Author: Ipstenu (Mika Epstein)

I Don’t Care If You Use Multisite

I love Multisite. I think it’s awesome. It makes my personal life way easier, it helped me write a book and get a job, and it’s a totally cool aspect of WordPress that is still underdeveloped but a very hard worker. Multisite could be so much more, and it’s still that new kid on the block, but it’s growing every day.

When I tell people over and over again that they shouldn’t use WordPress Multisite, I do so knowing there’s a good time to break every reason I said not to use it. After all, why not use it?

But there’s one big question I don’t answer in the WordPress forums anymore, and that is “Should I use WordPress Multisite?” Oh I may clarify specific moments in what I said in other places (like you can duplicate content, but I don’t believe you should), but I won’t get into conversations of “Is this a good use case?” The reason why is that I cannot tell you, quickly, if you’re a good candidate for being a WP Multisite Admin, nor can I glance and say that your situation and environment is perfect for multisite. And the reason for this is that Multisite is complicated.

Actually that’s wrong. The reason is I don’t know, and neither do you.

Do you remember, way back when you started with websites, and you first looked at WordPress and asked yourself “Is WordPress right for me?” Someone probably said “It can be.” or “Maybe.” Oh I’m sure someone said “Of course!” And another person said “No way!” But the point of all of those answers is that it depends.

When you consider using Multisite, or WordPress (or anything) for that matter, you should take stock of what you want to do. Does the product, natively, support those things out of the box? Do people complain that doing something is really hard? Do people say it’s weird, but works? Do people suggest plugins? None of those things are reasons to not use the product, whatever it is, but it’s getting an understanding as to what world you’re stepping into that is important.

But I know, I just know, one of you will post a comment here “Mika, I just want to know if I should use Multisite! Please tell me!”

No.

It takes me about an hour to determine if you and your current site are a candidate for Multisite (and yes, I have rules). Then there’s another two to three hours going over your specs (and probably pushing to get more details) and making sure this can’t be done easily with a standard WordPress install, that it can be done with WordPress, if there are extant plugins, and if there’s custom work that’s going to be needed.

Basically it’ll be about half a day spent to give you the answer you deserve, and even then, it’s not going to be the full answer because you’ve probably forgotten to tell me something like “I need non-logged in users to be able to upload files.” or “This will be on Windows IIS.”

Hopefully at this point you’re thinking that’s fair of me. Four hours of my time is worth around $1000 USD (my going rate is $250/hour when I’m available, which is rare), and while I’d be happy to do a flat-fee for that sort of thing, no one in the history of ever has come to me with a clean and precise list of what they need and why and how they plan to grow.

Which brings me back to why I just can’t do this anymore. I just don’t know. I don’t know you, I don’t know your skills. I don’t know the skills of your users and I don’t know your future plans. I don’t know if you’ve compared the options yet. I don’t know your feelings about custom code and a lot of plugins. I don’t know your requirements. I don’t know if you want to have multiple sites with no admins, or a network with a hundred super admins (please don’t do either of those things). I don’t know your SSL requirements, your domain mappings, your servers, or your host. And because I don’t know those, I can’t answer the question fairly.

I don’t care if you use it or if you use multiple separate sites. I do care that you understand that multisite is complex and I care a great deal that you’ve researched your options. I care that you ask questions like “If my database gets too big, can I split it with Multisite?” (Yes, use HyperDB or SharDB.) I care that you consider “Is a custom post type slower or faster than a separate site on a network?” (Neither, as it happens. They’re about the same.) I get really happy if you ask specific questions, actually. You know, the ones that tell us you’ve looked into this and thought about it.

The answer to “Should I use Multisite is?” is a question.

“Are you prepared to use Multisite?”

19 March, 2014
Embedding Videos from TVGuide
This one goes out to my fellow fansites.

There are a lot of you guys who use WordPress (probably that’s my fault) and like me, you bash your head in when a news source makes a video embedable, but only if you use their code. Why is this a problem? Most of us like using WP’s visual editor, and that means we have to switch to text mode, paste this in, and then never ever ever visit that page in the visual editor again:
```
<script src="http://player.ooyala.com/player.js?width=600&amp;amp;video_pcode=VlajQ6DTdv9-OYPHSJq6w4eU0Bfi&amp;amp;embedCode=NwdzM3aDp4BB3-MEdPemlMJK5XH7ZVdn&amp;amp;height=337&amp;amp;deepLinkEmbedCode=NwdzM3aDp4BB3-MEdPemlMJK5XH7ZVdn"></script>
```
Augh!

