Author: Ipstenu (Mika Epstein)

Hide Your Site on Multisite
Sometimes when you’re building a network, you don’t want all your sites to be available just yet. While you can install a ‘Coming Soon’ plugin, there are also built in ways to handle this.

First you’ll want to take advantage of two of the Network’s least loved features: Deactivate and Archive. When you go to the Sites page on the Network Admin and hover over the items, you have new options appear:

Should you click on Deactivate, you’ll be asked to confirm and then you get this:

Don’t panic!!

I know it says Deleted. It’s not. A deleted site is 100% deleted, the DB tables dropped and the images nuked. So while it ‘says’ deleted, it’s not. If you press Archive it’s a little more realistic:

What’s the difference? In both cases, this is what a non-logged in user sees:

This site is no longer available.

And in both cases, you can’t log in, because this is what you see for wp-admin and wp-login.php.

It’s weird, but it pretty much ‘archived’ the sites. You can, as a Super Admin, see it, but you can’t even change user roles from the network dashboard. (I spent about an hour trying to debug why I, as a Super Admin, couldn’t get to the dashboard at all, and it turned out I needed to flush my cache, so remember folks, caching is wonderful until you shoot your foot.) Still this presents a predicament.

Frankly, I don’t want people to know a site doesn’t exist. That can be easily done with a filter and a redirect:
```
// Archived sites only I can see
function helf_redirect_hidden_sites() {

	// Super Admins always get in
	if ( is_super_admin() || current_user_can( 'manage_options' ) ) {
		return true;
	} else {
		// Defines
		if ( defined( 'NOBLOGREDIRECT' ) ) {
			$goto = NOBLOGREDIRECT;
		} else {
			$goto = network_site_url();
		}

		$blog = get_blog_details();

		if( '1' == $blog-&gt;deleted || '2' == $blog-&gt;deleted || '1' == $blog-&gt;archived || '1' == $blog-&gt;spam ) {
			wp_redirect( $goto );
	        die();
		}
	}
}
add_filter('ms_site_check','helf_redirect_hidden_sites');
```
I wanted to allow my site admins and my super admin to view it, but if you don’t, edit if ( is_super_admin() || current_user_can( 'manage_options' ) ) to only allow what you want. And because I’m using a subdomain site, this makes it look like an archived/deleted site is just another non-existent site, by redirecting to NOBLOGREDIRECT.

But this doesn’t work around the problem that my whole wp-admin is blocked off to non logged in users. I mean, how can I log in? The only workaround is that if the site is a subdomain (test.halfelf.org) or a subfolder (halfelf.org/test), then I can log in at halfelf.org/wp-admin and then visit over. If this was a mapped domain, I’d be in trouble. So it’s clearly not a perfect solution for everyone.

By the way, you can customize the various messages for suspended or deleted sites by creating the following files in wp-content:
```
blog-suspended.php
blog-deleted.php
blog-inactive.php
```
So if you just want it to be pretty, that’s easy.
10 December, 2014
Don’t Be Afraid To Learn In Adversity

also i’d like you to either never submit pull requests again or at least try to not put harmful code in them

That was what a developer said when I made a derp pull request, adding in a check for 0 that should have been better as a check for not -1.

Regardless of the fact that he and I fundamentally disagree on the usefulness of the code (and frankly, that’s why I assumed he’d be punting my pull request), his reply is something I’m very glad I got now and not 10 years ago.

Like pretty much everyone on the planet, I have moments where I wonder if you’re all going to figure out that I don’t know a damn thing and I’ve been faking it all these years. It’s Imposter Syndrome, and we all suffer from it to a degree. And it’s comments like that developer made that reinforce it.

Now, I know this guy’s history. And I know at first glance his reply may seem terse but not all that bad. Sadly, this is probably the nicest I’ve ever seem him tell someone they sucked. He’s not nice. At all. His support forums are filled with him calling people demeaning names, or saying they’re stupid for not understanding his code, and frankly on the list of humans I would willingly interact with for fun, he’s not there. He’s not even on the reserves. But I still respect his code (though not his documentation, inline or otherwise) and I use it every day. I won’t be contributing to it anymore because I don’t have any need to be in an abusive relationship.

