Above is a shot of a couple of the images I’ve produced for new site features.

You can find that related posts plugin at http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/similar-posts/. Another plugin by the same authors is one that shows a list of the most recent posts. In the old design I had this functionality hardcoded into the theme footer but now it can be done with a single line of PHP.

It’s pretty easy to find how to send alternative headers and a the source data from a PDF file: for example http://uk3.php.net/manual/en/function.header.php Additionally, there is plenty of information out there if you want to use ‘Content-Disposition’ to force the client’s browser to behave as if the file was a download rather than load Adobe Reader in the window itself.

However this was all fine until we discovered that Adobe Reader’s usual behaviour of displaying the first page and loading the document as it is being read was broken. This system is intended for some fairly large documents and the browser was choosing to download and cache the entire file before displaying anything. I knew immediately it would be something to do with the headers.

There is very little I could find that expanded on this issue, so using an online tool that can be found at http://www.askapache.com/online-tools/http-headers-tool/ I examined what response would be sent by accessing a PDF file directly from the server. Using this I could replicate the header in PHP and as I guessed, the issue was resolved:


header('Accept-Ranges: bytes');
header('Content-Length: '.$filesize);
header('Connection: close');
header('Content-Type: application/pdf');


A link to the plugin: http://www.phoenixheart.net/wp-plugins/referrer-detector/

I’ve posted it on the wordpress forum in case it proves useful for anyone else: http://wordpress.org/support/topic/245629

Update: Since this is now closed, I have included the code I made originally here:


function Get_Post_Number($postID){
$temp_query = $wp_query;
$postNumberQuery = new WP_Query('orderby=date&posts_per_page=-1');
$counter = 1;
$postCount = 0;
if($postNumberQuery->have_posts()) :
while ($postNumberQuery->have_posts()) : $postNumberQuery->the_post();
if ($postID == get_the_ID()){
$postCount = $counter;
} else {
$counter++;
}
endwhile; endif;
wp_reset_query();
$wp_query = $temp_query;
return $postCount;
}

http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/wp-page-numbers/

Unfortunately this wasn’t quite what I was after, since it works with the existing pagination system of WordPress.

I quickly found http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/wp-smf-a-simplemachines-bridge/, which seemed ideal. That is until after diligently following the installation instructions the plugin caused the entire site to break. Fortunately WordPress’s plugin system can be rescued by simply deleting the offending plugin.

Searching for much longer wielded a solution based on the first. The stuff that can be found at http://www.earthorbit.com/opensource/ DOES work and works well.

An excellent page bringing together a whole range of resources to do just this can be found at:

http://www.graphicdesignblog.co.uk/wordpress-as-a-cms-content-management-system/

Before now I have experimented with the nextgen gallery wordpress system and the wordpress simple forum.

http://www.sillybean.net/archives/452

http://www.zend.com/zend/spotlight/breadcrumb28.php

http://gr0w.com/articles/code/php_breadcrumb_links_creator/

Next comes the CSS for that general area, including my new design’s main navigation.