Every now and then you will probably install an application that has a certain amount of prerequisites that you should verify on your server before beginning installation. Today I needed to verify that PHP was compiled with curl and/or libcurl support to install an application on a CentOS Linux server. I also needed to verify that PHP safe_mode was set to off and PHP register_globals was also set to off. The easiest way to verify PHP settings is to create a temporary PHP file that calls the phpinfo function and displays the results on a web page. Use the information below to verify that PHP is compiled with curl support on CentOS Linux or any other Linux server.

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After moving a WordPress site from one server to a brand new server I ran into an issue with one of the WordPress plugins called MM-Forms. The MM-Forms WordPress plugin allows you to easily create contact forms that will either email filled out forms to you, store those forms in the MySQL database, or both email you and store the results in the database. The issue was the fact that the contact form was not displaying on the page it was configured to display on. After digging around a bit I located the issue by looking in the Apache logs. The issue ended up being with the PHP function called imagetypes. Below I describe the actual error noticed in the Apache logs, the CentOS RPM package that will provide the PHP function that was missing, and the yum logs from installing the package.

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I have had FORCE_SSL_ADMIN set for quite awhile now in my wp-config.php file which forces all traffic to /wp-admin/ to be HTTPS. When I initially configured this setting it broke numerous WordPress plugins which I fixed however I missed MM-Forms being broken. The issue was the exact same as previous plugins that had the issue so it wasn’t to hard to fix but I wanted to share in case anyone else is having trouble getting the MM-Forms plugin working over SSL. Below I will explain what lines need to be changed to get MM-Forms working over HTTPS including syntax, line numbers, and old code.

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Previously I wrote an article that detailed modifying the WordPress Most Commented plugin to display the most commented WordPress posts via the WP admin site. If you need more information on creating admin plugins or just wanted to glance over the article related to this one you can read it by clicking here. Something I did not include in that article was how to add code to the plugin that would also display a widget on the WP Admin dashboard. Below is basic information that should assist you in adding code that will display a dashboard widget.

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In the process of creating a mirror image of a current WordPress to be used for development purposes I ran into a PHP error that I had not seen before. The current version of WordPress was working without issue but because many of the settings needed to be modified for the installation to work with a different domain pointed to it. Even after modifying the settings that I had modified in previous instances to make WordPress work with an updated domain name I was still getting an error related to the WordPress Theme. I enabled some PHP error logging, started looking for answers on the web, and then implemented some changes described below to resolve the error.

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