Category: How To

Mailman Newsletter Widget

I read How to Add a Newsletter Signup Box After Your Posts by Brian Gardner and thought to myself “Self,” I said, “I really would love to be able to add a signup widget for my mailman newsletter.”

And so I did. The following code is plain HTML. Just drop it into a text widget wherever you want it to show up, and magically it will. If you’re using a Genesis theme, this is your replacement for Step 3.

&lt;div id=&quot;newsletter&quot;&gt;
    &lt;div class=&quot;white-border&quot;&gt;
        &lt;div class=&quot;newsletter-wrap&quot;&gt;
            &lt;h4&gt;Newsletter&lt;/h4&gt;
            &lt;p&gt;Get my awesome newsletter!&lt;/p&gt;
            &lt;form action=&quot;http://example.com/mailman/subscribe/newsletter_example.com&quot; method=&quot;post&quot; id=&quot;mc-embedded-subscribe-form&quot; name=&quot;mc-embedded-subscribe-form&quot; class=&quot;validate&quot; target=&quot;_blank&quot;&gt;
            &lt;input type=&quot;email&quot; value=&quot;&quot; name=&quot;email&quot; class=&quot;email&quot; id=&quot;mce-EMAIL&quot; placeholder=&quot;Email Address&quot; required&gt;
			&lt;input name=&quot;pw&quot; type=&quot;password&quot; class=&quot;password&quot; id=&quot;mce-PASSWORD&quot; placeholder=&quot;Enter Password&quot; required&gt;
			&lt;input name=&quot;pw-conf&quot; type=&quot;password&quot; class=&quot;password&quot; id=&quot;mce-PASSWORD&quot; placeholder=&quot;Confirm Password&quot; required&gt;
			&lt;input type=&quot;hidden&quot; name=&quot;digest&quot; value=&quot;No&quot;&gt;
            &lt;input type=&quot;submit&quot; value=&quot;Sign Up&quot; name=&quot;subscribe&quot; id=&quot;mc-embedded-subscribe&quot; class=&quot;button&quot;&gt;
            &lt;/form&gt;
        &lt;/div&gt;
    &lt;/div&gt;
&lt;/div&gt;

One important thing to note here, I wanted everyone to get the emails as they happened, no digest, so I set this: . If you want to make it an option, the down and dirty way is to use this:

Digest: &lt;select name=digest&gt;
&lt;option value=1&gt;Yes&lt;/option&gt;
&lt;option value=0&gt;No&lt;/option&gt;
&lt;/select&gt;

The rest is pretty much Brian’s CSS, tweaked a little since my size requirements were different. Don’t change the ‘name’ values, as it makes Mailman cry. And how does it look?

Looks nice, don’t it?

18 April, 2012

WordPress Multisite 101

So there’s this thing. I blog a lot, but sometimes the ‘lessons’ I want to teach would take up a few thousand words. I’ve sorted out that any blog post over 1200 words is ‘too long’ and I try to split it up. But then how do I organize it? Let’s face it, books are useful for a reason.

After compiling and colating all the emails, IMs, forum posts, and blog posts Andrea and I have made over the last couple years, we realized we had a novel. The problem was organizing it so the scope wasn’t maddening and daunting for us to write, nor for the user to read. Finally inspiration struck. If you’re using Multisite, you really need to know WordPress first. You have to walk before you can run, as they say, and with Multisite, you have to already know how to do the basics.

This book will not teach you how to pick a host, copy files up, create a database, or any of those things. It won’t even tell you if you should or should not use Multisite. What it will do is help you go from WordPress to WordPress Multisite, configure the options, understand what they mean, sort out the standard problems, and help you figure out what you need to know and where you need to be in your own head in order to do this thing.

And it’s free. Well, no. It’s not. It’s pay what you want.

That’s the other thing. I could go the traditional route with a book, find someone to publish it, etc etc. Or I could self-publish on the iBook store or eJunkie and take a hit for the overhead and the hassles of all that. Or… Or I could address the real problem about making ‘money’ with books. Obscurity. I have a whole philosophy about paying for ebooks and you can read it if you want. But the tl;dr for you is this.

Pay me whatever you think the ebook is worth. If you aren’t going to pay, you weren’t anyway, and that’s nothing lost from my end. I’d appreciate a fiver if you find it useful. I totally support you downloading it first, reading it, then paying later. After all, how do you know it’s what you wanted without reading it?

