Tag: administration

Breaking Up Multisite
This is by no means the be-all and end-all of how to break up a Multisite. These are, however, methods I’ve used to move Multisites around into brand new places. As always, if you have another method, feel free to explain in the comments, and link back to your own tutorials!

You see, Multisite is great at some things, but breaking up is crazy hard to do. If you want to just disable multisite, it’s not too bad, four steps, and the hardest is to delete the right tables. And if you want to move a whole multisite, it’s not terrible either.

But. What happens when you want to move only one site on the network?

Usually I see this happen when someone is developing a site for someone else, and thinks it’ll be ‘easier’ to do it on their Multisite. After all, the site will be ‘visible’ but clearly a development site, and remote clients can take a look all they want. The minority of people I see doing this for just themselves, knowing the site won’t ever need to be on a Multisite, but taking the ‘easy’ way out. And to them I suggest developing locally, as domain.dev, and then a blanket search/replace on ‘domain.dev’ for ‘domain.com’ when you’re ready to move. Then there is a small group of people who have a multisite installed on localhost for development, which … no. Don’t. It’s localhost. Spin up a new instance of WordPress.

And still, while I lament the shortsighted nature of these things, there are clear-cut use-cases for this that people just can’t predict. Like the day you wake up and realize that Ennis and Jack can stay on brokebackblog.com, but maybe you should move the Hulk.(Ang Lee directed both movies.) Now you have a dilemma. Do you rebrand brokebackblog.com as angleefilms.com? Maybe you just domain map brokebackblog.com/hulk to hulksmashblog.com or maybe, maybe, you don’t want to run the Hulk blogs at all, but your friend Eric does. Certainly there are always options to splitting up a Multisite, yet for the sake of this post, you have decided that Eric (who has bought hulksmashblog.com) should have the whole site, all the posts and users, and you don’t want it on your server at all!

Now what?

Uber Easy: Export and Import

This is straightforward. Install your new stand-alone WordPress instance, export the posts from brokebackblog.com/hulk, import them into hulksmashblog.com, customize the theme and plugins, done. If you don’t have a lot of users, this is the best bet. Yes, you’ll lose a lot of time resetting all the plugins and theme configs, but you probably had to do some of this anyway. All your comments come with, all your images too, so it’s going to be straightforward.

A couple more things to keep in mind. User passwords will need to be reset, which is trivial in my experience, and a good idea anyway if you want to enforce good passwords. Many new themes are getting great at allowing you to export theme settings, so that may ease the pain as well. The plugin settings really are the biggest hassle to me, but in the long run, I’ve found that having to reset them isn’t horrible since the new home usually is a little different from the old one.

Finally, you’ll probably need to search/replace your posts to compensate for the new image location. I prefer Velvet Blues Update URLs, but sometimes I use .htaccess to redirect instead. If you’re moving from an older Multisite, your images will all point to /files/, but newer ones are in /wp-content/uploads/sites/#/ instead. Of course, wp-cli make it even easier, and I use it all the time when moving people at work.
```
$ wp search-replace brokebackblog.com/hulk hulksmashblog.com
```
That’s right now my favorite command. It updated everything, with serialization handled safely, and I was done. If I can’t use that, I’ll grab the interconnectit search/replace tool (not just for WordPress) and run that instead, but for me, I install WP-CLI pretty much everywhere now. It’s just so easy!

Ugly Complex: Database Dancing

When you’ve got a more complex situation, like a heavily customized and themed site, with lots of users and content, then you may have to do this the hard way. As before, make your new stand-alone instance of WordPress. Copy down all the plugins and the theme from your multisite, same as before. Instead of importing the content via an XML file, though, we’re going to import the following database tables as well as all the media images. Remember, no import, no media import, so you must SFTP them all over.

Then the DB Tables you need are as follows:
```
wp_x_*
wp_user
wp_usermeta
```
This means you need to know your site number (not too hard, you know how to make them show up, right?), but don’t think it stops here! Now you have to rename tables. There are two directions to go. One is to rename all the wp_x_ tables to wp_, and the other is to rename the other two tables to wp_x_user and wp_x_usermeta instead.

