Author: Ipstenu (Mika Epstein)

Version Control
I’ve noticed a lot of people don’t really ‘get’ what version control is, or how it works. This is most evident when you watch the WP plugin repository.

Around 400 commits are made daily to the repository, which doesn’t seem like a lot until you compare it to core trac commits. Now WordPress Core never commits until they’re sure the version in trunk is functional (since many of us use trunk on live sites), something most devs don’t have to worry about unless they use trunk as ‘live’… Let’s not talk about that.

Instead of going into code today, I’m going to explain a little theory and talk about what version control is, why you want to use it, and how to use it.

If you’ve ever saved a document, had MS Word crash, and come back to be asked what version of the document you want to restore, then you actually already have an idea of what version control is. You’ve possibly just never had to do it yourself. Version control is a very simple concept: saving versions of a file so you can go back to the older ones. Sounds easy right? Yes and no. Most people are accustomed to a different way of saving.

Traditionally, we’re taught about saving as something you do regularly and often. After all, we’ve all lost that crucial document by forgetting to save. Apple has been changing this on us, having a much more robust auto-save process, and a better restore. It coaxes you into a place where you don’t think about saving anymore. There’s no save button on my iPad, and I actually use it to write a lot of the time. That freaks me out still, but so far it’s worked really well.

In contrast, I have my coding. I sit and write, save a lot, test a lot, and when I’ve got a change that works, I commit my code. You see, version control is like a second type of saving. One save is me working, and one save is me ready for someone else to test. But the best thing about version control is how it saves changes. You check in code, and SVN (or Git), and the server checks the changes and records what changed in a way that is easy to read. Here’s an example picked at random from the hundreds I skimmed today:

KatePhiz’s checkin of changed code

See how beautiful that is? Right away you can see what changed between versions! You, and anyone else who wants to troll a revision log, can see what you changed, which makes it easier for people to write a change log for you (if you happen to work that way).

Where I see the most people making mistakes with version control is missing out on the two rules you need to adhere to, if you want to use them effectively.
1. Never Delete Files
2. Trust The Tool
That’s it. That’s all you have to do. I see a lot of people correct files by deleting them and uploading new versions. This is flat out doing it wrong, but I can see why people think it’s what they should do. You have to trust your tool, and know that it will see the new file, tell the differences and record that. If you delete a file, it stops you from being able to compare it to earlier versions and that’s a problem. Bug tracking becomes much harder, as you no longer have a quick and easy way to see what changed. Sure you can compare two files, but you’ve now put up a barrier for the next guy who picks up your code. What if she doesn’t have that previous version? What if she has no way to get to it, and you were hit by a bus and are in a coma? Or not. But still, building barriers between yourself and the next person is lacking foresight. Worse, you build barriers for yourself.

It’s hard to trust the tool, and just as it took me months to get used to the iPad’s way of saving files, you have to get used to how version control saves things. This isn’t FTP where you’re always replacing a whole file, you’re making incremental changes. A check in is not a delete and replace (unless you’re using some of the horrific tools I’ve had the dubious pleasure of using in the past). Getting past that one hurdle will make your life much better with any tool you use.

As for never deleting, I come to this from working at a bank. We never deleted anything. Ever. Not once. You always keep all versions of your code, even the broken stuff, because legally you had to. But in the end, I feel that was a great practice to get into. Disk space is cheap and you won’t ‘run out’ of space any time soon. I keep a copy of every plugin’s latest version on my hard drive, and I’m not out of space.(I don’t have SVN checkouts, that would be a little much.) Also there’s no point to deleting your older code, since they’ll just show up in SVN anyway. It remembers everything you checked in. Ever.

Now, I cannot give you advice on the best way to tag or branch code, as each person comes up with their own methodology. I will say this: Don’t use ‘trunk’ as your stable releases on SVN. Git’s a little different, but I wouldn’t use it there either. Instead, use trunk as your playground. When you have a functional change, commit that minor change. When you have a major change and it’s ready to go, tag it and release it. In that way, your beta testers can safely use trunk, and your normal users never get hurt. By the way, making frequent commits may feel like a smart move, but you don’t need to. Check in a working copy. Oh and don’t go back and edit your tagged versions, unless it’s a very minor change. Someone is sure to have downloaded it, just tag a new version and go forward. As I always explained to people at the bank “You don’t go backwards with code, you go forward.”