Grab a copy of WordPress Multisite 101, it’s in ePub and PDF. You know the drill. Right click and save as.

30 March, 2012
Moving WordPress Multisite
I answer this a lot.

Edited to add: If you’re just moving to a new server and keeping your domain name, it’s exactly like moving Single Install WordPress. Just remember to make sure your new server is set up to handle wildcard domains, and your httpd.conf has ‘AllowOverride’ set to ‘All’ and you should be fine. If you’re moving to a new domain name, read on!

Edit #2: The Incerconnectit Search/Replace DB script is also perfect to use, though you still need to manually edit a couple places.

Moving a normal WordPress site is really easy. Copy over your data. Change your URLs, do a search/replace on your wp_posts table (to fix any internal links), go out for a beer. Some of you may need to edit a wp-config file, but mostly that’s it.

Then there’s Multisite, which sucks. See, unlike single installs of WordPress, you can’t change your site URLs easily. Don’t get me wrong, if you’re a Super Admin, you can easily go into WP Admin -> Network -> Sites and edit the sites. You’d have two places to edit it:

On the Info Tab

On the Settings Tab

But here’s where it starts to suck. If you’re changing tech.ipstenu.org to press.ipstenu.org for example, you do that and then you need to go to your database and look for the site posts table (in this case, it’s wp_2_posts) and search/replace tech.ipstenu with press.ipstenu.

That’s not terrible, right? It looks a lot like moving a single install of WordPress.

What if you have your site as subfloders, using ipstenu.org/tech and ipstenu.org/press though? And you want to move everything to lipstenu.org?

This is where it sucks.

See some widgets and theme settings store your data and include your URL. This is done with data serialization as well, which means the length of your URL matters. If you changed from ipstenu.org to Lpstenu.org, then you would be perfectly safe doing a total database search/replace of the domain name! But since I’ve proposed changing it to Lipstenu.org, I can’t do that. Any field that counted my domain name would be off by one, and thus invalid, and thus wipe out my settings. Oh and to make it worse? Depending on how you uploaded your media and included it in your site, your postmeta table might also be filled with this.

It’s important to understand two things here.
1. This situation exists on a normal single site install.
2. You don’t have to change it in those places!
And as a maybe third, I know a lot of people who do a blanket search/replace all the time and never have a single problem. But because I know enough who do have issues, I can’t safely recommend you try it unless you have a rock-solid backup of your database.

This brings us to the point. How do you move WordPress Multisite to a new domain name?

Very, very, carefully.

You’re going to have to do some work in the database, so now’s the time to get some coffee and practice not freaking out. If you have phpMyAdmin, editing your WordPress database is not terrifying, but like a cat, should be approached with caution. Remember to take a full backup of your database before you start. A good backup.

First, it’s perfectly safe to edit all wp_posts (and wp_x_posts) tables with a search/replace of your domain name. I strongly suggest using as much of the domain as you can: i.e. http://newdomain.com instead of just newdomain. This will make sure you don’t confidently change the content of your posts. The Incerconnectit Search/Replace DB script is also perfect to use here, but it won’t fix everything, which is why we have another step:

Next you need to manually go through these tables:
- wp_site
- wp_blogs
Those two tables are really straight forward, by the way. You’ll see what to edit right away.

Then you have to manually (again) review all the wp_x_options tables and look for THREE fields:
- home
- siteurl
- fileupload_url
Only edit those. And yes, you have to do it manually in each of the options table unless you used the Incerconnectit Search/Replace DB script earlier.

Once you’ve done that, go into your wp-config.php and see if you have to change define( 'DOMAIN_CURRENT_SITE', 'ipstenu.org' ); (depending on your change, you may not).

And … that should be it.

It’s a pain, but it’s not insurmountable.

Right away, though, you can see the complications if you’re moving a site from ipstenu.org/wordpress to ipstenu.org, and while most of the changes remain similar, you need to remain vigilant and attentive with every change you make. The wp_blogs table is where it gets stickiest, as you have to add in the new subfolder (or remove it) by editing a separate field in the row.

