So you want people to be able to easily share your posts, and you install Jetpack and configure it so that the happy icons only show up on posts and pages (since you can’t make it show on only posts).
Then you decide to make a Static Front Page so everything looks pretty. Except you get multiple instances of the sharing links! That isn’t what you wanted at all!
The problem is that the when you make a static front page, it’s actually not an index page. It is simply a page using a template. Strictly speaking, it’s not an archive page, nor an index page, and because of that it’s treated like any other page and the ‘share this’ settings treat is ‘correctly’ by showing itself every time a page/post is called. I did report this to Jetpack, by the way, and they were a bit torn on if this is Jetpack being silly or something that needs to be addressed in core (that is, does WordPress need to grow up and treat a static front page as an index page).
While they’re hashing this out, you can fix it yourself, which is a relief to those of us who ran into this.
The easiest (and actually best) way is to use the WordPress template hierarchy to your advantage. If you use a front-page.php file instead of a static front page, WordPress knows that it’s an index page. This is the best way because you don’t make any extra ‘calls’ to the code. WordPress tucks it away on it’s own. To do this, if you’re using a page template, just copy the template (say page-snarfer.php) into front-page.php and call it a day. Depending on your theme, you may need to add a call to any special classes being called. (I know that if you use Hybrid Core, you need to add a call to page-template-home for it to format right.)
But sometimes you can’t do that. Like if you’re on MultiSite and you use the same theme for multiple sites and you don’t want them all to have the same style of front page. Well now we have a minor problem. First thing to do is turn off sharing for the page you’re using as the static front page.
Doing just that brought me to this:
In this case, I’m using a static front page with some content, formatted via the Twenty Eleven “Showcase Template” to show recent posts below my content. The first post shows up as an excerpt and then the rest show as titles with links (apologies for the different color):
So for this theme it works perfectly and I’m happy as can be. This method also works if you’re using a Static Front Page without a page template!
But. That doesn’t work for all themes. And this is where we have to do the ugly things we don’t want to do. We have to edit CSS. In and of itself, this is pretty easy but I think it’s a poor choice because all this will do is hide the icons from displaying, and that means the code still gets rendered and call and that means you’re putting more work into loading your page than you need.
Sometimes you just can’t fix it the best way, and acknowledging that, here’s how to do it. First, you must be using a page template for your static front page. (I said this once before, but it bears repeating: If you’re not using a page template, you can fix this by just turning off the sharing for the page.) Open up that template and look for something like this:
<div id="primary" class="showcase">
Once you’ve found it, you just have to add in a CSS call:
div#primary.showcase div.sharing {display:none;}
That says “In the primary.showcase div, if anything’s using the div sharing, hide it.” Not the most elegant or efficient way about it, but it gets the job done.
And thanks to that massive spike in traffic, my server was slowing down to the point that HTTP was becoming unresponsive and it had to reboot itself. In short, the TimThumb exploit was causing my server to behave like it was under a Denial of Service Attack, even though I don’t use TimThumb! My server was able to handle this, but if I’d been back on my old Shared Server, I’d probably have not gotten a text from the server at 11pm saying “Man, we had to reboot, but it’s okay now. Can I have a beer?”, but instead woken up to ‘Dude, where’s my website!?’ And this is with having a fantastic web host who cares and takes the time to help me out.
Blocking an IP is easy, and I can do it via command line or GUI. Auto-detecting a URL though, is more complicated. Part of me thinks that, much like I can auto-block someone who tries to log in with any ID 10 times in a row, I should be able to add in a file pattern somewhere. Turns out you can’t, at least not the way I wanted. Instead, you have to do it differently.
We often sum up GPL as “Do what you want with this software. Just let other people do what they want with the software you make from it.” If you’re not familiar with it, I think I can sum up the spirit of GPL as “Don’t be a dick.” (
Was Woo being a dick to fork the plugin? Yes. And no. You have to keep this in perspective.
Since I was asked, my personal opinion is this: WooThemes pulled a dick move which in no way violated the letter or the spirit of GPL.
Freedom is a complicated, annoying, thing, and sometimes having a freedom means you accept the consequences of that freedom. In the US, we have freedom of speech, which means we can bitch about our government if we want to. But that also means someone else, who has the polar opposite of your views, has the exact same right you do. And I will defend that person with my dying breath that they have that right, no matter how much I detest what they’re saying.
No one here violated a contract, lied, cheated, or stole. So why are people chapped and are they right to be so?
It’s a numbers game. Your site, you’re in control of how you tag and categorize things. I do it differently from many people, who do it differently from others and so on and so forth. While this difference is great (go diversity!) it means that ‘tagging’ a topic on Google is up to the person making the post. I may call it WordPress, you may use WP, and now which one do I follow?