I don’t expect this to be a perfect primer on how to use version control, nor was it meant to be, but I hope I demystified it a little. If you have great primers for people on SVN or GIT, aimed at first time users, please share them!
8 January, 2013
Multisite Stands Alone

While I wrote up a lot of reasons why you shouldn’t use Multisite, the truth is I really like it and find it well suited to my needs. But one of the big problems with it is that everyone’s network setup is different. Many times, when people ask for help in the forums, I have to sketch out the bare ideas of what to do and why. This brings people to their biggest complaint in Multisite: Why isn’t there a plugin for this already?

First and formost, Multisite is still ‘new’ for the mainstream. Thelonius, the 3.0 release, is only two and a half years old! WordPress 1.0 came out in 2004, just as a reminder. 3.0 is when Multisite was folded into full WordPress, and it’s not been there very long, but it’s changed a lot since the start. In 2010, when 3.0 came out, there were 10,000 plugins in the repository. Today we’re at 22,000 and growing every day. When it comes to single site WordPress, the plugin world is mature and populated. Of those 22,000, about 300 are specific for Multisite. That’s a pretty small number when you look at the over 1000 plugins that do something with Twitter. Of course, most plugins work with Multisite anyway, but the ones that are Multisite specific are the ones to look at here.

A plugin is developed to fit a need. A good developer tries to keep the plugin simple and adaptable, so as many people as possible can use it for as many situations as suit their needs. Doing that has a lot of weird scope creep, of course, and if you consider that we do have 1000 twitter related plugins, you may understand why. Plugins fit a need, and when they don’t we extend/fork/hack the plugin to fit our specific need. Multisite, in and of itself, is fitting a need, and while that need is very specific, it’s also very broad. There are myriad reasons to use Multisite, and because of that, those 300 plugins that are built specifically for Multisite have to meet all of our needs. Of course, that’s not how it works.

While the majority of themes and plugins work just fine on Multisite, the ones people get in arms about are the ones that are supposed to be ‘for’ Multisite. These plugins should do more, but not too much. They should meet my specific needs, as well as all of yours and hers and his too. There should be a plugin for everything. Why am I the only person who wants this? I walk away from those arguments a lot, or I point out “You’re not the only person who wants it, but you’re possibly the only person who wants it in that way.”

Plugins are not the silver bullet for everyone. Your site may be a werewolf, mine a zombie, and his a vampire. Each one has their own needs and because of that, their own requirements. So let’s be direct. The whole reason you can’t find the perfect plugin is because no one’s a mind reader. The reason you can’t find everything you want in one plugin is because you didn’t write it (or have it written).

What does that mean? Multisite is still young, and those 300 Multisite specific plugins aren’t all Multisite specific first of all. At least a third are listed as Multisite because they work on Multisite. For example, bbPress is tagged ‘multisite’ but it wasn’t built ‘for’ Multisite. On the other hand, Networks for WordPress is built for Multisite, and nothing else.

The best way to tell if a plugin is built just for Multisite is to see if it set ‘Network:true’ in the code. If you open up the code of the plugin, you can see this in the header:

Now, not all Multisite plugins are meant to be Network enabled, but only plugins that are for Multisite will be Network only like that, so it’s one way to make sure that plugin is intended for Multisite. The downside to that is expressed via something like BuddyPress, which if you use on a Multisite must be network activated, but you don’t have to use it on Multisite. This means the check isn’t perfect.

The point to all this is that Multisite’s still the new kid in town. It isn’t perfect, and it is still evolving and changing in pretty dramatic ways. Also, I find it pretty cool to watch it grow. But the reason you can’t find all the plugins you want with it is really simple: They haven’t been written. You may actually be the first person who wants something done in that specific way, and with the myriad new methods Multisite gives us to do amazing things, there’s a lot of room for different options.