Either way you get to fuss even more. And don’t forget what I talked about in Recovering Your Cape: If your tables are named wp_x_ then you MUST have a field called wp_x_user_roles in wp_x_options, or no one will have any permissions at all. This almost makes it easier to think “Well I should just add in _x right?” You’d think, but then you’re stuck with this funny prefix you have to account for in your wp-config.php file, and you also have to consider what if hulksmashblog.com later wants to make itself a multisite. Be nice to the next guy. I would rename the tables, and then run a search/replace for wp_x_ and wp_ using wp-cli or that script.

Now you’re still not done though. You actually moved over all of your users. That means you have a bunch that don’t have any posts. Go to the /users.php screen and sort by number of posts. Nuke everyone who doesn’t have any posts. Of course… what if they had comments and you want to keep that? Sadly that’s not listed. The comments table isn’t tied in to the users table in a easy to calculate way. But remember, deleting a user won’t delete the comment.

Finally, remember you changed the domain name? Do that again, like you did with an import export.

To The Pain: Moving Your Main Site

Ow. Ow. Okay, Jake, here’s where we get messy. There are just too many options to consider, so let’s look at them briefly.

First, if you want to keep the main site at its current location (domain etc), then you want to actually move all the other sites and then disable multisite.

However, if you want to keep the domain as a multisite and give the main site it’s own, new, home, you’ll want to switch out the main site for a subsite (detailed in WordPress Multisite 110 – around page 80), and then move it per one of the other ways… except remember the site number stays as ‘1’ which is to say ‘none’ so you’ll be moving wp_* and only the ones for the site, not the network (which you can’t delete unless you feel like breaking everything).

Finally, and this one boggles my mind, you want to keep the multisite, and all the sites, but separately. You can see there’s no quick fix for this. Move ’em all manually, and have a beer when you’re done, cause it ain’t fast.

Worse….

There’s more? Just a little bit. Keep in mind that any network settings won’t copy over, so W3TC and WordPress SEO, just to name two popular plugins, have network wide settings. Those don’t magically come with, you’ll have to re-build all of that. With W3TC, you should be able to export the settings, but maybe not. Other plugins too may prove problematic. What about BuddyPress? That would pretty much have to be a table-copy over. At least bbPress should be easier, as it’s all CPTs.

Obviously the more layers you get into with this, the messier it gets. Me? I try to do the age old export/import whenever possible.
27 August, 2013
Whois On First
Sometimes when I’m helping people out with their website, I feel like I’ve walked into an old Vaudeville act and we’re trying to figure out the answer to a question they don’t understand. The Internet gets newcomers every day and my conversations feel like this:

Ipstenu: Strange as it may seem, they give computer terms nowadays very peculiar names.

Costello: Funny names?

Ipstenu: Code names, geek names. Now, to figure out everything about your site, we start with whois on first, What’s Your Host is second, I Don’t Know your app is third —

For those of you who have never listened to Abbot and Costello do “Who’s On First” you need to take a moment to watch their televised episode “From The Actor’s Home” in 1953, the complete Who’s On First.(I grew up listening to them on the radio in reruns on KNX in the 1980s, and its safe to say that my concept of humor comes more from them than modern TV.)

So when I run into these people who are brand spanking new to the web (yes, they exist), I’m a little annoyed when I find they are totally at a loss at what they actually need to know in order to keep their website up and running. In part this is because the people who build the sites aren’t ‘consultants’ but friends and they just do the needful and move on. Those friends mean well, I’m one of them, but when you make a site for someone else, you have a responsibility to them that they know what the heck they’ve got. Otherwise, you’re not as good a friend as you thought.

But if you’re that newbie, what do you need to know to run your website? Three basic things! Whois! What is! Know is!
- Your Domain Name: Whois On First
- Your Web Host(s): What’s Your Host
- What’s Running Your Website: I Don’t Know Your App
That’s it. Three simple things. But in reality, they’re not that simple. And worse, the person who bought them is, technically speaking, the person who owns them. So if someone else bought your domain name for you, they own it. Not you. They have full, legal, rights to do whatever they want with it. Same goes for your hosting. It’s very important you put close attention to who is paying for your site, because if it’s not you, it should be. Don’t let your friends or consultants or developers buy these things for you, because then, legally, it’s theirs, and no amount of begging to a webhost or registrar will get them to give it to you.

But let’s get into the details.

Your Domain Name: Whois On First

You know this, right? I’m looking at halfelf.org right now. But do you know where it’s registered?

The domain name registrar is the company you paid to ‘reserve’ the domain name. It’s like your phone number. You paid AT&T to buy the number, and you can keep it as long as you want. But unlike the phone company where you pay for the number and the phone service, you may not be paying for both domain name and hosting in one go. In fact, many of us like to separate our host and our domain name, so if the host goes down, we can point the domain somewhere else.

