Pros and Cons of WP 2.1 (IMHO)

Regard the feed thing. I’m using this plugin to “fix” that: https://cavemonkey50.com/code/full-feed/

I do not like the autosave feature and would like some advice on how to turn it off.

I don’t want autosave to save changes I may not be sure of. Once the page saves, I lose the undo function in Firefox that allows me to reconsider and restore old versions.

How do I shut autosave off? Surely this is a feature we can opt out of.

Autosave doesn’t seem to happen once the post has been published. (in other words, when editing an already published post)

Until then, why is it an issue?

I’m going to guess that calendo is talking about posts he’s writing but haven’t yet been published. Maybe not?

Well, I guess that’s where I was headed (in my own meandering style). If the post hasn’t been published, then it isn’t on the blog yet, right? So.. why worry about ill-effects of an early save? Nobody’s gonna see it…

Correct. I work on a professional site that features blog entries. Like every conscientious writer, I write things, polish them and sometime realize I’ve overdone the polish and lost the basic sense of a sentence.

But autosave wipes out the ability to undo in Firefox.

This is why in most applications autosave is off by default. You need to go into options to switch it on.

For me an uncontrollable autosave is a design flaw in 2.1, and I hope you will give users the option to turn it off, as well as set the time interval for saves, in future iterations.

For now I would like to go into the basic code, if I have to, and shut this puppy down.

Meanwhile, I love wp. Because of autosave, I have to write offline and then copy/paste copy in after the piece is more or less done (one never stops tweaking — at least control-freaks like myself don’t.) The downside is that by composing offline I lose the ability to see how the text is working with — or against — the pictures that I use to dress up the copy.

Can you help me out?

The ill effects of an early autosave is you can’t undo it, can’t retrive anymore the copy you changed a moment ago and now wish to change back to its original.

Autosave kills the “undo” capabilites of Firefox. Once a page is saved, Firefox loses memory of your past changes.

Got it now?

To disable autosave you have to edit the files /wp-admin/post.php en /wp-admin/post-new.php.
Find the line that says wp_enqueue_script('autosave'); and delete that line.

Remember, make a backup of the files you edit first in case something goes wrong.

I agree it should be an option instead of a default feature.

A somewhat easier way:
<?php
function adjust_autosave($seconds) {
return "999999";
}
add_filter('autosave_interval','adjust_autosave');
?>

This adjusts the autosave interval from the default of 120 seconds up to 999999 seconds. Which means that it will only autosave if you leave it up for about 11.5 days or so. ??

If you prefer a different interval, change the number.

This could be inserted into a plugin or into your theme’s functions.php file, if you don’t feel like making a plugin.

Overall, my main complaint with 2.1 (and for all WP upgrades) is that the new features added do not have options to turn them off. We now must get plugins to turn off new features.

This is a serious design flaw in my opinion. I think every addition of functionality should include an option to remove that function.

All in all, though, I’m happy with 2.1 and I’ll keep using it ?? And thank you to all the hard workers who created it. Open source is awesome and code IS beautiful (even if I don’t understand most of it).

I’ve been having problems with the Auto-Save functionality since it was deployed in 2.1.

Here’s what happens:

1. I start to enter a post
2. I continue to type (I can be long winded, imagine that!)
3. Auto-Save kicks in and refreshes the screen.
4. I can then no longer add categories, and when I try to click the “Save” button it gives me an error of “Are you sure you want to navigate away from this page?”.
5. At that point no matter what I click (OK or Cancel) I lose my post.
6. My screams of rage can be heard in the next county.

I would like to propose an enhancement to the WP-Admin interface whereby you can either disable the auto-save functionality (a check box would work great), or you can increase the auto-save time increment … Or both!

This would likely help those who are having issues with this new feature, and also give flexibility for Admins to configure their WordPress blog however they wish.

Help? Please?

@jfinchatl – can’t duplicate your problem, at least on a Version 2.2 system.

Regarding your request that Autosave be a user option, you might want to post that request at the WordPress trac system https://trac.www.remarpro.com Your forum login/password will work there.

I don’t understand why they deprecated template-tags that have been used in the Default theme for years. This means 2.1 / 2.2 breaks everyone’s theme who has been using Kubrick since 1.5. That must be 10,000’s of broken blogs. I am hating this change right now. It might be better if I understood a reason for it.

The biggest example is wp-list-cats is broken. You have to change the code to wp-list-categories, which uses different arguments so you have to figure out how to change the options too — all this mucking around in the code, just to restore the same Category list I’ve had since WP 1.5!?!

Without making this change: my category list displays the Link categories along with the Post cats! Ugly.

This seems like a crazy task to require of people who merely selected the Default theme in 1.5 and stuck with it.

I also found out previous_post and next_post are deprecated, but I haven’t seen yet whether this breaks the links on my site.

But if you had upgraded the default theme as a proper part of your upgrade, you’d type with a lot fewer exclamation marks!

It might be better if I understood a reason for it.

All the older functions that used straight PHP parameter passing methods are being slowly phased out in favor of the query_string method of passing parameters.

In your case, wp_list_cats() still exists, but it’s not being updated anymore, and so the changes to categories (combining link and post categories) in 2.1 is what actually broke your listing.

Why is query_string argument passing better? Well, the main reason is that it allows arguments which can be stacked internally using multiple functions.

wp_list_categories() uses several possible parameters. But it then calls an internal function walk_category_tree() to handle the recursive display of the categories. walk_category_tree() gets passed that same query string down to it, where it uses some other parameters (not shared in this case). Thus the wp_list_categories() call gains all of walk_category_tree()’s options by default, without any special coding for it, since you can just use all those parameters in the call and control it at both levels.

It makes the code a lot cleaner, a lot more expandable, and future-compatible.