What should you do if you’re not a coder and want something that’s never been done? Well, learn to code. Or hire a coder. I wish there was another way, but when you want that special one-off toy that really isn’t suitable for everyone, you’re going to need to meet the challenge head out. None of this is meant as an excuse, by the way, but an explanation. It’s just not done. Yet.

31 December, 2012
Dumping ms-files
NOTE: You do not, under any circumstances, have to do this to continue using WordPress Multisite. I just wanted to see if I could.

I have been toying around with this. Since WP 3.5 doesn’t use ms-files anymore, I wanted to see how much of a pain this would be. While I was at the DMV (I now have a California Drivers License), I started sketching out the methods and possibilities for how one might do this as safely as possible, without bolluxing up your site. I got about 90% successful with it, so this is something I would never suggest you do on a massive, live site. If you compare it to what I did to move images from uploads to blogs.dir for the main site, it’s far more complex and annoying.

Do you have to do this? Again, no! Everything will work just fine. Can you do it? Sure. Why did I? Support. I already know all the mishegas with blogs.dir, but the new location, and it’s lack of ms-files, promises other, weird, errors. I want to repeat, you don’t need to do anything. The Core Team was fantastic with the work they did to turn off ms-files for fresh 3.5 and up installs is nothing short of phenomenal. This was just to assuage my curious nature, and learn more about the way things work.

You ready? Here we go.

I decided to move the images at http://test.ipstenu.org/ to start with, so everything will use that as my example. This is after I played with it on a local site and got my steps mostly solid. I knew that live is always different than test, so I backed up the DB first (always, always, backup first!) and went to town.

Move the images

This is obvious. Move your images from blogs.dir/SITENUM/files/ to /uploads/sites/SITENUM/ (or make an alias). I went and did it via command line in the /uploads/sites/ folder, doing this:
```
$ cp -r ~/public_html/wp-content/blogs.dir/10/files .
$ mv files 10
```
Lather, rinse, repeat. I could have scripted it, but I was working out the kinks until I had two left.

Edit all sites

Upload Path, Upload URL Path and Fileupload Url. You can blank them all out.(Corrected thanks to Nacin.)

Since you’re blanking it out for everyone you can probably do this via SQL, but since I was doing the sites one at a time, I did them one at a time.

Fix the Database
Search/replace each posts table for each site, changing /files/ to /uploads/SITENUM/
```
UPDATE wp_10_posts SET post_content = REPLACE (
post_content,
'=&quot;http://test.ipstenu.org/files/',
'=&quot;http://test.ipstenu.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/');
```
Why did I do it that way? Because of this blog. I talk a lot about code here, and I know I’ve talked about moving files around before. If you don’t do that, you’re okay with a less precise search, but why bother? This works, it’s safe, and I’d use it again.

That got annoying really fast. I went and grabbed my favorite Search And Replace for WordPress (and any other database) tool. Seriously I love that. I used that to follow up, change everything, and it actually worked really well for me.

Another DB Fix!

One of the changes in 3.5 was turning off rewriting. This took me forever and a day to find. After I did that, my images showed up fine, but the little buggers kept uploading to /files! Turns out it was all because of the site option ms_files_rewriting

The way I got around this was by putting the following in my wp-config.php file:
```
define( 'UPLOADBLOGSDIR', 'wp-content/uploads/sites' );
```
And then I ran this in SQL to turn off ms_files_rewriting. Or so I thought. More in a second.
```
INSERT INTO `my_database`.`wp_sitemeta` (`meta_id`, `site_id`, `meta_key`, `meta_value`) VALUES (NULL, '1', 'ms_files_rewriting', '0');
```
I came up with that after reading through /wp-includes/functions.php line 1515.

For most sites, this worked, but in my later work, I determined that it actually wasn’t working. It was ignoring this. I don’t know why, but every test I did merrily ignored this setting, so I finally growled and wrote this mu-plugin function:
```
function stupid_ms_files_rewriting() {
        $url = '/wp-content/uploads/sites/' . get_current_blog_id();
        define( 'BLOGUPLOADDIR', $url );
}
add_action('init','stupid_ms_files_rewriting');
```
It’s stupid simple, it’s probably not a good idea, but it works for the three sites that have the stupids.

Finish up .htaccess.

