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Last week, I noticed some problems in the True Blue Wordpress theme that I got from Easy wordpress. So what I did was to go to their support forum and post a question,

Hi,
I have been using the True Blue Theme for about two weeks now and I have noticed several problems.

1. The search function does not work. Check at http://silkenhut.com. Do a search and it just redirects to the homepage.
2. There is no <?php wp_footer(); ?> found anywhere in the code. I think this is required for some plugins to work (wordpress stats).

Please advice on what can be done about this. Thanks.

Guess what I got from what I posted? (link to my forum thread)

A link back to my blog.

Yes! That’s the only thing I got from my post. There were a few views but nobody replied or bothered to help. So what I did now is to try to solve this problem on my own.

#1 Search Function Not Working

This was something I accidentally discovered when I was trying to search for old posts in my blog. The search function does not give you results but only redirects you the homepage. So I put on my thinking cap and started debugging the template code.

The search function can be found at the header.php file. The original code is this,

<div class="Search">
<form action=”<?php echo $_SERVER['PHP_SELF']; ?>” method=”post”>
<input type=”text” name=”s” class=”keyword” />
<div id=”buttonsearch”><input name=”submit” type=”image” class=”search” onmouseover=”javascript:changeSty(’searchIE’);” onmouseout=”javascript:changeSty(’search’);” title=”Search” src=”<?php bloginfo(’template_url’); ?>/images/transparent.gif” alt=”Search” />
</div>
</form>
</div>

Take note of the code that has been highlighted in red. Actually that’s the code that tells your browser where to go when it does a search.

<?php echo $_SERVER['PHP_SELF']; ?> returns a different value depending on your blog address. So for my blog, it returns the value, “http://silkenhut.com/index.php“. It’s simply yourblog.com + index.php. Since I don’t use index.php for my blog, I replaced that phrase with my blog address so now it looks like this.

<div class="Search">
<form action=”http://silkenhut.com” method=”post”>
<input type=”text” name=”s” class=”keyword” />
<div id=”buttonsearch”><input name=”submit” type=”image” class=”search” onmouseover=”javascript:changeSty(’searchIE’);” onmouseout=”javascript:changeSty(’search’);” title=”Search” src=”<?php bloginfo(’template_url’); ?>/images/transparent.gif” alt=”Search” />
</div>
</form>
</div>

See what I replaced? With that simply change, the search function now works. ^_^

No wp_footer in theme

This is another error that I found accidentally. I’m using the wordpress stats plugin and I noticed that it’s not recording the hits to my blog so I went to wordpress support forums to look for answers. I found out that the reason why the plugin does work because it needs the <?php wp_footer(); ?> somewhere in the template in order to work.

I’m currently working on the fix for this since adding this in my footer destroys my current theme. ^_^

Update: Just add it in your footer, before the </div> tags and it will work.

Where’s the support?

This is something I want to ask the theme developers. I’m sure it’s not a one man blog so there should be someone who could help me but alas nobody did. But it’s good that I had a bit of knowledge in PHP so I was able to solve some of these problems.

So in the future, if you want to use the true blue easy wordpress theme by easy wordpress, don’t forget to add these fixes first. ^_^

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