In part this is because WordPress uses TinyMCE for editing GUI-like, and switching between visual and text mode kills things. But on the other hand, how come we can just paste in a YouTube URL and that works? Well it’s a magical thing called Embeds, and basically WordPress sees that URL for YouTube and knows “OH, I should be a video and YouTube has a special code on it’s sever to tell me how to display it! Yay!”

Not everyone has that. TV Guide, CBS, etc. I’m looking at you. Where this makes sense is where they do not want you to embed a video because they want the traffic to themselves, which is fine. We can link. But where it’s daft is when they make it embeddable, give you that link, but it’s flipping ugly and can’t be used in the visual editor!

For TV Guide, at least, there’s a fix. Ooyala Video Browser.

While the search function doesn’t work ‘great’ right now, probably because I’m searching for their videos with the wrong keywords, but still I was able to embed a video like this:
```
[ooyala code="NwdzM3aDp4BB3-MEdPemlMJK5XH7ZVdn" player_id="undefined"]
```
The ‘code’ is the ’embedCode’ from the embed they gave me before.

I can also use this:
```
[ooyala code="NwdzM3aDp4BB3-MEdPemlMJK5XH7ZVdn" player_id=&"VlajQ6DTdv9-OYPHSJq6w4eU0Bfi"]
```
Using ‘video_pcode’ for ‘player_id’

So this wasn’t super obvious, and personally I would love it if Ooyala had an oembed and then a ‘share this on WordPress’ link for things, but seeing as Automattic (and Pete! Hi Pete!) helped with the plugin, this may be as good as it gets for now. Maybe they could marry it into the Media Uploader, below ‘Insert from URL’ – have ‘Insert from Ooyala’. Dreams. I haz them.

There’s a lot to this plugin that I didn’t need, though. After all, since I don’t have an account, I don’t need all the search stuff, so I stripped it down to just this (which is an mu-plugin):
```
/**
 * Ooyala Shortcodes
 * Usually for crap like TV Guide
 * Example: [ooyala video_pcode="VlajQ6DTdv9-OYPHSJq6w4eU0Bfi" width="222" embedCode="NwdzM3aDp4BB3-MEdPemlMJK5XH7ZVdn"]
 */
add_shortcode( 'ooyala', 'ooyala_shortcode' );

function ooyala_shortcode( $atts ) {
	extract(shortcode_atts(array(
		'width' => '500',
		'video_pcode' => '',
		'embedcode' => '',
		), $atts
	));

	$width = (int) $width;
	$height = floor( $width*9/16 );
		
	if ( !is_feed() ) {
		$output = '<script src="http://player.ooyala.com/player.js?video_pcode='.$video_pcode.'&amp;width='.$width.'&amp;deepLinkEmbedCode='.$embedcode.'&amp;height='.$height.'&amp;embedCode='.$embedcode.'"></script>';
	} elseif ( $options['show_in_feed']  ) {
		$output = __('[There is a video that cannot be displayed in this feed. ', 'ooyalavideo').'<a href="'.get_permalink().'">'.__('Visit the blog entry to see the video.]','ooyalavideo').'</a>';
	}
	return $output;
}
```
And that is that!
17 March, 2014
Not The Bug I Expected
“Comments aren’t working,” he said and I winced. I hate when people say ‘broken’ or ‘not working’ because I don’t magically know what they mean by ‘working.’ But this guy was a coworker whom I like and trust so I asked what he meant by not working, and he said “When you enter a comment, the page reloads, but there’s no comment.”

“Okay,” I muttered to myself. “Touché, Mika.” Because that, indeed, was ‘not working.’ We turned on debugging and got a strange error:
```
WordPress database error: [Duplicate entry '0' for key 'PRIMARY']
INSERT INTO `wp_comments` (`comment_post_ID`,`comment_author`,`comment_author_email`,`comment_author_url`,`comment_author_IP`,`comment_date`,`comment_date_gmt`,`comment_content`,`comment_karma`,`comment_approved`,`comment_agent`,`comment_type`,`comment_parent`,`user_id`) VALUES (507,'lori','admin@example.com','','12.248.40.138','2014-02-07 23:07:08','2014-02-07 23:07:08','test',0,'1','Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10.9; rv:26.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/26.0','',0,1)
```
And then it was a mess of ‘Trying to get property of a non-object…’ and ‘headers already sent.’