“Curse your sudden, but inevitable, betrayal!”

And that’s what this is! He’s abusive and behavior I don’t care for and wether he means it or not, he’s being mean. It feels silly and petty to put it that way, but that’s what it is. He’s a mean person. I don’t care that he’s mean, and it didn’t actually hurt my feelings though it did make me momentarily angry at him, but I do care that meanness like that will convince someone to stop and never get better at things. Did it hurt my feelings? Yes, it did. It sucks to be told your code sucks, but it sucks more to be told in a way that makes you feel like you’ll never be good enough in any way, which is precisely what many people will read from that comment.

When you ask me “Where does Imposter Syndrome come from?” I say “People like that.” People who reinforce the belief that you’re not good enough, that you’re crap and don’t deserve their time to learn better, and you can go eff yourself.

Is he required to be nice and handhold me through the code and explain why? Hell no! But he made an open source product which he opened to the public, put on GitHub, and allowed for pull requests. He’s naive to think everyone will come to his product knowing everything, and I suspect part of his attitude issue is because he doesn’t want to help people. Which again, is fine. Obviously I don’t feel the same way, but I also don’t think everyone can be good at support. I do think that if you’ve got all this in the open, you’re going to get people who are far less experienced than you are. How you treat them will set the standard for what kind of help you get from your community in the future.

Let’s contrast this. I was talking to people about a change in some laws recently and fiddling with an add on to code I use because of it. When I reached a point at which the code worked, I put it on Github and said “Pull requests and fixes welcome!” I knew the code wasn’t good enough. I knew I wasn’t sanitizing everything yet, some of it was terribly inefficient, and some of it was bad code. I knew this. I knew it wasn’t perfect at all, but I put it up and then pinged a developer for the product I was using. His reply?

mind if I fork that and we distribute it either on [our] site or in (pending yet another round of core team discussion) in core?

Boom. He knew it wasn’t perfect. He saw the value in the attempt and proof of concept, and he ran with it. Naturally I told him to use and enjoy, because I’d licensed it GPL. He also said he’d try and do a pull request to make it so when you used the code, it stopped you from picking the wrong thing. That was something I’ve yet to sort out, even though I’ve been playing with the code some more. I’m learning something new. I’ve never written for that code project before (except a typo fix). This is all new for me.

The difference is pretty bold. One guy pretty much insulted me, one encouraged. The insult, justified or not, discouraged me from wanting to pitch other suggestions or improvements. The encouragement is making me think about an offer they made a while ago more seriously. It also inspired me to sit and study the code, read what it did and why (seriously awesome inline documentation there), and be able to go from zero to add-on in 4 hours while prepping for a holiday dinner.

How you represent yourself, as a developer, creates your community. How you treat others can help or hinder their entire lives. You may not think about your words as having that much power because you’re just someone who helps in a support forum, or you wrote a simple two line plugin, or you translated a file, but they do. Your words matter a lot.

As for the people reading this who don’t code well either, don’t be afraid to code badly. You can’t know it all from the beginning and don’t let people get you down about that. Tell them you’re learning, that you’re trying to be bold and step out, and you won’t get any better in a vacuum. Some of us have to learn by doing, after all. We can’t all read the code and know the answers, and that’s okay.

By the way, yes I’m still using the code from the other guy. I’ve forked it (and now I get to learn about syncing your fork back with master changes) and I’m keeping my one change in there. I’m sure there’s another fix, with a filter perhaps, but given the lack of documentation and assistance, I’ll be stuck with this for a while yet. But you know what? That’s actually okay.

I honestly have no hard feelings on a personal level. I’m not obligated to like him or agree with his choices. He’s not obligated to agree with mine. That’s why open source is great. I can fork it and go. But what won’t happen is that I won’t be afraid to make changes, to get things wrong, and to keep learning.

