Most of bloggers have a problem with spam. Of course, there is Akismet, but sometimes Akismet is not good enough because he doesn’t catch all spam messages. So, with this in mind, i wanted only to get rid of all automated messages.

So, look what i did:

First of all, i go with „robots fills ALL fields with something” in my mind. I’ve added only TWO lines of code: one in comments.php from your theme folder and one in wp-comments-post.php from your root folder.

Ok, how you do it?

First of all you need a ftp client and a text editor. E-texteditor is 2 in 1 so you can download a trial version for doing this. Ofcourse, you can use the old and ugly notepad (or whatever your OS has default).

Open comments.php (which is in your wp-content/themes/your_theme_name folder) then find this line:

<form action="<?php echo get_option('siteurl'); ?>/wp-comments-post.php" method="post" id="commentform">

Some things can vary (like ID of the form), but 90% in cases you won’t need to look for something else

Just AFTER this line you add:

<p style="position:absolute; left:-9999px;">Don't fill this! <input type="text" name="name2" /></p>

We put a form here and hide it. I didn’t use display:none because i wanted to be sure that field will be showed up, even is on the left side of the screen (you should actually turn you head to left to see it ) So the bot will actually SEE that form and will fill. Normal user won’t.

Save and upload (or just save if you work directly on ftp) then open wp-comments-post.php from your root folder. Just after the

<?php
/**
 * Handles Comment Post to WordPress and prevents duplicate comment posting.
 *
 * @package WordPress
 */

beginning part, just add this:

if( $_POST['name2']!= ''){
	die('Spammer!');
}

Save and upload.

Next you need to… Hmm… You don’t need to do anything else ! Now empty your Akismet queue and wait to see if you get any other spam messages

Note that is possible to not catch ALL spams, but those are automated you won’t get it anymore Also, when you upgrade wordpress make sure you make those changes again. And finally, BACK UP FIRST!

How many times did you need a light modal box? To display an error mesage, a picture or even another web page inside of the current page? And every single time, you ended with using a large-full-of-useless-options script. Yeah, i know the feeling. Seriously, i know it VERY well. That’s why i wrote this piece of code to display modal boxes Anyhow, this works BEST with AJAX content

UPDATES: known issues

If you need to display more content than fit into a screen height, you won’t see the content after the fold. To fix this, just remove the scroll bind on document:

(document).bind('scroll', function(){
		$('#ntz_modal').css({
			top:$(document).scrollTop()
		});
	});

How to use?

Just call with modalBox('content', 200) where content is what do you want to display (which can be an ajax result) and 200 is the width of the modal box. If you don’t specify any width, the default value (350) is used.

How to close the modal box?

Well… Just call the function modalBox(). When no parameter is passed, then the modal goes off. Nice, isn’t it?

Browser compatibility

The script was tested in FF 2, FF 3, IE 6, IE 7, Safari (on Win), Opera 9.5. If you don’t know what these letter means, there is a very high probability to don’t need this snippet

Selectboxes on IE6 - how they are managed?

Very simple: i hide ALL selects when modal is shown and i show them back when modal is destroyed. Ofcourse, you can use bgiframe plugin. Which is

Requirements

The script is tested with last version of jQuery (1.2.6) but should work fine with previous (and ofcourse next) versions. If you use an ancient version, you may need some extra plugins (like dimensions)

What’s the cost?

Prepare you credit card, prepare you paypal account or whatever you want. Because this is totally FREE. You may use, modify and distribute whatever you like. A small link back would be nice (but NOT mandatory).

You bastard! You use your name in modal elements! Yeah, so? No, seriously, i used this way because there is no way to know what div did you use. And the chance to have a div called ntz_modal in your code is kinda.. hmm… Right! ZERO! Of course, you can change these ID’s whatever you like it

How do I get the code?

Keep reading!

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var IE6 = false /*@cc_on || @_jscript_version < 5.7 @*/;
function modalBox(content, width, callback) {
	if(!content){
		$('#ntz_modal').remove();
		$('#ntz_overlay').fadeOut(function(){$(this).remove();});
		try{if(IE6){$('body').find('select').visibility('visible');}}catch(err){};
		return false;
	}
	try{if(IE6){$('body').find('select').visibility('hidden');}}catch(err){};
	$('body').append('<div id="ntz_overlay"></div>');
	$('#ntz_overlay').css({
		width		:	'100%',
		height		:	$(document).height(),
		position	:	'absolute',
		left		:	0,
		top		:	0,
		backgroundColor	:	'#FFFFFF',
		zIndex		:	9990,
		opacity		:	0
	}).fadeTo(200, 0.5);
	$('body').append('<div id="ntz_modal"></div>');
	$('#ntz_modal').css({
		border		:	'1px solid #2d7abb',
		width		:	width ? width : 350,
		backgroundColor	:	'#FFFFFF',
		position	:	'absolute',
		left		:	'50%',
		top		:	$(document).scrollTop(),
		zIndex		:	9995,
		marginLeft	:	-(Math.ceil((width ? width : 800)/2))
	}).append(content);
	$('*').blur();
	$('#ntz_modal a:eq(0), #ntz_modal input, #ntz_modal textarea').focus();
	try{
		callback.call();
	}catch(err){};	
	$(document).bind('scroll', function(){
		$('#ntz_modal').css({
			top:$(document).scrollTop()
		});
	});
};

Note: the example is VERY intrusive

Today i made a nice gallery/carousel for a customer who didn’t want to use flash. Why? Beats me! Anyway, take a look HERE and tell me what do you think?

I made this very quickly (and very, VERY messy!) and i didn’t have enough time to test in other browsers than firefox and ie7.

Soon i will post the last part of carousel - the autoslider part - and after that i will show you how i made this carousel.