Just pay attention, read carefully, and remember to breathe.
31 January, 2012
SOPA Blackout
I’m lazy and I don’t want to write a plugin, so I asked on Twitter if someone had one to black out a site for SOPA on the 18th of January. If you don’t get why this is a thing, please read WordPress.org’s post on SOPA. A lot of sites are going black from 8am to 8pm. I am, and I to didn’t want to use a plugin.

My solution for this involves two files and is all thanks to Pete!

@Ipstenu add a .maintenance file

— Pete Mall (@petemall) January 12, 2012

To do this is really simple. Go in and make a file called .maintenance in the top level of your WP install. For most people, it’s the same folder as your .htaccess and wp-config.php files.

Now edit that file and put in the following content:
```
<?php
 
// Let's make sure you're not an admin/logged in!
 
function is_user_logged_in() {
    $loggedin = false;
    foreach ( (array) $_COOKIE as $cookie => $value ) {
        if ( stristr($cookie, 'wordpress_logged_in_') )
            $loggedin = true;
    }
    return $loggedin;
}
 
if ( ! stristr($_SERVER['REQUEST_URI'], '/wp-admin') &amp;&amp; ! stristr($_SERVER['REQUEST_URI'], '/wp-login.php') &amp;&amp; ! is_user_logged_in() )
 
// If it's after 8:00:00 on the 18th, we're going to show the blackout page
 
if ( time() >= mktime(8,0,0,1,18,2012) ) {
	// When we hit 8pm (20), we're back.
	$upgrading = mktime(20,0,0,1,18,2012);
}
?>
```
What does this do? It’s pretty simple. First it checks to see if you’re logged in and, if so, lets you get where you need to go. If you’re not logged in, though, it checks the date and if it’s after 8am on the 18th, you get a maintenance page. After 8pm on the 18th, it swings back. (All this code, except for the date stuff which I wrote, is from Matt (Sivel):
WordPress Maintenance Mode Without a Plugin and WordPress Maintenance Mode Without a Plugin Part 3/ ) Pretty cool right? And the 8am to 8pm is based on your server’s time, so it’s all local. It’s also pretty easy to see how you change that for your own time. I would say pick your busiest time to go black.

But if you want it to look pretty, you need to do a little extra. (Code from WordPress Maintenance Mode Without a Plugin Part 2 and text from Blaccupy) Make a file called maintenance.php and put it in your wp-content folder. Here’s an example:
```
<?php
/* Tell search engines that the site is temporarily unavilable */
$protocol = $_SERVER&#91;"SERVER_PROTOCOL"&#93;;
if ( 'HTTP/1.1' != $protocol &amp;&amp; 'HTTP/1.0' != $protocol ) $protocol = 'HTTP/1.0';
header( "$protocol 503 Service Unavailable", true, 503 );
header( 'Content-Type: text/html; charset=utf-8' );
?>
<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Strict//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-strict.dtd">
<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">
<head>
        <title>BLACKED OUT</title>
        <meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8" />
        <style type="text/css">
        body {
                background: black;
                text-align:center;
                color: #eee;
                font-family: Helvetica;
                font-size: 2.2em;
                }
        </style>
</head>
<body>

<div style="width: 960px; margin: 0 auto;">
<h2>This website is..</h2>

<h1>BLACKED OUT!</h1>

<p>In protest of pending US legislation, which threatens the freedoms of websites like this one and the freedoms of the people who use them, this website is offline on January 18th, 2012 from 8am to 8pm EST.</p>

<p>Please <a href="http://americancensorship.org/">help protect our free speech</a> against the corporate and political interests which seek to take them away!</p>

<p>(And don't worry, we'll be back in business tomorrow!)</p>
</div>

<?php
die();
?>
```
Which means your site will look like this on January 18th. You’ll notice I made some tweaks on mine. This is a default feature of WordPress, by the way. You can design your own maintenance mode page just with this one file, so y’know, party time.

Now there’s only one catch. If you update WP via the automatic updater between now and then, you lose the .maintenance file. I don’t have a fix for that, but if you do, please comment!

And yes, my sites are going dark on the 18th.

ETA: If you have a Multisite and only want SOME sites dark, use Customize the Suspended blog page from WordPress Must-Use Tutorials. Suspend the sites and boom goes the dynamite.