I’m not an imposter. I’m just still learning.

8 December, 2014
Whose Responsibility Is It?

When WordPress 4.0.1 came out, a small number of sites broke.

For a while, we’ve been touting that minor releases to WordPress core, the ones we auto-upgrade for you, are very safe, very tested, and very important. While all this is true, it has brought a few people complaining to me that obviously I was wrong.

It’s true that the 4.0.1 release broke people. It was an object lesson in why I tell people not to reinvent the wheel. But this upgrade situation does not mean the upgrades aren’t safe, secure or smart. It does bring thoughts to mind, like what my friend David talks about when he considers WordPress at the enterprise level. I know people who are using this failed upgrade scenario as a reason to tout that WordPress isn’t ready for big business, but I think they’re looking at it from the wrong perspective.

Let’s step back.

I used to work for The Man. I’m well aware of the machinations you go through to upgrade anything at a massive enterprise. One of the things they do is a code review. Every single upgrade is checked and tested and a dry-run of the upgrade is run to ensure everything works the way they think it should. By allowing WordPress auto-upgrades, you remove that ability. For a massive corporation? I would turn off the auto-update.

But at the same time, this mythical major company running WordPress would have at least one person who knew WordPress. They would have someone who’s job it was to review every single bit of code that went into their WordPress site. Each plugin would be checked, tested, evaluated for security, and only installed if that WordPress Checker said it was good. Because that’s exactly what you must do in any and all enterprise situations.

David’s viewpoint is that the vetting of a site should be delegated.

My gut reaction to say that they should know better has to be tempered with the fact that no, they should not have to. It’s the job of every site owner to vet their system, but to make a platform that is truly global, that vetting should be delegated. Web hosts and security analysts should vet code for collisions and bugs. Theme and plugin shops should ensure that their products adhere to best practices. Putting accountability for the full stack on each site owner is not only inefficient, but impractical. Inherent trust should exist that code in the official repository maintains a baseline level of code, trust that is eroded when the problems that occurred with a subset of sites on this update occur.

And here, he and I disagree somewhat.

It’s the job of everyone who uses software to be aware of what they’re doing. Vetting the software before it goes in to your system has to be someone’s job. WordPress core does an amazing job of this for you. WordPress core is safe. The 45k plugins and themes in the world don’t always meet the same level of robust checking. Which means when you introduce WordPress to your environment, you absolutely have to seriously review those third party odds and sods you want to use because they’re so shiny and cool.

Web hosts vet code for collisions, sure. We do at DreamHost. That’s part of my and Mike’s jobs! We know what’s going into WordPress and if it’s going to blow things up at DreamHost for our customers. But like the site owner who found her site down one morning because we’d upgraded her from PHP 5.2 to 5.4 and it broke her WordPress 2.5 site, we cannot account for everything.

I think there’s a need for security specialists to review plugins, in a public forum, and point out who’s not doing things in the best way. I also think that there’s a need for developers to remember there’s a reason why we do things a certain way, and while it’s fine not to, you have to keep in mind that it’s now your responsibility to keep a close eye on anything that changes in core that might cause your code not to work as well.

For example. If I wrote a plugin that worked around the shortcode API for whatever reason, I would have a custom query on trac for any ticket related to Shortcodes and have it as an RSS feed to monitor. Or I might even subscribe to the trac firehose and use a filter to pull out anything that so much as mentioned the word. Because I’ve now made a change that I know might be a problem someday.

Every business owner should know the risks of all the software they use, be it website or desktop. This responsibility is the cost of doing business. The size of the business and the importance of the software will change what resources you can afford to allocate to that part of your business, but you absolutely cannot ignore it.

While I really want to say that because WordPress core does due diligence you don’t have to, I would be a lying liar who lies. Even if we do as David suggests and have everyone in the world making sure things are vetted and checked and stamped, it still requires the owners of a site listen to that information and not use the code that’s less optimal. Enforcing that would be impossible unless you wanted to suggest that WordPress outright deactivate code that doesn’t use the proper APIs. That would put a lot of weight on WordPress and slow it down and be pretty annoying for people who are legitimately using non-standard methods of development and implementation.

