Jim's
Tutorials

Though not technically a bug, I have found a ticket in trac that intrigued me. It can be found here: http://core.trac.wordpress.org/ticket/18382

The basic idea is that the current admin interface is a little clunky. If you're unfamiliar basically the navigation for the admin interface is divided (sensibly) into menu items and sub-menu items. If you're not currently looking at a given menu item you can't see any sub-menu items under it. If for example I'm editing a page, then in order to change a setting in a sub page of the settings menu then I need to first click the settings menu-item, then wait for the page to load before I can select the sub-menu item. On slow connections this can be quite tedious.

The solution this ticket proposes is what it calls fly-outs. The idea is like drop-downs except that we're talking about a vertical navigation so the menus "fly out" to the right of the menu.

Here is a useful picture:

Quite a bit of work has already been done here and many people are already involved so I'm not expecting that I'll actually contribute to this but it might be a good opportunity to see how these things happen by going through seeing the patches myself.

At this point I actually checked out a svn working copy of WordPress to start working with and it became clear that the flyouts feature had already been integrated into the current subversion revision so I went back to trac. This time I looked at the "has-patch needs-testing" page of trac: http://core.trac.wordpress.org/report/13.

I found a couple bugs, tested them and commented on the trac thread to that effect. I found a lot of good documentation on how to appropriately interact with trac here

The first was ticket 18349: "Approve and reply on recent comments metabox doesn't work properly". It had to do with approving a comment in a particular way from the dashboard (as opposed to the comments page). I was able to reproduce the bug as described on the page. I was then able to apply the patch file. At first the bug remained but then, after some looking, I realized that the patch file modified wp-admin/js/edit-comments.dev.js. At first I was confused by this but I eventually realized that wp-admin/js/edit-comments.js is a minified version of wp-admin/js/edit-comments.dev.js. So to test the changes I used:

And the bug was gone. I added a comment to the trac page saying which svn revision I had used and that the patch had worked.

The second bug was ticket 18765: "tag_escape() should not strip digits". It described an obscure, barely used function tag_escape which is intended to escape html tags. It seems the creators of the function had omitted the possibility of a tag containing a digit (e.g. '<h1>').

I began by adding the line:

to the end of one of the template files.

When I loaded the page, the resulting html source showed:

I then applied the patch and reloaded the page again to find:

I added a comment to the trac page saying which svn revision I had used and that the patch had worked.

I also started looking at ticket 16413: "Settings page needs HTML refactoring and UI improvements". Expect more updates soon.

http://cs.marlboro.edu/ courses/ fall2011/jims_tutorials/ sam/ Looking_at_WordPress_bugs
last modified Monday September 26 2011 11:12 pm EDT

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flyout-missing-border.png Sep 25 2011 4:01 pm 5.61kB