After some kicking of the usual suspects (reinstall WP, remove plugins, theme, etc) I realized I was stupid and the problem was that the table wasn’t updating the primary entry. It should start at 1 and move up to 2 and so on. Since everything else was working, I compared the table to a working one … and they were not the same. Here’s a good one:

There’s had comment_id as the name, and the rest of the values were blank. So I restored the values and it worked! Except … I was getting a new error.
```
Notice: Undefined property: stdClass::$comment_ID in /home/wp-includes/comment.php on line 155

Warning: Cannot modify header information - headers already sent by (output started at /home/wp-includes/comment.php:155) in /home/wp-includes/pluggable.php on line 896
```
I stared at that for a moment and after I had given up and proposed we reinstall WP and copy tables over, my brain kicked in and I said “Wait a second, isn’t that comment_ID and not id?” I changed it on a whim and shouted “HOLY **** I AM GOOD!”

Yes, it was in all caps. Yes, it was said to my coworker, who said I have his vote.

That was, by far, the weirdest error I’ve seen in months. And the moral of all this? You can’t know everything, but if you read and pay attention and are willing to experiment, you can solve pretty much anything.
14 March, 2014
The Responsibility of Freedom

I’m sure you know there are clubs out there that re-sell WordPress products at a far lower cost than their original source. This post is not about that being right or wrong via the GPL, nor is it about the morality.

This post is about responsibility.

In my home office hangs a poster “Flynn Lives” which I have to constantly remind me “I fight for the users.” It’s a nerd level joke most of my fellow developers and support gurus get, but many people I help would not understand the point. My job, as a WordPress Support Guru, is to help people. This is simple, straightforward, and obvious.

My other job, though, is to make their lives easier and better. It’s my responsibility, when I write code, to make it do something to make someone’s life easier. Even if the only person it helps is me, the point is that someone is being helped. If it’s just me, it’s really easy to support myself. “Hey, Ipstenu, you know this broke?” “Yeah, added to my list!” But when it’s someone else, how does that change?

I firmly believe there’s an expectation of support with all plugins and themes hosted in the WordPress.org repository. Period. That means, yes, I have code I don’t put up there because I don’t care to support it. But I know that expectation puts responsibility on me as more than just “Someone who writes code.” I can’t just write code, drop it into the world, and never support it.

“But Ipstenu,” I hear you say. “Isn’t that what WordPress.org does? It just dumps WP into the world. I never see the devs in the forums!”

You’re not WordPress.org. You’re not that big, that complex, and that intricate. Unless you’re BuddyPress-levels of plugins, and you’ll notice they have support forums. Instead of directly supporting WP, the core devs of WordPress who are dedicated to WordPress have people like me, who traipse about the forums and help. And when I see broken things, I either take it to trac or help the person who found it do so. My determining line is “Can I fix it? Okay, I’ll trac it and patch it.” If I can’t, I help them. Low hanging fruit.

The point here is that all this wonderful software came with a responsibility to make it great and help people. What does this have to do with sites like those Justice League Clubs that offer cheap/free versions of pay-wall’d software? They’re not helping you.

Oh, in the short term they’re helping you by giving you something for free. They’re getting you further in your site development than ever before. However that help ends at the provisioning level, because you aren’t paying for support from these resellers, you’re paying for product. That’s okay, so long as you know what you’re paying for, and a lot of people don’t. If people did know what they were paying for, they wouldn’t use nulled themes with base64 backdoors in them.

The ethics and morals of reselling someone else’s work aren’t at play here. Yours are yours, mine are mine, and that’s just fine. What is at play is what are we paying for, what are we providing, and what are we devaluing when we resell someone else’s product?

Devaluing is the easier one. People sell products at cost in order to make money. It’s simple. I work for a company that sells space on a computer and world wide availability from anyone to that space. We sell it at a price that allows us to make money, but also that allows us to hire amazing people like me who work on WordPress, write some of the code, test it, and otherwise spend all this time on WordPress, just because it’s software you use!

The value of the product is, again, not just in the product, but in the service. And the service is more than just access and accessibility, but also in the support you get. No matter what people think, we aren’t just rolling around in money and laughing at you. We reinvest that money in ourselves, our hardware, the software (some of which we give to you). But what we always do is support that. Sometimes the support isn’t what you want to hear, but we do our best to solve problems, or explain why we can’t.