No matter what, at the end of the day, the person who is responsible for the code quality is the person who wrote and maintains it. But the person responsible for their site is the person using the code. You have to know what code you’re putting into the site and be aware of the risks you’re introducing to your environment by doing so. If your website is your entire business, you cannot afford to be cavalier about these things.

Disasters happen. Understanding the risks will prepare you for dealing with them when they do.

5 December, 2014
Switching The Main Blog on Multisite
Previously I’d only ever posted this in my ebook, WordPress Multisite 110.

What people mean by this is the site they originally set to be seen at domain.com is no longer the one they want to use, but the one at (say) domain.com/temp or temp.domain.com. If this is what you’re wanting to due, it’s not impossible, but it is annoying and a little tricky. If you’re using the trick to give WP it’s own directory, these are not the directions you’re looking for. I haven’t written those out yet.

First you have to go to Network Dashboard > Sites and edit the site you want to be the main site.

This you want to to look like this:

~~Make certain you leave ‘Update siteurl and home as well’ checked! If you forget that, you’ll be sad.~~ You no longer need to check the box (it’s gone in newer versions of WP), but if you DO have it, check it.

Now you’d think you go to edit the main site and change it, but you can’t.

By default, the main site is not editable. This makes sense when you think about how messy this might be, so in order to edit it you have to go to your wp-config.php file and look for this line:

define('BLOG_ID_CURRENT_SITE', 1);

Change it to the site ID you want to use as your main site. In this example, I want site #2, aka, two, to become my main site.

define('BLOG_ID_CURRENT_SITE', 2);

Save the file and then you have to go back to your Sites and edit the old main site.

Give its path a new name and press save, making sure you keep that checkbox checked if it’s there.

In this example, I’ve picked a new URL for my formerly main site becuase I don’t want any conflicts, but there’s nothing stopping me from picking ‘two’ again and just totally swapping things.

The last step is to change your post content. Using a plugin like Velvet Blues Update URLs, you will need to search each site separately and replace the URLs. If you have wp-cli, you can do that too like this:
```
wp search-replace 'example.com' 'example.com/new' wp_posts wp_postmeta --dry-run
wp search-replace 'example.com/two' 'example.com' wp_2_posts wp_2_postmeta --dry-run
```
If those look good, rerun without dry run and call it a day!

An interesting quirk is that you may need to edit the Fileupload URL if you’re using blogs.dir for your images. I noticed that on one site it was set to http://example/two/files which clearly is wrong. To fix that, go to Network Admin, click on Sites, and click on edit for the site. From there, click on the dangerous “Settings” tab and look for “Fileupload URL” and edit as needed to match things.

Cool tricks like this can be found in WordPress Multisite 110.
3 December, 2014
Being Smart Cures Headaches
While reviewing WordPress plugins, I often kick a plugin for calling file locations poorly. This usually happens when they’ve hardcoded their plugin name or (worse) wp-content into paths.

When you hardcode in paths, or assume that everyone has WordPress in the root of their domain, you cause anyone using ‘Giving WordPress it’s own directory’ (a VERY common setup) to break. In addition, WordPress allows users to change the name of wp-content, so you would break anyone who choses to do so. And when this happens, I always link them to how to figure out the constants, which leads them to the function plugins_url().

In many ways, plugins_url() is a panacea, a silver bullet, because it can take this:
```
<?php
echo '<img src="' . plugins_url( 'images/wordpress.png', __FILE__ ) . '" > ';
```
And magically turn it into this:
```
<img src="http://www.example.com/wp-content/plugins/my-plugin/images/wordpress.png">
```
Even better, if you put the plugin in the mu-plugins folder, it would know to be this:
```
<img src="http://www.example.com/wp-content/mu-plugins/images/wordpress.png">
```
That makes it insanely flexible and wonderful.