.htaccess, remove the ms-files.php line for ms-files, or comment it out. This is pretty simple.

Why not move the main site to /uploads/?

Because of the way I fixed the uploadblogsdir. It defaulted everyone to /sites/ and after an hour I said fuck it.

Any weird problems?

Yeah, two sites (this one and my grandmothers) decided that they wanted to be repetitious and spat out URLs like this: wp-content/uploads/sites/8/sites/8/

Since that wasn’t right at all, and I was a little too eggnoggy to parse why, I did this:
```
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^taffys\.org
RewriteRule ^wp-content/uploads/sites/8/sites/8/(.*) /wp-content/uploads/sites/8/$1 [L,R=301]
```
I swear I have no idea why three sites got stuck with /files/ and two more decided to double down, Vegas style, but frankly I’m pleased I got through this far on my own.

I can’t stress enough that you do not have to do this!
24 December, 2012
Social Throttling

Lately we’ve all seen the ads on Facebook ‘Promote this post and have it seen by a wider audience!’ And many of us pish-posh it, because the people who liked us will see our posts, and who needs it. Right? Wrong. Not even 25% of the people who like you, or your page, will ever see your posts if you don’t promote them. What they call ‘organic’ reach is highly limited, especially with their new timelines. The way in which they filter the new timeline is going to make this even harder.

A lot of people I know had no idea that Facebook limits who can see your posts. When you start combining this with Google’s encrypting of search terms, the easy valuation of your SEO is creeping swiftly into overly complicated. A lot of A/B testing relies on this information and now that it’s being taken away, we’re back to the age old metrics of grabbing people off the street and asking them which sock is whiter.(Of course with on-line prompts to fill out those Q&As, we’ve already hurt ourselves. We’ve all trained ourselves to ignore those ad-like things that get between us and content. But that’s another post.)

Facebook Ad Example
Twitter has had ‘promoted‘ tweets for a while, which is probably why they get so tetchy about the other Twitter apps. The concept is that you pay and more people see your tweets. Not a bad model, really, though most of us just roll our eyes and ignore them. Still, all your tweets are just as popular and shared with people who follow you.

Not so, Facebook. For a long time, Facebook did something kind of similar. Your sidebar has “sponsored” posts, which are just plain ads. If you have a Page, you can pay to sponsor your posts, similar to Twitter, and push your brand. But here’s where Facebook’s a shit-bird: Edgerank.

The concept is like Pagerank from Google. The more popular, and active, your page/post are, the more they’re worth. But that doesn’t make sense for people, since my brother’s edgerank may be low, but I still want to see all his posts. Supposedly Edgerank doesn’t affect this, but I’m not so sure, given how many ‘important’ Facebook messages I miss. This probably stands out more to be since I don’t visit the site with any regularity. If I have a blog post (like this one) that I push to Facebook via Wordpress, I may go back to see if people commented there. That’s really the only time I notice what’s in my timeline, and while I do quick scan it, it’s filled with cruft.

What happens on the Death Star stays on the Death Star.
If you’re on Facebook all the time, you’d never notice. If you got Facebook emails, you’d never notice. I don’t meet either of those requirements. If I use Facebook, I use it. If I don’t, I don’t want a hundred emails cluttering up my space, and this is a problem. See, if I don’t participate actively, by clicking like (something I rarely do), then I cause your edgerank to drop and fewer people to see your posts, so fewer of us click like and thus it sucks. They aren’t wrong with their algorithm, as Facebook is a work based on connections. A likes B likes C who shares A with D. That’s how things get around.(If you’re interested in the math, Dan Zarrella did the math and Harvard reblogged it.)

With that in mind, if you’re trying to improve your ranking for your product, Ari Herzog has a suggestion: Concentrate on interactions. If you have some regular people who leave comments, talk with them. They’ll be more inclined to share and retweet your posts, which gets you better ranking. Remember, we’re working under the assumption that everyone wants to get noticed more for business, and while SEO is not a zero-sum game, there are winners and losers. Concentrating too much on the media aspect of social media is a quick way to lose.

For the rest of us who just want to communicate with our friends and family, you’re better off getting a blog that emails them directly. At least then the only fear you have is the spam filters. But of course, that falls into the argument of why you should own your own content anyway, and is a post for another day.

