So, if you try to activate a WordPress plugin, but can’t, due to a memory allocation problem, you can either modify the wp-settings.php script, or, if that has no effect, increase the ‘memory_limit’ variable in the php .ini file. If you can access the php .ini file yourself, great, if not, contact your host.

To change the wp-settings.php file, open it up and locate the following lines:


if ( !defined('WP_MEMORY_LIMIT') )
define('WP_MEMORY_LIMIT', '32M');


Now change ’32MB’ to ’64MB’, so it reads:


if ( !defined('WP_MEMORY_LIMIT') )
define('WP_MEMORY_LIMIT', '64M');

Again, if this doesn’t and you can’t change the php .ini file yourself, contact your host. Incidentally, if you’d like to see your ‘memory_limit’ allocation, pop the following code into a php web page and upload it to the server:


<? php echo phpinfo(); ?>


This is a convenient little resource featuring the abovementioned tip and plenty of others.

extract( $_POST );

This creates a value pair corresponding to each key/value pair in the $_POST array (the elements in the contact form). So, the names in the posted form fields become the variable names, whose values are automatically assigned to their respective form values.

Take the following basic form:

<form action="emailSent.php" method="post">
<fieldset>
<legend>Personal information</legend>
<label>Name</label><input type="text" name="name" />
<label>Email address</label><input type="text" name="email" />
<label>Telephone</label><input type="text" name="phone" />
</fieldset>
<strong><label>Message</label>
<textarea name="message" ></textarea>
<input type="submit" name="SUBMIT" value="SUBMIT" />
</form>

Upon clicking ‘submit’, the form’s sent to the processing script, ‘emailSent.php’. There, the extract() function would appear:

extract( $_POST );

Which would immediately capture the $_POST array elements as:

$name=name;
$email=email;
$phone=phone;


The above piece of code targets selects all IE versions less than or equal to 7, and is Microsoft’s recommended method for aiming CSS as one of its browsers.  Include all the problematic CSS in stylesheet ‘ie.css’ and leave the conditional comment below the main stylesheet. Try this rather than resorting to a hack, or giving up entirely and whacking a table in.