This allows me to happily rename a plugin folder to my-plugins_off to force disable it and will reward me with this error:

I like that error. I like that it happens no matter what, once I’ve renamed that plugin folder and I refresh a page that uses the plugin, it’s gone. Of course, sometimes it’s not enough, but most of the time, if you know what plugin’s being a doofus, you can fix it with that.
1 December, 2014
Don’t Reinvent the Wheel
In WordPress, I punt plugins now and then for doing weird things that can best be described as reinventing the wheel.

Any time a plugin replicates functionality found in WordPress (i.e. the uploader, jquery), it is frowned upon. It presents a possible security risk since the features in WordPress have been tested by many more people than use most plugins. Simply put, the built in tools are less likely to have issues.

This was always something a little theoretical. I hadn’t yet run into someone who had broken their code with an upgrade of WordPress just because we updated the core wheel. Until November 20th.

The shortcode API in WordPress was updated. It was decided that in order to stop breaking on PHP 5.4.8 and under, we needed to apply wptexturize() to shortcodes. This had a fun side effect when people didn’t properly register shortcodes, which of course brought up the logical question … why wouldn’t you register your shortcode?

What I generally see in plugins is someone’s using a filter to look for their shortcode instead of registering it, so the post content is, in it’s entirety, parsed. That always struck me as foolish, since posts can get pretty long if Chris Lema or I are writing. And the reason people would do it was also odd. Either they were being lazy, they didn’t know about shortcodes (which I can understand, you can’t know everything), or they were trying to get around an ‘issue’ with nested shortcodes.

For what it’s worth, the shortcode parser correctly deals with nested shortcode macros.
```
[tag-a]
   [tag-b]
      [tag-c]
   [/tag-b]
[/tag-a]
```
That works fine. This won’t:
```
[tag-a]
   [tag-a]
   [/tag-a]
[/tag-a]
```
Now I want to note, I’m using a php shortcode around those tags. So yes, it works great. But the problem would be if I wanted to show you the php code in a php shortcode… Doesn’t work that way, and it’s a limitation of the context-free regexp parser used by do_shortcode(). We went for speed over levels, and it can’t match each opening tag with its correct closing tag.

Obviously the ‘right’ answer is ‘don’t nest same-named shortcodes’ but instead, some plugin authors have chosen the strategy of not registering shortcode names. That way the parser doesn’t try to mess with it. Sounds great, right?

Not with wptexturize() running.
```
[tag-a unit="north"]
   [tag-b size="24"]
      [tag-c color="red"]
   [/tag-b]
[/tag-a]
```
That turns into this:
```
[tag-a unit="north"]
   [tag-b size=&#8221;24&#8221;]
      [tag-c color=&#8221;red&#8221;]
   [/tag-b]
[/tag-a]
```
Basically the code is understood to be code and not a quote. That means it would simply output the tags as code and not the tag content.

And you see why this is a problem.

There are two answers to fix this. One is to turn off wptexturize for your pseudo-shortcodes (via the no_texturize_shortcodes filters which are not complete, sadly, if you need to unfilter shortcode variables) and the other is to use the Shortcode API as it was intended. I would, personally, suggest you use the API since that prevents your code from breaking like this if another security update happens.

Which brings us back to why reinventing the wheel is generally foolhardy in robust, well maintained systems. WordPress is constantly being improved, fixed, patched, and secured. The more you work around it by making your own way, the harder it is to fix things when WordPress makes a change. You’d think that people who make their own wheel would be attentive to anything that might break it, but they rarely are. They make their way, forget about it, and get annoyed when their code breaks and blame WordPress for not warning them. That’s a dirty secret about Open Source. No one’s going to tell you that a change will break your code. They expect you to be paying attention.

The absolutely worst part about all this is that your users will have to decide to either stop using your code (which isn’t always an option) or not to apply an upgrade. In the case of 4.0.1, this is dangerous. This is why I will keep telling you not to reinvent the wheel, unless the wheel really needs it. And if the wheel needs a reinvention, you should consider submitting a patch to WordPress core, because if it’s that bad, everyone should know.
28 November, 2014