The ownership of the domain name is important, because if you don’t own it, whomever does can point it wherever they want. This happens, from time to time, when domains expire. Someone will snipe the domain (i.e. buy it when you’ve forgotten to renew) and take it. And there is very little (if anything) you can do about it.

How do you find who your registrar is? It’s not that easy. If you use a tool called WHOIS to pull up the information, you’ll find a lot about a domain. For example, here’s what you can find for halfelf.org:
```
Domain ID:D165216955-LROR
Domain Name:HALFELF.ORG
Created On:06-Apr-2012 13:52:55 UTC
Last Updated On:06-Jun-2012 03:50:37 UTC
Expiration Date:06-Apr-2014 13:52:55 UTC
Sponsoring Registrar:eNom, Inc. (R39-LROR)
Status:CLIENT TRANSFER PROHIBITED
```
I removed some of the lines, because my information is WhoisGuard Protected. Normally it shows phone numbers, addresses, and so on. By law, you have to keep that stuff up to date and correct. Most of us forget. But none of that actually tells me what I need to know. See, I know who my registrar is, but all I see is “Sponsoring Registrar:eNom, Inc.” and that actually isn’t it.

Except it is.

My domain registrar is NameCheap, and NameCheap is both an eNom reseller and an ICANN-accredited registrar. I know, that was Greek, but what it means is there’s a list of people who are allowed to sell domain names, and this is the ICANN-accredited registrar and on there you will find both NameCheap and DreamHost, as well as Automattic (aka WordPress.com) and so on. So if they’re listed, why does my WHOIS show as eNom? Because they’re using eNom. Now as a separate example is my domain elftest.net, which shows up as NEW DREAM NETWORK, LLC. And that is, in this case, where I registered it.

If you get eNom as your registrar, don’t worry, you can easily find out who your actual registrar is via their reseller lookup tool. Toss halfelf in there, and you’ll see it’s NameCheap. Whew!

Your Web Host: What’s Your Host

This is the company you pay monthly (most of the time) to host your site. They generally have your email, too, though some people use Google’s Gmail ($5/year, yes, it used to be free). The Web Host is where your website ‘lives.’ All the files, all the pictures, all the email. It’s really easy to see who your host is, thanks to tools like WhoIsHostingThis.com, which can tell you that HalfElf is hosted on LiquidWeb.

If you can’t tell, this is pretty simple to suss out, but also very important to know. And just because you know who your host is does not mean you know the user account or passwords associated with it. If you are the person who pays the bills, you will always be able to get the account back by using your credit card info, but really this is something you should be keeping track of, because if you’re not paying for it, you’ll never ‘get it back.’ It wasn’t actually yours to begin with.

Speaking as a web host, the question I hate to hear the most is “I don’t have my login information for you guys, can you give it to me?” For what I think are pretty obvious reasons, unless you can prove you’re you, no we cannot hand you access. You need to know the login ID, the email address, the physical address/name of the owner, or some credit card into, in order to prove you’re you. You are not Gracie Allen, after all.

What’s Running Your Website: I Don’t Know Your App

This is the ‘what runs my site?’ one, and I am often amused by people who don’t know they’re using WordPress. Why amused? Because it’s at the bottom of every page, it’s on my login page, and … well it’s there. I don’t advocate removing all traces of WordPress from the site, because when you’re trying to figure out ‘what’ runs your site, these are helpful clues.

Even if you don’t use it, you should know what it is. Check if your site has a ‘readme.html’ page like https://halfelf.org/readme.html. Drupal has a README.txt (see http://www.typepad.com/README.txt for example), and MediaWiki just uses README (see http://jorjafox.net/wiki/README for one). So you may need to try multiple variations until you find one.

Of course, complicating that is the possibility of custom code. If your site is just plain HTML, hey, awesome. It’s easy and flexible and you’ll be fine. But the custom stuff, where someone comes up with cool ways to do things and doesn’t document them… this is why I like Web Apps, personally. Someone’s documented, or if not, there are other people who know how to help me.

What else?

