I love blogging to help others out with Plumtree / ALUI / WCI issues, and to contribute to the “The WebCenter Interaction” portal ecosystem. But I have a confession to make: A big reason I blog is to create my own reference tool. I find myself always forgetting the syntax for Remotely Rebooting Windows Servers just when I need it, or the console command to use when the number of Remote Desktop Connections are maxed out in Windows.

I know I’ve overcome challenges like these in the past, but can’t remember the command syntax or how I did it. So I do a Google search for something like site:integryst.com wordpress rather than a general search where I have to dig through thousands of responses.

My first WebCenter-related tip for this post is to use “site:integryst.com” or “site:function1.com” in your Google queries for WebCenter tips you know you’ve seen before but can’t quite remember where they are.

Secondly, I’ve been looking at integrating the WordPress blog into the WCI portal.  As of this writing, I’ve basically been getting acquainted with the technology and have gotten the UI pretty much down by simply mirroring the portal UI in WordPress.  This blog is a good example of that, as is the Health Buzz Blog (check out the blog, which is running WordPress, and click the nav links on the left, which link to the portal).  Next up for WordPress blog integration is Authentication, Authorization, and Search.

But that’s not the real reason I started this post. The real reason was that I found myself debugging a WordPress (2.8.6) bug knowing in the back of my mind that I’ve seen this before but forgetting how I fixed it. The bug is that when a user submits a comment to a blog post, the page that comes back is a 404 error and the comment isn’t recorded. Turns out – after a crash course in PHP and way too long doing diagnostics and printing debug statements – my browser has a User-Agent header that’s larger than 255 characters. This causes WordPress to fail deep in its core, and it improperly redirects the browser after a comment is posted without showing or logging any error messages.

The solution (and maybe I’ll remember this the next time I run into it without spending another hour looking for my own bug report): increase the size of the comment_agent column in wp_comments:
ALTER TABLE wp.wp_comments MODIFY COLUMN comment_agent VARCHAR(512) CHARACTER SET utf8 COLLATE utf8_general_ci NOT NULL;

Astute readers will notice that I’m a little behind in my WordPress versions; the latest as of this writing is 2.9.1.  However, as this is as much of a test/demo environment as a “real” web site, I’m testing out WordPress MU, which is a couple of revs back due to the additional functionality: WordPress MU (multi-user) is what would allow us to provide each portal user and community with their own blogs.

Interested in getting an industry-leading blog integrated with your WCI portal?  Drop a comment here, contact me, and/or stay tuned!