However, as the proper way is to set the encodings in mysql 4.1 correctly, I decided to do it sooner rather than later.

According to the document, if UTF-8 was saved in the mysql 4.0 db although the default encoding is not UTF-8, then:

However, you should avoid trying to convert directly from latin1 to the "real" character set. This may result in data loss. Instead, convert the column to a binary data type, and then from the binary type to a non-binary type with the desired character set. Conversion to and from binary involves no attempt at character value conversion and preserves your data intact.

As it turns out, wordpress 2.1-alpha actually just save the text as latin1 strings, so no need to convert the fields to BINARY first, setting charset to UTF-8 on those fields is sufficient.

An sql file is prepared for doing this. (Proceed at your own risk and always backup first)

It seems it is now the time for a new release of SJSD which supports the latest FCKeditor: The svn trunk of SJSD supports 2.3 already, but no public release yet. I will try to make a release if I can find some time to sort it out.

In addition, a new patched EditMonkey would be nice as well, but as I haven’t ported the FCKeditor plugin for wordpress to FCKeditor 2.3 yet, it requires much more time, which I probably won’t do until some time later when I am not so occupied.

As this is a 2.1-alpha (svn) of wordpress, it refused to store the WordPress.com API key. However, after a svn up of wordpress, it got fixed.

I deactivated plugin CaptCha! and went and saw how well Akismet could do its job. So far, Akismet caught 8 spams perfectly without missing a single one. I guess I will stick with Akismet then.

I just did not come up how can the spammer bot work around the Captcha challenge…

Due to working on SJSD, I am pretty familiar with FCKeditor code base. When I tried the built-in tinyMCE editor of WordPress, I noticed it supports <!–more–> and <!–nextpage–> much better than the FCKeditor does in EditMonkey 2.5: in tinyMCE, an image is displayed instead of an invisible comment.

I noticed this post in regarding to this issue in the EditMonkey forum:

This can’t be fixed. I spent a week trying to get visual aids to show up in FCKeditor with an FCK plugin only to discover that this can only be done by extensively hacking the innards of FCKeditor. The two images are provided just in case someone does figure out a way to do this through the plugin. Unfortunately, as detailed in other posts, do to the difficulty in working with FCKeditor, I won’t be supporting FCK in any further releases of EM.

It looks like that "someone" happens to be me: I am pretty sure a FCKeditor plugin can achieve this (talking about version 2.2 here).

If you are fans of FCKeditor, than you may want to try this EditMonkey 2.5 Patched by Cougar version. It fixed lots of bugs related to FCKeditor interface. This download file does not contain tinyEMC and dictionaries. Unzip this file under your wp-content/plugins directory is enough.

However if you need dictionaries, you can unzip the original EditMonkey 2.5 file first, then uncompress this one to overwrite FCKeditor related part.

This is a ChangeLog compared to the original EditMonkey 2.5:

• Better <!–more–> and <!–nextpage–> support: at least as good as the tinyEMC counterpart
• Complex PRE tag content is supported, and new lines are preserved correctly
• Content saved to database is ensured to work with the builtin WYSIWYG editor as well as the builtin plain editor

Hope you enjoy it.

Only modifing one file is enough to fix this, here is the patch:

--- editormonkey.php.orig       2006-04-21 01:22:40.000000000 +0000
+++ editormonkey.php    2006-05-14 23:02:33.000000000 +0000
@@ -112,6 +112,8 @@
                add_action('admin_head',array('editormonkey', 'insert_interface'));
                add_action('edit_form_advanced',array('editormonkey', 'load_interface'));
                add_action('edit_page_form',array('editormonkey', 'load_interface'));
+               add_filter('content_save_pre',array('editormonkey', 'filter_content'));
+
                add_action('simple_edit_form',array('editormonkey', 'load_interface'));

                // Add actions to the comment form
@@ -165,7 +167,30 @@
                }
        }

-
+       function filter_content($content) {
+               if(preg_match( "#<pre.*>#imU", $content) > 0)
+               {
+                   $splices = preg_split("#(<\/?pre.*>)#iU", $content, -1, PREG_SPLIT_NO_EMPTY|PREG_SPLIT_DELIM_CAPTURE);
+                   $content = '';
+                   $inside_pre = false;
+                   foreach($splices as $s)
+                   {
+                       if(substr(strtolower($s),0,4) == '<pre')
+                       {
+                           $inside_pre = true;
+                       }else if (substr(strtolower($s),0,5) == '</pre')
+                       {
+                           $inside_pre = false;
+                       }else if($inside_pre)
+                       {
+                           $content .= htmlspecialchars(preg_replace("#<\s*br\s*\/?>#i", "\n", $s));
+                           continue;
+                       }
+                       $content .= $s;
+                   }
+               }
+               return $content;
+       }
        /**
                Creates a personal dictionary, 0=plugin/global dictionary
        */

Googling around for a WP plugin which implments Captcha, I found a list.

With further investigation, I decided to try out Captcha! (BTW: there is an open contest sponsored by eZ among others, in which one of the three available categories of application is captcha. However, as it turned out that it has too little information in the English post, I do not know much about this contest)

According to the document, I have to find a fancy font to use. I followed the suggestion to dig in website dafont. ” 28 Days Later” seems to be a decent while fancy one, so I downloaded it and put it in the same dir as the Captcha! plugin.

It is also necessary to create a web server writable dir for Captcha! to put the generated image files and the dir has to be under document root.

You can see the results at the bottom of this page

However, that’s means I can not use the SJSD project.

I searched in google for this kind of plugins for wordpress. Without much effort, I found out a fabulous one: Editormonkey.

You can try it in the comment below. Of course, as you can imagine, the functionality in the comment area is a much limited one compared to its full potential.