What do you consider a ‘must know’ when you’re hosting a site? One thing that’s always interesting to ponder is “Where does my email live?” When I host other people’s sites, I tend to put their email on Google or another email only service, since that makes ‘moving’ way easier. Never assume people will want to have their files with you forever.
19 August, 2013
DreamCon In Review

The weekend after WCSF I talked at DreamCon, which was our own little Webhost convention/camp for technology and other things. As Matt said, we’re kind of the wacky Webhost, and I love it that way here at DreamHost.

Some of my coworkers talked about the technical stuff, like WP-cli and how DreamPress works, but I talked about some slightly more esoteric and conceptual things, no coding involved topics, because I tried to think about the questions people who host with us asked me the most.

Choosing WordPress Plugins

This was the more geeky of the two, but was an overview on how I search for plugins, value the devs and their work, and determine which ones I use. I mentioned needs and wants a couple times, which makes me think I’ll end up giving people a talk on that one of these days…

The questions I got after this session were interesting. I preemptively answered the long standing question I had never been able to answer before, which is “What is your favorite plugin?” I finally have an answer, and it’s MP6. My eyes suck, and for me, MP6 finally made the back end of WordPress totally readable for me, without having to increase my browser’s font size. The font was better, and larger, and clearer. Normally I hate black backgrounds, but for some reason MP6 doesn’t give me headaches.

The best question I got was how to search effectively. My answer was to be more exact with search terms. Too often we go for broad terms and narrow down, but I like to go the other way. “wordpress plugin calendar event list” – I pick every major term I need in that plugin, and more precise results follow.

Get Out Of The Monkey House

Besides the fact that all the devs in the room cheered when I stated “code is art” I think this one really opened people’s eyes. Remembering that the design of your site doesn’t stop at the pretty stuff, that your content and the flow of how the site works is also a major impact, is huge.

By the way, code is totally art. You’re making something out of nothing, inventing and building a concept that never existed before. It’s just like writing music. Be proud of it. The most standout question from this talk was what do I do when a customer demands they stay in that monkey house? I put my foot down. When I get into contract work, I have always stated up front “You’re hiring me to be your expert, which means you may suggest things for your website that I, out of my experience and expertise, know to be bad ideas. When that happens, I will tell you that we should not do these things, and why. This is my power of veto. I will only use it when I have proof, via research, that what you are proposing is not in your best interests. If that’s not okay, then we don’t sign the contract. If it is, then you will accept my actions on web design, just as I will accept yours about your product. You know more than I do about that, I know more than you about this.”

Thus far, no ones walked away, and I’ve never made a website with a blink tag (except for the gag website, where the contract was to make it look like Ling’s cars…).

5 August, 2013
My Question is “You Suck”

If you’ve ever watched Survivor, they have a Tribal Council at the end of each episode, where they discuss things and decide who to vote off the island. In the grand finale, however, they instead discuss whom to give the million dollars. Every previously voted off tribe member gets a chance to ask the two (or three) finalists a question. Miss Alli, from the classic days of Television Without Pity, used to love/hate when someone would step up and use their time to shout, insult, or otherwise berate the finalists. She called that “My Question is you suck.”

Whenever you do support, you will invariably run into people who act exactly like that. If I had a dollar for every time someone left a support ticket with “This sucks!” I wouldn’t need to work anymore. And those people are really annoying, because you want to reply “Well thanks, and over here in the constructive world…” but you absolutely cannot engage them. As the Survivor yahoos quickly learned, feeding the fuel for someone who’s ranting is about as useful as keeping the rain off with those little paper umbrellas you get with fruity drinks.

My question is … this code is crap

Something to keep in mind, Tech Support is not “Customer Service” per se. When someone needs tech support, while they totally need someone to be ‘nice’ to them, they really need someone to fix their problem. Customer Service is all about building a relationship with the customer, figuring out their needs and wants, and basically selling them something. On the other hand, tech support is being told “This is my problem, fix it.” While that certainly happens to people who work at hotel desks (“There’s no hot water…”) it’s the meat and milk of life for anyone who writes and/or maintains software.

To this end, you’re really not ‘servicing’ the customer, nor are you taking time to build a great rapport with them, you’re trying to fix what’s wrong. Certainly doing this provides a service to the customer, but making sure the person comes back (or stays) is often secondary. After all, if we can fix the problem, you’ll come back, right?

When someone just says ‘You suck’ or ‘Your code sucks’ there’s very little you can do about it, if they’re not willing to give you a concrete example of these things. I have, on occasion, replied “Patches welcome! I’m always happy to improve my work.” That’s pretty much the best I can do. When the reply is that I, personally, suck, then I hand it over to anyone else. There’s nothing I can do here, so it’s time to ask someone else to help me out.(If you’re the solo dev, it’s time to cut your losses, say that you’re sorry you can’t help them, and walk away.)