18 December, 2012
Subdomain vs Domain
When two words are very similar, it’s easy to get confused. Which witch is which? Whether, weather, and wether. Affect vs effect… Okay, you know, English sucks. We have way too many words that will drive you to drink, and if you know anyone who’s learned English as a second language, please take time to tell them how amazing they are. My father’s wife is Japanese, bilingual in French, and is learning English. I know a smattering of French. Our conversations are fantastically amusing and thankfully we have great senses of humor.

Because I’m that familiar with the crazy of my native language, I have no surprise that people get subdomains and domains confused. Here’s the basic statement:

A subdomain is not the same as a domain.

That’s it. But since I don’t expect everyone to know what the heck I just said, I’m going to explain. Remember, don’t think you’re stupid for not knowing this! You can’t magically know everything, you have to learn it, and there are people like me who want to help you. Where the confusion kicks in isn’t that we call it a ‘subdomain’ but that the official definition is “a subdomain is a domain that is part of a larger domain.” So we’ve just said a domain of a domain, and yet here I am pushing you and saying that a subdomain isn’t a domain when it clearly is.

It is and it isn’t.
- A domain is pretty simple: elftest.net is a domain. It’s the solid basis that all websites are built on.
- A subdomain is a subset of the domain: tools.elftest.net is a subdomain on elftest.net.
Notice how ‘tools.’ is in front of elftest.net? That extra period between tools and elftest is how we know this is a sub domain. The .net part is called the ‘Top Level Domain’ and any time you see www, that actually isn’t a subdomain, but a special term… You know what, let’s break this down with a picture.

You can ignore protocol for now (we can get into that another time). What we’re looking at is this:

URL: http://www.example.com/index.html
Top-level domain name: com
Second-level domain name: example.com
Host name: www.example.com OR example.com

Why is www special? It has to do with a lot of boring history, but suffice to say that used to be how we knew it was a webpage! Now we use http:// to say ‘This will be a webpage’ so many of us (myself included) feel that www is unnecessary and just makes URLs longer. However because of history, http://www.elftest.net and http://elftest.net will forever point you to the same place. This actually means that www is a subdomain, but it’s a very special one that points to the same place as no www at all. In very rare cases, a fancy website will redirect www and non-www to different places, but this is the exception, not the rule. Good SEO practices are to have the www and non-www point to the exact same place.

The meat of the matter is that most of the time, when someone asks ‘What’s your domain?’ they really mean ‘What’s your host name?’ My host name is elftest.net (or ipstenu.org or halfelf.org…. I have a lot of domains

Now let’s look at a subdomain.

They look shockingly similar, except that instead of www in front, I have sub. So what’s the deal here? Well because I’m using something other than www, I’ve designated sub.example.com as a subset of example.com, and thus a subdomain. Yes, it’s backwards. Sub should be below or behind, but remember, we’re calling .com the top level domain, so right-to-left this makes more sense.

I know. It’s all clear as mud. Even writing this I sat there and muttered “This stuff is nuts.” I know all this didn’t explain everything as clearly as I could wish, but I’ll break it down into the simplest terms that, while not 100% technically accurate, will tell every decent web tech what you mean:

When someone asks “What’s the subdomain?” you answer ‘sub.example.com’

If someone asks “What’s the domain?’ you say ‘example.com’ (sometimes they’ll ask “What’s the main domain?”)

If you’re on Multisite and someone asks “What’s the mapped domain, and what subdomain does it point to?” you say ‘mappeddomain.com and it points to mapped.example.com’

And never ever use domain mapping plugins for your subdomains. Those are for grownup domains only, not your subdomains.

For extra credit: Third level domains are what you get when you see things like example.co.uk – example isn’t a subdomain here, it’s the main domain. co.uk is the TLD. Why third? Well, we’d already used sub and second, and we needed some way to say that this is part of the primary URL, and not a subset. Also geeks love to confuse people.
18 December, 2012
Stolen GPL

I made a polarizing comment on Twitter back in November, which was perfectly plain to me, but apparently not everyone else.

