CoffeeBear.net

WordPress/Akismet Hack 0.0.2

Posted by Mark | Filed under WordPress

Do you run WP? Do you also have Akismet installed? Would you like a quick ref­er­ence on the Dash­board show­ing you some info from Akismet? I do and did want this. Since I have zero idea on how to set this up as a plu­gin; I sim­ply added the code into /wp-admin/index.php. I scanned through the file until I found the sec­tion of code which cre­ates the “Lat­est Activ­ity” box. Then between the sec­tions for “Blog Stats” and “Incom­ing Links“¹, I added the fol­low­ing code:

<h3><a href="http://akismet.com/" title="Stop Comment Spam and Trackback Spam « Akismet">Akismet</a> Stats</h3>
<? php
$deadspam = get_option('akismet_spam_count');
$livespam = $wpdb->get_var("SELECT COUNT(comment_ID) FROM $wpdb->comments WHERE comment_approved = 'spam'");
$sitelink = $wpdb->get_var("SELECT option_value FROM $wpdb->options WHERE option_id = '1'");
print "Killed Spam Count: $deadspam\n";
if ($livespam == 0) {
print "Your spam queue is empty!";
} else {
print "<strong>Possible Spam Count: <a href="http://coffeebear.net/wp-admin/$sitelink/wp-admin/edit.php?page=akismet.php" title="Click here to see the moderation queue">$livespam</a></strong>\n";
}
?>

There’s undoubtably a more ele­gant way of retriev­ing and dis­play­ing this infor­ma­tion. And for some­body who actu­ally writes PHP code reg­u­larly, this might even be a quick and easy plu­gin to cre­ate. Unfor­tu­nately, I’ve only read part of a book about PHP; so this is about as far as I can cur­rently take the hack. Unlike what some peo­ple think, Word­Press does not require you to be a PHP guru. It only requires a web­server with PHP, MySQL & a lit­tle patience².

NOTE: THIS IS A CORE WORDPRESS FILE! EDIT AT YOUR OWN RISK! I AM NOT RESPONSIBLE IF YOU HOSE YOUR BLOG, SERVER, LIFE, THE UNIVERSE, AND EVERYTHING! BACKUP EVERYTHING BEFORE YOU EVEN CONSIDER ATTEMPTING THIS! ONLY ATTEMPT THIS HACK IF YOU FEEL COMFORTABLE EDITING CORE WORDPRESS FILES.

Update: Neto Cury was kind enough to point out an error in the above code. Though to be fair it’s not entirely my fault. I pasted into this post the exact code I used in my file, but some­thing in WP or one of the plu­g­ins I use appears to have changed the first part of the PHP cod­ing from <? php to < ?php. I’m not sure what caused that, but to help peo­ple avoid get­ting errors; I’ve uploaded a text file con­tain­ing the code for the hack. You can down­load that file here.

Update #2: Fixed a typo in the pre­vi­ous update. Sorry about that Neto!

Update #3 2007-04-21: I’ve updated this hack to mod­ify the akismet plu­gin file (Akismet v2.0 for Word­Press 2.1.3) instead of one of the Word­Press core files. Read about it here.

¹ Blog Stats ends at line 85 in my file and at the time of this writ­ing I am run­ning Word­Press 1.5.2.
² This is true of every CMS that I’ve looked at.

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