So I'm using Textpattern to develop a CMS for CRMA. One of the critical features I need is a front-page expiration - if a meeting announcement is stale, I don't want it to show up on the front page, but I do want it to show up in the Announcements archive.
There's a feature request for article expiration in the works, which helps me not at all. However, some looking around brought me to the wonderful chh_article_custom plugin, which does exactly what I need it to. However, it took me much too long to figure out how to get the beast installed.
The plugin looks like1
< ?php $plugin='YTo4OntzOjQ6Im5hbWUiO3M' ? > </>
where the string of gibberish is a uuencoded (or some encoding) of PHP code. On the plugin admin page, you get two boxes: "Install Plugin", with a textbox, and "Old-style (text file) plugin installer", with a file chooser. Both boxes have a help button associated with them, that returns... absolutely nothing. I remembered (from having installed one plugin successfully) that I needed to paste the plugin into the textbox. However, doing that gives a "Badly formed or empty plugin code" error. Well then, perhaps using the old-style installer... nope, same error.
It took me about 30 minutes of searching the forums and googling before I figured out that what gets pasted in the textbox is what's between the two single quotes. So, for the example above, I'd paste just YTo4OntzOjQ6Im5hbWUiO3M.
Arggg! Why isn't this more clear? And why isn't it at least in the help?
But now, at least, Google has some prayer of retrieving something about this, in case some other poor soul needs it. And mondo mad props to Coke Harrington for making my life easier.
1 Why does WP muck up the PHP string? Does it have something to do with the backslash issue, where my hindbrain is telling me that there's a known issue about WP swallowing backslashes, and you have to escape them?
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