WordPress Hebrew Date Plugin Alpha Release

I just hacked a simple plugin that displays Hebrew dates alongside the current Gregorian dates on posts. This is now active on this site. The alpha quality code (v0.2.0) is now available for your testing. For the most part the code is almost identical to the PHP code that I wrote to display Jewish dates in PhpGedView. While the PhpGedView code has various display options, for the sake of simplicity and the fact that I never wrote any WordPress plugins before, I did not code any of these options yet. Also not done is parsing of the “Month, Year” format of the archive pages. The PhpGedView code has many options such as displaying the dates in

  • Hebrew Only – י״ז סיון תשס״ה
  • Hebrew and Gregorian – June 24th, 2005 – י״ז סיון תשס״ה
  • Hebrew using the Latin characters – 17 Sivan 5765

and more. These may eventually be added to the plugin.

WordPress “Site Unavailable” Plugin Tweak

Since I am constantly tweaking things here (will settle down soon), I found myself looking for an easy way to temporarily bring the site offline. I came across the Site Unavailable plugin. It did exactly what I expected it to do, but the simple

<h3></h3>

html code that the plugin generated left a lot to be desired in terms of look and feel. I tweaked the file to add the site’s header and footer to make the unavailable message match the look and feel of the site. Being new to WordPress and too lazy to debug the PHP error message, I just suppressed them with an @. It works well with the default theme that I am using but not exactly proper with the Coffee Cup theme that I was testing. Since you will not likely hit the “Unavailable” message, here is a screen shot of the original plugin look, the default theme look and the Coffee Cup look. You can download the modified file here. There is a slight problem with the mod in that the nav bar bgcolor seems to still show. In the Site Unavailable blog, the author mentioned an option that he might include implementing a request to allow an admin to see the site. This should be done with great care, since it is very easy for one to not realize that the site is still offline in this scenario and leave it that way.

The Site Redesign is Now Live

The site is now running WordPress v1.5.1.2 (as opposed to the original hand crafted KosherJava.com site) and seems to be running well. The install was relatively painless and will allow greater flexibility in running the site as well as in receiving feedback. There seems to be a DNS issue when trying to reach https://kosherjava.com, but https://www.kosherjava.com seems to be working fine. A small glitch that has been corrected was the layout of the Zmanim calendar generator. This turned out to be a minor CSS issue.
Enjoy and please let me know of any problems.