My question is …. this plugin gets one star because it doesn’t work

Mark Jaquith Reviews Code. Credit Mark Jaquith

Everyone hates the ‘review that should have been a support question.’ Invariably we’ll get it. The plugin doesn’t work, screw you. And when we go back to look at the person’s post history, we see never once did they, in a place you can find, ask you ‘How do I make this work?’ It’s frustrating. Now you should keep in mind, on the WordPress.org forums, someone can change their star rating, so the best thing to do here is try and win them back. Kill ’em with a little kindness, point out ‘I would have seen this faster had you…’

But in general, this one is not to terrible to win back. Much of the time, someone who is this lost that they can only find the review location and not the right support places is someone who has a pretty easy to fix issue. Solve it and you’ve got a returning user. A smaller percentage of the time, alas, the problem is someone who really, truly, didn’t read what the plugin does. “This plugin for vegan resources sucks because there’s no bacon!” Not much you can do there except point out “This is by design.”

My question is …. you don’t reply fast enough for me

Today we expect, and often get, instant feedback. We have livechats, we have Twitter and Facebook. We reach out to the people who represent a company (or a TV Show), and we assume there will be some prompt reaction. This is no longer customer ‘service’ but ‘experience.’ The customer’s personal experience will color their feelings about both the product and the people behind it. It’s a large part of why I don’t think pure customer service exists any more, if it ever did, in software.

The problem comes in when you take a weekend off, or an afternoon, because you want to actually have, you know, some time with your family, or go to a movie. Maybe you were just asleep for eight consecutive hours. Either way, it was the worst time in the world for someone else, and they’ve left multiple requests for help. If you’ve ever worked in a ‘traditional’ office, these people are like the guy who emails you a long question, and then calls you and swings by your desk, after IMing you, to make sure you got the email.

In short, they hit every single ‘annoyance’ nerve in a person’s body, all at once, and they do it over and over and over. I tend to want to reach through the monitor and take away their caffeine for a couple days. But until someone invents that for me, I have a couple tactics.

For anything ‘free’ (like WordPress plugins) I tell them that this is a free product I write in my free time, and that means waiting a reasonable time for a reply means waiting 3-5 days, not 3-5 seconds. And then I answer their question as best I can. For the paid stuff, I point out that I missed their email because I had gone home for the day (or ‘had the weekend off’). Usually just that gentle reminder of “some people do work ‘normal’ hours still” gets them off their horse enough to work with. On the rare occasion it doesn’t(I’ve had people tell me that I’m too important to not be available 24/7, which is sweet, but no.) I’ve just ignored their unreasonable demands and concentrated on fixing the problem at hand.

My question is … you don’t know what you’re talking about

Finally there’s the you suck hidden in a peculiar phrasing of basically “you aren’t good enough.” This is not the same as the outright “You suck.” because it’s actually a value judgement. It’s not a dismissive “You’re a meanie poopy head!” sort of claim, it’s a “Your code sucks!” And this sort of comment hurts a lot. People calling you names rarely have any basis to do so, and they’re rarely right. People calling into question your work, however, that cuts to the bone and tends to make us over react.

In defense of people who submit bug reports, much of the time this is not what they mean! Sometimes they say “I think you’re wrong because of XYZ” and it comes across as “You idiot, how could you not possibly know this!” I say this a lot, but text is a really lousy medium for communication of intent. Now. One thing the people who report the bugs really need to remember to do is say “Thank you” when the bug is fixed, or even “I appreciate you taking the time to explain to me why you won’t do XYZ.” Instead, most of what we get is someone saying “I told you! I was right and you were wrong!” I gotta tell you, that never really makes me want to work with you again.

But the real reason this one galls me is that it’s generally said to me after someone has specifically asked me for help on something of I’m somewhat of an expert (or talented tweaker). I’ve had people tell me I don’t know jack about WordPress (pretty sure that’s wrong), or pretty much anything else under the sun. That frustrates me, since you came over here asking me, admitedly a total stranger, for help, and when I gave it you snipped that I’m ignorant.

To these, I actually do point out “You know, you asked me for my help/opinion and I gave it. We can agree to disagree, but you don’t have to be mean about it, since that’s not a good way to get help from a free, volunteer, community.”

