Fixed WordPress calendar title formatting issue ($ak_title_separator) in cached pages

I discovered an annoying issue with the calendar widget on my Thripp.com blog [1] today. I use the widget which is included in WordPress, WordPress MU, and Thripp.com, but for the Internet Explorer, Safari, and Camino browsers, it formats the pop-up titles with line breaks instead of commas. In Firefox it looks like this:

It’s pretty reasonable to use commas to separate post titles. But in Internet Explorer, WordPress generates the page using line breaks instead:

That makes sense, since Firefox can’t handle line breaks in title tags. Unfortunately, as you may know, I use WP Super Cache [2]. If the first visitor to a page is using Internet Explorer, his hit generates the cached copy. For later visitors in Firefox, the titles then look like this:

Bad bad bad. There’s no space or comma or line break or anything. It’s illegible.

The solution is to serve the same formatting to all browsers, so caching is a non-issue. I don’t care for the line breaks anyway; everything should have commas. I found the culprit in wp-includes/general-template.php. This is in WordPress MU 1.5.1, but it’s the same in WordPress 2.5.1 and the new 2.6 series:

if (strpos($_SERVER['HTTP_USER_AGENT'], ‘MSIE’) !== false || strpos(strtolower($_SERVER['HTTP_USER_AGENT']), ‘camino’) !== false || strpos(strtolower($_SERVER['HTTP_USER_AGENT']), ’safari’) !== false)
$ak_title_separator = “\n”;
else
$ak_title_separator = ‘, ‘;

Change that to this:

$ak_title_separator = ‘, ‘;

Simple. I’m surprised no one else is talking about it [3]. I guess I’m the only one who is annoyed enough.

If you want the best of both worlds, use this instead:

$ak_title_separator = ‘, \n’;

It’ll look right in Firefox and the same as before in Internet Explorer (line breaks), except with a comma after each title but before the line break.

The problem with this is that I’m hacking the core files, so I’ll have to re-apply the updates by hand when I upgrade WordPress MU. Thripp.com is on 1.5.1 now (2.5.1 in regular WP), but I’m skipping 2.6 to wait for 2.7 for Thripp.com. Hopefully the developers will have more bugs [4] worked out, with new ones to go along.

Surely there’s some way to do this with a plugin outside the core, but since it’s such a small thing I’m not going to look.

Your Thripp.com calendar widgets can now look nice for everyone. You can add one under Design > Widgets.