But for others with the same desire, it can be a nightmare of confusion that prevents a would be "do it yourself-er" from making that all important first step towards their own custom WordPress blog or for the ones who already made the jump but found out later that every little upgrade became a dreaded event and the occasional problems that sooner or later pop up caused nothing but endless frustration and aggravation. There’s absolutely nothing wrong with not having a head for the technical of course but like the folks above that do, that need for more freedom of choice that’s available with “doing-it-yourself” is just as important. Just because you can’t wrap your head around the technical part of it doesn’t mean you’re any less of a blogger or that you shouldn’t be able to have your own custom WordPress install.

I happen to be one who loves all things technical, always have been and WordPress came naturally to me. Not everything mind you. To be perfectly honest about it, I’ve never been able to wrap my head around writing up my own code although I can easily track down a problem without any trouble and fix it. I understand the layout and what the code does but I could never write from scratch no more than I could design my own OS or PC motherboard. But that doesn’t mean that I don’t know my PC’s operating system like the back of my own hand or be able to easily replace a component on my motherboard (I can you know). And so it is with WordPress.

So for anyone who just desires to write up and publish posts (what else is a blog for anyway?) and leave the “heavy lifting” to someone else when new features are needed, the occasional problem arises or if you’re duly concerned about keeping your WordPress blog secure with all the current updates to your install and plugins but dread attempting it yourself (or just don’t care to), I’ll be more than happy to help you out. Just contact me via my contact form and let me know what’s going on and we’ll go from there. And for the more general info, comments are always welcome.

Through a completely unrelated problem that my friend Sixty encountered when his host switched his server over to PHP 5, (which prompted me to check my profile/forum posts on the WordPress.org forums) I finally found a fix for this problem in the form of a tiny plugin from a WordPress Trac member called “westi” which I’ve tested on two different WordPress blogs (one being my own and the other is Sixty’s) and it works just great. Both email notifications and comment subscription notifications are now working again. So until this shows up on the WordPress.org’s plugin directory, I’ve zipped up the plugin for download purposes for any who may need it.

Just click the link to download.

no-sender.zip

Installation is simple. Just extract the file and upload it to your wp-content/plugins directory and activate via your WP Admin’s Plugins page. All your comment email notifications should now be working again.

I highly recommend using this plugin rather than any core file hacks that are also offered in the Trac ticket link above since you would have to redo the hack every time a security release came out. Using the plugin instead means that no hack has to be done in the first place. By what I understand, this problem should be fixed in WP 2.3.2.

Hope this helps folks and thanks westi.

Note: If you install this plugin and you’re still not receiving notifications you might have to get into your hosting account’s cPanel (or the equivalent) and simply create a new email account that looks like this (without the quotes):

wordpress@(yourblogurl).com/.net/.org/.etc

That and the plugin should solve your problem.

Technorati tags: wordpress 2.3.1