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Had a chance to comb through some of the latest WordPress 1.5 code (through 2005-01-05) in CVS, both in the course of a fresh install and in the course of code analysis for development of some new plugins. Spotted a few things that would benefit from improvement (nothing critical).

A list of things I’ve noted, provided, or want to inquire about to help contribute to WordPress v1.3 (or as ideas for future versions), roughly in ascending order from trivial to implement to complex.

Bug 0000113 is titled “Post content ‘lost’ if multiple <!–more–> (more…) tags used“. Which basically says that if more than 1 <!–more–> tag is located in the content of a post, you’d only ever see the text up to the second <!–more–>. All subsequent text, though still part of the post content in the database, will never be displayed. The fix is extremely simple:

In wp-includes/template-functions-post.php, in the function get_the_content(), change this line:

$content = explode('&lt&;!--more-->', $content);

to this:

$content = explode('&lt&;!--more-->', $content, 2);

The third argument to explode(), the limit arg, was introduced in PHP 4.0.1, and since WP supports PHP 4.1, the fix should be valid. This way text before the first <!–more–> will be put into $content[0] (as expected), and all other post content, regardless of subsequent <!–more–> tags, will be put into $content[1] and therefore not “lost”.

Here is the patch (modified from, and then compared against, the latest WP 1.3 from CVS).

One of my nits about WP, from my original formatting problems post, was that despite balancing tags for an entire post, WP wouldn’t do so for text appearing before a <!–more–> tag. Others have noted this in the support forums, and it was reported as bug 0000178, titled “WP doesn’t close tags when breaking a page with <!–more–>”. This fix is actually quite simple.

Continued from my previous post in which I examined, and provided examples for, various problems related to the WordPress core function balanceTags(), here’s an explanation of the changes I made to the function.

First, here is a copy of the original balanceTags() function.

Here is a copy of the modified balanceTags() function.

Here is a diff of the changes to the file wp-includes/functions-formatting.php diff of the changes to the file wp-includes/functions-formatting.php (modified from and then compared against the latest version as obtained from CVS for WP 1.3).

Here’s my justification for the changes I made. The first of my changes takes place early, in the while() where it iterates through all the functions in the text. The remaining fixes are in the function related to finding an open tag. These fixes address all issues I am aware of with the balanceTags() function (except for situations I mention at the very end).

Prompted by WP Patch Day, I felt compelled to try to patch a bug with WordPress.

I choose one that has already caused me numerous headaches, bug 0000053, entitled “WordPress deletes some text when HTML tags incorrectly nested”.

In a nutshell… In the Admin sections “Options” menu, “Writing” submenu, a checkbutton exists to indicate if “WordPress should correct invalidly nested XHTML automatically”. This setting is active by default.

The thing is, not only does it not always correct invalidly nested XHTML, it can actually delete some of the text in the post. As the function operates on the post as the post is inserted into the database, that text is gone.