How To Really Enable The WPMU Theme Editor
Call me a n00b, but I like to use the theme editor in WordPress to get the themes to suits me. I can move around all the different files needed to make changes to the sidebars and tweak the CSS files fairly quickly and when you use the Find box in the status bar of Firefox, locating a particular spot in the code is very fast.
When you do your first WordPress MU install one of the first nuisances you run into is the lack of a theme editor “out of the box”. A quick trip around Google will inform you that it is a huge security hole to enable an editor in WPMU.
Being a fairly unpopular fellow, my WPMU installs have an amazing lack of real users, so I really don’t have many security fears. So, dang it, give me my editor back.
Several blogs offer the answer. Simply open admin/includes/mu.php and get yourself down to line 530 (in PSPad anyway) to find:
unset( $submenu['themes.php'][10] ); // always remove the themes editor
This line prevents the editor from being loaded. Either comment or delete this line. Save and re-upload.
You’re supposed to now be in business. However, on my sites, I find that, yes I do now have a link in the backend for the Editor, but when I click it, the next page says ‘Disabled’.
I quizzed my code guru buddies in IRC and found no one n00b enough like me to use the theme editor.
Anyway, to get to the point, I noticed the file returning the ‘Disabled’ message was theme-editor.php. The WordPress powers that be are pretty much opposed to theme editing and yet they ship with this file. I poked around it a bit and noticed this:
require_once(’admin.php’);
wp_die( ‘Disabled’ );
$title = __(”Edit Themes”);
$parent_file = ‘themes.php’;
Either comment or delete the “wp_die( ‘Disabled’ );” at line 11 or so. This will allow the editor to load up and you’re then on your way.
Good luck with it.
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Back Up, Back up, Back Up
All right, no-brainer quiz here. What’s the number one thimg to do on a routine basis to ensure the survivability of your sites and your business? Obviously back them up on a regular basis. Everything. The databases, files, themes; everything. We all do it all everyday, right?
Right.
Well, I have this small site I created for a local band. Decent little community. With the proliferation of Xrumer the poor guest book was taking a beating. More and more spam until this last week I would clean it out in the morning and find a dozen more by evening. Finally, I broke down and did some upgrades to the security. In all the haste to get this non-profit chore done, the tables got overwritten and all of the last two year’s worth of entries were gone in a flash.
Bummer. Surely they will understand. The band , I mean.
This story has a less than unhappy ending.
I could find no sql dumps for this site anywhere, though I know I had made them at one time. Hey, half a guest book is better than none at all. I even called Godaddy. They have a recent backup, right? Yes they do. And for a mere $150.00 USD they will be glad to send you a copy. One more reason to get the heck off of Godaddy’s tit.
Then the bright idea hit me. Check the Google cache. A quick site: search and surely enough the spiders had been there last week. I printed out dozens of pages of now precious entries which can be manually re-entered. Whew.
Moral of the story for me. You can’t be in this business and be very lazy. There are lots of little details that either have to be attended to to personally or they have to be delegated. Ignoring such details is begging them to bite you in the butt. Even the small details.
Prepare Yourself
I see a lot of people on the various marketing forums trying to do something with internet marketing without being willing to aquire basic skills.
It’s true, that this business can be started and a basic amount of success can be had, with a basic set of skills. But that is the end of it. You can’t outsource everything, forever.
Here’s a list of basic commitments in knowledge that have to be made.
- HTML or XHTML The basic language of the web. A must have.
- CSS Cascading Style Sheets. The thing that pretty much makes the place look like it does. Yes, a site can be thrown up with Wordpress or Joomla and a theme used right off the shelf, but do you really think you need to look just like everyone else that grabs things ‘off the shelf’? Even basic color changes and font adjustments take a small amount of CSS handling.
- Image Editing I know, images can all be bought or scraped somewhere, but there comes a time when they need resized, cropped, or whatever to make them more effective.
- PHP Familiarity with a server side language will need to happen eventually. Sometimes a tweak is all some plugin needs to be made more effective. If you don’t know how it works on a basic level it’s hard to be creative with what you need to get done and communicate it to your outsourced programmers.
Understand that some of the brightest competition in this space are people that have been in this game (internet) since they were kids or are college trained computer geeks. It’s hard to come into this battle arena and fight to win against such opponents.
The good news is that you don’t have to have those skills to get started. Wordpress on shared hosting is so simple. Getting offers to promote at various networks and buying some clicks is not hard. All it takes is a bit of cash to get you rolling. But before too long you will find out that, ultimately, the learning curve is steep.
Be prepared to invest in yourself.
Eric