ETA 2: If you’re using MediaWiki (like I am on another site) I came up with this idea to go dark for SOPA. Its just a normal extension that, between those hours, redirects to the same page I use for WordPress. You could have it point to any page, of course.
```
<?php

if ( !defined( 'MEDIAWIKI' ) ) die();

if ( time() >= mktime(8,0,0,1,18,2012)  &amp;&amp; time() <= mktime(20,0,0,1,18,2012) ) {
     
        include('/location-of/wp-content/maintenance.php');
    exit();
}
?>
```
That code, sans the Mediawiki line, will also work as an extension for ZenPhoto, so pass it on.
12 January, 2012
Yourls
For a long time I’ve wanted short URLs for one of my sites. Finally I figured out a short URL, picked up the domain, and said “It would be great if I could redirect posts with this! But how?”

As it turned out, I was making a mental mountain out of a miniature molehill. I do that sometimes, get all caught up in a non-meaningful detail. This was easy, it wasn’t super complicated, and it was fast. On the scale of things where WordPress is the easiest (1) and MediaWiki is the hardest (8), this landed next to Zenphoto (4) and was about the same (3 or 4, depending on your skills). It requires more RTFM than WordPress, and I had to do some things manually.

Setting Up Your Domain

First buy the domain. This part is obvious, I hope. Since I’m on cPanel, I added my new domain as an addon domain to the master. This let me have the short domain (do4.us let’s say) hosted off the main domain.com site, without making a separate account. If I’d wanted to map a domain, I would have parked instead of addon-ing.

To add an addon domain in cPanel:
1. Enter the domain for the new addon domain into the New Domain Name field.
2. Enter the main FTP username for the addon domain in the Subdomain/Ftp Username field. You can use the one you use for the mani account if you want.
3. In the Document Root field, enter the directory that will contain the addon domain’s files.
4. Enter the password for the addon domain into the Password field.
  - Make sure you use a secure password.
  - You can have cPanel generate a secure pasword for you using the Generate Password feature.
5. Confirm the password in the Password (Again) field.
6. Click Add Domain
7. To add files to the addon domain’s home directory, click the File Manager link, or use FTP/SSH like normal people.
Once I did that, and DNS propagated, I was ready to go.

Installing the App

I decided to use Yourls for this, since my friends use it, and I know (in that internet way) the guys behind it. Hi, Ozh.

That said, their install doc was screwed up. For 1.5, it says to edit a file that apparently isn’t included in the build. That’s okay, since I just used SVN anyway. The directions are very much geeky. This is not a simple WordPress install.

What I did was first make a database domain_yourls and added my DB user account to it (I never use my domain FTP account). Then I ran an SVN checkout from googlecode to grab the files into the root of my add-on domain: svn checkout http://yourls.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/ .

After that, it’s the manual editing of the config file (the sample of which is not included in the 1.5 zip) and then I went to myurls.com/admin/ to finish setup. I had to grab the .htaccess file sample, since mine didn’t copy down (my own fault there).

Configuring the App

Install the YOURLS: WordPress to Twitter plugin. Even if you don’t plan on using the auto-tweet function, this is the easiest way to get your URLs made. The “hard part” here is setting up a Twitter ‘app’ for the first time. If you’ve done it before, it’s not terribly hard, but with all new things, it’s scary. Ozh’s directions are painless, thankfully, and then … you’re done. And you have your own Short URLS!

What’s Missing?

Two things, and neither are YOURLS fault!

1) Twitter doesn’t know that three different URLs (domain.com/postname, domain.com/?p=2 and do4.us/2 for example) are all the same URL. That means if you use those Twitter Rewteet buttons on posts, it doesn’t show up the same way, and the ‘count’ is off.

2) There isn’t an easy way to tell Jetpack to use my short URLs instead of my site’s full one. Edited to add: By this I mean only in the ShareDaddy links. Like the ‘tweet/email/facebook’ ones. Actual shortlinks work perfectly.

I suppose a third is ‘Damn it, Twitter, stop shortening a short URL!’ but that’s a different rant.

Should you do this?

I think so, but then again, I’m weird.

Read Also…

Otto – Using YOURLS with WordPress

Rev. Voodoo – How I Set up Vudu.me URL Shortener With Yourls
9 January, 2012

Category: How To

WordPress Site Description

Mailman Newsletter Widget

WordPress Multisite 101

Moving WordPress Multisite

SOPA Blackout

Yourls