If you’ve upgraded Wordpress to version 2.6 then you may have noticed a new option in the top right hand corner, labelled “Turbo”. Clicking this enables the use of Google Gears in your Wordpress installation, allowing offline posting - brilliant!
However, it has taken me a few attempts to get this working ok. I encountered a few errors along the way, but they all seemed to be instances of two particular response codes - 403 and 500. After a bit of digging around, this is how I solved them.
NOTE: You will need to disable Google Gears for your site (in Firefox, go to the Tools menu, go to Google Gears Settings and Remove your site from the list), refresh your Wordpress admin page and then select Turbo again to rerun the file sync operation every time you make one of the changes below.
Response Code 403
This is a file access error so check to make sure you have the appropriate file access permissions set on the directory and file referred to in the error. If this doesn’t work after reactivating Gears/Turbo, then check to see if you have hotlink protection turned on - this stops images from your domain appearing on other people’s sites. Gears seems to have a problem with this, but this can be worked around simply by amending your .htaccess file (look in the root of your site) with this line:
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^$
This allows blank referrers and should let Gears work quite happily.
BONUS TIP: While you’ve got your .htaccess file open, add this line as well:
Options -Indexes
This stops outsiders looking at the contents of directories (like /images and /plugins) and therefore makes your site a little more secure.
Response Code 403
This seems to be a simple “File Not Found” error. Gears wanted to download a couple of the MCE files but they didn’t seem to be there, so I found the missing files (try the Wordpress installation or one of your themes, or failing that, Google it), uploaded them to the directory Wordpress was grumbling about and it worked perfectly.
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Really? I thought the Turbo button just cached the static files locally for improved responsiveness on slow connections. I don’t think offline posting is supported yet.
As said by Tamly, this is designed to speed up access to the admin interface, by caching up to 200 elements locally for speed. See this post on the wordpress blog for details:
http://en.blog.wordpress.com/2008/07/02/gears/