So what are you paying for? Support! In the end, you’re pretty much always paying for support. You buy Microsoft Office and you don’t get the kind of support you get with WordPress, but you pay a lot more money. Where’s the support? When Word crashes, it sends (or asks you if it can send) a report back. That report gets noticed and acted on so that if it’s solvable, it’s solved. The next upgrade you get has a patch, and that crash doesn’t happen again. That’s support!

You can also get actual support from Microsoft (though I know of no one who’s done so). They have people who write fantastic help docs and who monitor their forums and twitter. If you took Word (let’s pretend that was legal) and resold it, would you have all that?

But that’s a quite extreme example. WordPress plugins are significantly smaller in scale than MS Office. So why is Office (and Adobe Photoshop etc) so expensive if they don’t give you half the help that the free WordPress product does? There are a lot of reasons. Patents and copyright are expensive, and frankly we’re all willing to pay for it. When Apple dropped the price of the new OS down from hundreds to $25, we were all suspicious. When it became free, we flipped out.

But Apple wisely noted that making us pay that much money wasn’t helping them as much as it might. Free gives you a certain brand loyalty because we get to try before we buy. And we will buy those apps and those app add-ons (though I don’t fully approve of games that force you to pay to play all the time). We buy them because after we get the base product for free, we see the real value in the cost of the other products and we’ll pay for them willingly. Apple takes responsibility for their free software in interesting ways. We have to pay for assistance (most of us via the Genius Bar). And in the WordPress ecosystem, that too is what you pay for. The help.

So back to this whole “I’ll take your paid software and give it away” thing.

What are we paying for? I’ve heard tell that ‘Paying for support’ is a rip off. So is paying for documentation. I can see why some people balk at paying $25 a year for ‘support’ they may not ever need, and I’ve seen some companies work by letting you pay per-ticket. Though that makes people feel like you’re nickel-and-diming them, and I do agree it can come across that way. And yet that support which they so casually toss aside like an old shoe is where these free-software-clubs fall down.

There is one club that says they will support all the plugins they re-host. Many of us are suspect at the possibility of that actually working well, though given the odds of how small their sales will be to start with, it may end up sustainable. The problem is that they’re not going to be patching upstream. They’ll fix your issue, and then when the real source pushes the next version, they get to reapply their patches. Strikes me as a lot of work.

Is the payment system for some WordPress plugins and themes broken? I don’t think so. I think it’s not optimal for the user nor for the developers just yet, but monetizing these things is still relatively young. There will be mistakes and bad choices along the way. Finding the balance between the freedom of the GPL and the desire to make a living is difficult.

The ultimate responsibility we have with WordPress is to give back. We give back with support and with improving things for everyone. If we’re just doing things for ourselves, after all, we don’t share them. Are these clubs failing in those responsibilities? Not yet. But all eyes will be on them if they do.

12 March, 2014
WordPress’ SEO Sucks

“what to say when someone asks you to suck them off”

Not the sort of term anyone would really associate with this site. So imagine my surprise when I saw my search stats in Jetpack:

That sentence is at the end of my list of Search Engine Terms. I tweeted that I was astounded, and wondered how far down the SEO hole one had to traipse to find my site. As it turns out, not very far at all:

Fourth. That’s it. That’s how high I ranked. So the next logical question would be to ask what I did to make my site rate that high on random searches? Nothing. I don’t have anything ‘special’ on this site. I have a good theme, certainly, but I don’t use any WordPress SEO plugins, and in fact, I’ve never (until now) used “what to say when someone asks you to suck them off” like that, all in a row.

What’s the magic?

It’s not WordPress.

What Makes WordPress so darned Awesome (by Jen Mylo)

That is, it is and it isn’t WordPress. WordPress is SEO optimized out of the box, and your content totally matters. And it’s content that probably landed me so high. You take good content, you add in people linking to your content, you promote yourself with friends who pass it on, and magically your hard work becomes content!

Last week someone told me they wanted to “automate the posting of [original] content” and I was completely bewildered at the concept. The issue, as I understood it, was that posting original content to 100 blogs meant writing original content 100 times. And you can’t automate that. By definition, posting unique posts means … you make unique (aka different) posts. This person went on to say it was time consuming to make 100 posts and create 100 custom links to them. I sat back and blinked a few times, and thought “Well, yeah.”

I say it over and over. A website is work. If people could magically install WordPress and boom, money, then I wouldn’t have a job helping people speed up sites or debug strange conflicts, or a million other weird things I do every day. WordPress can make publishing on the web a heck of a lot easier, but it will never be effortless because effort is what makes your site amazing. Effort and attention are crucial to keeping your site going.

