WPMu Theme Editor Easter Egg

Update: Fail! I’m wrong yet again, damn it. Donncha replied to this post on my UMW Blogs here, basically saying he had nothing to do with it:

Not my doing. That’s just the normal WP easter egg. Dunno how that plugin managed to trigger it!

Tom Woodward discovered an Easter Egg in WPMu 2.6 which occurs when you install D Sader’s wonderful Userthemes Re-visited, but fail to include the proper code in the theme-editor.php file. You can see the Easter Egg he saw below:

The analysis below is a WPMu addict geeking out on a few things about this particular Easter Egg that may seem entirely nonsensical, but I find it particularly playful because there’s a history to it. If you follow Donncha O Caoimh (who is the developer of WPMu) you may have noticed he recently discovered the Easter Egg in WordPress 2.6. Getting a kick out of it, seems he made his own version for WPMu 2.6.5. Yet, this Easter Egg isn’t arbitrarily placed at all, it’s linked to an ongoing pet peeve of Donncha’s.  You see, he’s not a fan of allowing theme editing in WPMu because it wasn’t intended to do this (at least according to him) and it opens up security risks if mishandled.

In fact, about a year ago Donncha pulled the theme-editor.php file out of the WPMu trunk all together (which slipped back in recently–purely a merge error he assures us), and I was pretty puzzled by its absence back in January when updating to WPMu 1.3.3. I tracked down the reasoning through a trac ticket which had a brief discussion between Donncha and RavanH and posted about it here. So, when Tom told me when and where the Easter Egg showed up, I was sure Donncha was taking a shot at all us blaspheming WPMu theme editors, and it made me laugh.

After learning about this, I have to admit I’m deathly afraid to upgrade the Multi-Site Manager plugin because I’m petrified it will explode my blog for real. Reason being, if there is one thing Donncha hates more than theme editing capabilities in WPMu, it may very well be creating Multiple WPMu sites within one install –which I for the life of me can’t  figure out because it is such a damn powerful plugin and model.

Anyway, I thought this Easter Egg was awesome touch, particularly because it has a rich, contextualized history behind it if you are a WPMu geek. Here’s to you Donncha, quite a nice touch—you do fine work!

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5 Responses to WPMu Theme Editor Easter Egg

  1. It’s in WordPress 2.7 proper as well – looks like a trap for an error condition when comparing a version to itself. Probably easier/funny to write a Matrix-inspired error message than to use javascript to sanity check the version selection radio buttons…

  2. Reverend says:

    D’Arcy,

    Why come I don’t know what you are talking about?

  3. dunno…

    go to the admin UI of a blog running WP 2.7 (or, I guess, 2.6.5, but I haven’t checked on that version) and select a post in the Manage Posts section of the admin ui. (or, just hit Edit This Post). Waaaaay down at the bottom, the revisions of all edits for that post are shown (so it’s best to pick a post that you’ve edited a few times). Select a version to view, and then at the bottom, you get radio boxes to compare that version with other versions of the same post (same thing a wiki gives you – very cool text diff comparison). Pick the same version (click both of the the radio buttons for the same version). BOOM. Recursion. Infinite loop. Feedback. WordPress eats its tail. Follow the white rabbit…

  4. ah. the video you posted does exactly what I was describing, in WP 2.6.5 – it’s not showing theme editing at all, but post revision comparison…

  5. Reverend says:

    D’Arcy,

    I like the white rabbit image, I think that is powerful and I want to eat that rabbit. I also think, from what I gather from your analysis, that the internet might soon eat itself. Your like Nostradamus with a weird hat and policeman shades.

    Actually, you are like Neo, but riding on a bike in the snow with Tron’s helmet on, rather than in an actual computer matrix. Does that make sense?

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