPS Found in the header.php file a section:

<div id=”top_bar”>
   <ul id=”front_menu”>

In addition to the code for the Contents page button there is code for the 3 others. For example the first one is:

<li><a <?php echo ($_GET['comment-browser'] == ‘posts’) ? ‘ ‘ : ”;  ?> title=”Comments By Section” href=”/?comment-browser=posts”><span ><img src=”<?php bloginfo(‘url’); ?>/wp-content/plugins/digressit/theme/images/famfamfam/text_padding_top.png”> Comments</span></a></li>

for the Comments by Section button in the top menu. I edited this as follows:

<li><a <?php echo ($_GET['comment-browser'] == ‘posts’) ? ‘ ‘ : ”;  ?> title=”Comments By Section” href=”./?comment-browser=posts”><span ><img src=”<?php bloginfo(‘url’); ?>/wp-content/plugins/digressit/theme/images/famfamfam/text_padding_top.png”> Comments</span></a></li>

This has corrected the paths and fixed the buttons and they no longer go to the home page of http://terrywassall.net. I assume this is a problem because the installation is not in the root of a WP installation. It is in a subfolder called /documents.

PPPS (Jan 2nd 2010) Deleted the digress.it installation from http://terrywassall.net/documents/ and will do a new installation at terrywassall.org/documents/.