Every time I hear about someone trying to find the quick and easy way around content creation, I shake my head. There isn’t a quick way, there isn’t an easy way, and there isn’t a simple way. Unless you like writing and think that it’s any of those things. But even then, you can’t just write and expect magic to happen. You have to write, and customize, and care, and water, and fertilize your website.

So how did my site get ranked so highly about sex when it’s about tech? If you read the post that got linked, it’s about how you suck. “My question is you suck” is the title, and in there, I talk about what to say when someone says you suck. It’s actually a pretty logical result, when you think about it for a moment. But because enough people link to me, and enough people used the word ‘suck’ in their links, and enough people shared the link, I’m respected by google and score crazy high on a totally non-relevant search.

That’s how you work the system.

Sorry about that, to everyone who is vastly disappointed, having come here via the search result.

10 March, 2014
Great Walls of Fire

If your website is ‘international’, you’ve probably already run into this. If you’ve ever worked for cooperate America, you’ve seen this happen. If you’re on an out of date browser, you’ve definitely seen it.

It’s that horrible day when your site looks like absolute crap because something critical to your site isn’t loading because it cannot be accessed from where you are.

Let’s step back.

Using Google’s Open Sans doesn’t work in China because Google is, generally speaking, blocked in China. What does this mean for people there? Well their WordPress dashboard is going to load slowly, in fact for many it’s so slow as to be unusable. This is because WP 3.8 uses Google fonts on the back-end. Now, you can disable it with the Disable Google Fonts plugin, but many people feel that’s a poor user experience.

I want to take a moment to note that while I, personally, dislike using Google for required fonts on WordPress, there was a discussion on bundling vs linking that took place in November 2013. At that time, everyone agreed bundling (that is including the fonts with WP) would be best, however how to do that was more complicated. In order to provide a good experience for all users and all languages, it got messy and large really fast. You can read up on the history on make/core: Open Sans, bundling vs. linking.

That being said, by remotely calling Google, there are two main issues: privacy (which I’m not getting into) and accessibility (that’s what I want to poke at).

We know that calling Google remotely, for everyone in a country with good internet speeds, is great as it speeds up your site! That’s the premise behind Use Google Libraries after all. If someone’s already downloaded the files in their cache for JS (or fonts), then the next site they visit will load faster if it uses the same ones! It’s a sound, and accurate, theory.

But are you making your site inaccessible with your need for speed?

What happens when someone can’t load Google? In the case of the Use Google Libraries plugin, it falls back to using WP’s standard, which is good, but that initially connection has to fail first! The same happens for WordPress’s back end, which means the time it takes to load your site is longer for those users.

I tell this to people a lot, and generally they reply “Well I don’t have users in China.” or “This doesn’t affect my visitors.” Really? REALLY? Sorry, but that is one of the most shortsighted views I’ve ever heard in the history of ever, and one I tell people “Yeah, that’s an incorrect and rather arrogant conceit.”

Let me tell you a story. I went to Japan for 12 days to hike O’Henro with my Buddhist brother and our agnostic father. We made the “A Jew, a Buddhist, and an Agnostic walk into a temple…” jokes. While there, I checked in on my websites and on my regular sites I visited, only to find out that some were blocked because we were using a net connection that went through a country those sites blocked. Why? Because “no one” who would ever visit their site was from there.

I no longer use those services, I no longer support those sites. My father goes to China regularly (he does risk assessment on the disused weapons caches in China). I turn off Google Fonts on his website in order that he, and his customers, can see the site as intended. You can tell me all you want that ‘no one’ visits from those places, and you’re just wrong, and arrogant, and yes, I strongly disagree with WordPress having made Open Sans via Google a requirement like that.

My personal dislike of Google aside, it’s a reality I look at more than I wish I had to that people and places block third parties. This is why I get on the case of plugin developers who use third-party services when they don’t have to. They’ve created an unnecessary dependency on this other service, which will crazy to debug when someone says their code doesn’t work.

Your code should be as self-sufficient as humanly possible. Offloading for ‘speed’ doesn’t work for all situations, and instead can make things slower by causing more external resources to load. Have you ever looked at those scan reports where they say your site calls too many sites for JS or CSS? This is what you’re doing. Even though it increases the odds that people who can get to these sources will already have the files cached, people who can never access them have a worse time. And then loading them locally will make your site heavier and load slower, unless you use proxy-caching (like Pagespeed or Varnish).

It’s not a perfect solution for everyone. This is why websites are hard.

7 March, 2014