“GPL means that you can fork, but it doesn’t mean you can steal, and you know damn well what theft is.”

I should have said ‘doesn’t mean you should steal, and you know damn well what that is’ but the point is close enough. Forking in GPL is not only okay, it’s encouraged. Many of us get our starts forking and improving plugins. But there’s a difference between that and stealing someone’s work and presenting it as our own. That’s stealing, plain and simple. If you fork, you attribute. I have a plugin that started as a fork and ended up 100% re-written in a totally different way, but I still credit my original inspiration.

Why?

Because of the community.

Look, per GPL, taking someone’s plugin is not stealing it, in so far as taking the code goes. You have the right to distribute someone else’s code. And I don’t even think that taking someone’s copyright protected work is actually theft. What I do think is that is taking someone else’s work with questionable motives, and rebranding it as your own, is stealing.

Here’s the GNU’s take on Copyright ‘Theft’:

Copyright apologists often use words like “stolen” and “theft” to refer to copyright infringement. This is spin, but they would like you to take it for objective truth.
Under the US legal system, copyright infringement is not theft. Laws about theft are not applicable to copyright infringement. The copyright apologists are making an appeal to authority—and misrepresenting what authority says.
Unauthorized copying is forbidden by copyright law in many circumstances (not all!), but being forbidden doesn’t make it wrong. In general, laws don’t define right and wrong. Laws, at their best, attempt to implement justice. If the laws (the implementation) don’t fit our ideas of right and wrong (the spec), the laws are what should change.

I agree with their explanation, and think it’s valid, in so far as it goes.

Where it breaks down is the motive, as I mentioned before. If I buy a plugin or theme to use, I’ve bought it for the intended purpose. If I buy it to fork, I’ve bought it for another intended purses. If I buy it to sell as my own, now I’ve walked into asshole territory. Per the GPL, this isn’t theft and it isn’t stealing (again, forking is okay). But when you look at it dead on, you’ve taken someone else’s work, with the intent to profit from their work, without any attribution or credit or compensation.

In any other situation, that would be, clearly, stealing.

Theft is taking someone else’s property without permissions and with the intent to deprive the rightful owner of it. Obviously we’re not depriving the owner of the product when it comes to software, but we are intended to deprive them of the profits of their software, by circumventing their established ‘sales’ procedure. This works the other way, too. If I take someone’s free theme/plugin and sell it, I’m stealing from them as well. However. In both cases, if I’m not selling the product, but selling my support of it, I’m not stealing anything.

Stealing is presenting someone else’s works as your own, among other definitions, and taking without right or permission. When it comes to GPL, you have both right and permission to take, that is unquestioned. But again, once you start presenting this as your own, you’ve walked into asshole territory. You didn’t do the work, you didn’t write the code, and you didn’t do anything except copy/paste. That’s not coding. You’re being dishonest, and I feel you’re stealing.

It’s morally ambiguous and sticky for me to just say ‘this is stealing’ which is why I have to come back to the intent and motive. Am I doing this for altruistic reasons? Did the developer take a walk and abandon their work, and I’m simply keeping it alive? Did the developer reject my patch so I forked it? Or am I doing this because I resent them charging $85 for a plugin when WordPress is free? If it’s that last one, then I’m a thief, because my motive is to stick it to the other guy.

Separating ‘stealing’ and ‘theft’ is like undoing a Gordian knot. You can do it, but it starts bumping into all sorts of crazy semantics. That’s why, most of the time, we don’t bother. I have a very strong opinion on the subject of code-theft, and always have. I feel that the only way to keep the GPL going is to not only do what’s right, but mean it, and being a good steward of the community, be it WP or Drupal or even Expression Engine, means you have to do what’s right.

The right thing is to thank the guy who came first. Even an ‘Inspired by a snide comment by Ipstenu’ is being a good steward. You’ve encouraged me to do more by taking the time to recognize my effort. With that encouragement, I’ll go on to do more. It’s positive reinforcement at it’s best.

13 December, 2012

Author: Ipstenu (Mika Epstein)

Version Control

Multisite Stands Alone

Dumping ms-files

Social Throttling

Subdomain vs Domain

Stolen GPL