Unless of course you’ve hired me, at which point I refund most of your money and cancel the contract.

22 July, 2013
Recovering Your Cape
One of the odder “hacks” out there is one where the person, once they get in, de-frocks your Super Admin on a Multisite. This isn’t always a hack, sometimes it’s just a simple mistake.

To quote my friend Jen Mylo:
1. People give away admin rights like logo-encrusted keychains at a car show and then the new admins abuse the power.
2. Someone who has admin rights deservedly but doesn’t know code makes a mistake.
[…]

Some people make bad decisions about who to give admin roles.
There’s an extra level of problems with making everyone and their pet monkey a super-admin on Multisite. You may think it’s a great thing, because now someone else can add new users, install plugins, edit themes and plugins, and of course, use iframes and PHP and such in widgets.

We run a Multisite at work, and they let me ‘secure it up’ recently. The first thing I did was demote pretty much everyone except five of us to ‘Editor.’ I told them all that I’d done this, and if they found something they couldn’t do, tell me, and I’d fix it. At this point, I’ve changed only three people to Admin, and dropped even more to ‘Author.’ Why? Because they don’t need to have high levels of access to do what they need to do! The admins on the site can tweak theme settings, play with widgets, and add ‘existing users.’ Everyone else? They just write content. Heck, most of them don’t even need to be Editors, but we gave them that level so they could help us copy-edit other posts. Two people complained “I need Super Admin access!” and I gave them my best Enda: NO CAPES.

Limit your admins, and there is less of a chance someone will accidentally remove access from the wrong person.

So now that that’s out of the way, how do you get it back?

Normally, reinstating an admin account is pretty easy. You go in via mySQL, pop open the wp_usermeta table, find your ID, and toss this in for meta_value for wp_capabilities: a:1:{s:13:"administrator";b:1;} That won’t restore all the roles, if you happen to be using Role Scoper, or some other management tool, but if you’ve got that, you can do anything. If you’re using WP-CLI, wp user update 1 --role=administrator (assuming you’re user ID 1).

There’s a sidebar/caveat to this. Sometimes this doesn’t work, and it happens if you change your DB prefix. So normally you have the prefix wp_ and the table wp_options. In that table you have a option named wp_user_roles and everything works. But then you make a new site, and you pick a different DB prefix, maybe you heard it was more secure, or maybe you wanted both tables in the same DB. Either way, now you have wp_wdssrr_options instead, and when you copy over your old options content, no one can log in. It’s because you have to rename that option to wp_wdssrr_user_roles

I just had a site with this problem last week.

On the other hand, getting back Super Admin access is less straightforward, but by no means is it impossible.
1. Go into wp_sitemeta and look for site_admins.
2. In there you will see something like this: a:1:{i:0;s:7:"Ipstenu";}
3. If your userID is ‘superman’ then it would be a:1:{i:0;s:8:"superman";}
Capitalization and stringlength matter. Add one user, and use that to correctly restore power to the others.

Can you do this via WP-CLI? Yes, if you’re on the latest versions. Kind of. You can get a list of super admins via wp network-meta get 1 site_admins and in theory wp network-meta update 1 site_admins USERNAME would work except that the data is serialized. I opened a ticket with WP-CLI, and it’s a ‘plugin territory’ issue right now, so I’ll have to see if I can code it myself.
25 June, 2013
When Your Code Doesn’t Self-Alert…

If you don’t want to read this whole post, there’s a big takeaway for anyone who releases code: Please make sure you have an easy way for people to be notified to a new release.

The Story…

I use WordPress a lot. It’s made me lazy on a lot of things, like version control. It’s also made me incredibly complacent when it comes to updates. You see, WordPress has a massive API system and servers which allow you to get in-app alerts to any needed updates. Click to upgrade and done. It’s second only to Chrome, which just updates.

Now there are pros and cons about automated updates, and some things, like my server software? Hellz no, son, I don’t auto-upgrade that! Yes, I auto-upgrade cPanel and other server tools that I added on, but PHP and Apache and MySQL? No, those are things I have to stop and make damned sure I know what I’m doing. Why? Because they’re not ‘add on’ software, they’re the core functionality of my entire webserver, and if I mess them up, I am up shit-creek.

If you’d asked me last year ‘Should WordPress auto update itself like Chrome?’ I would have shouted no, very loudly. And now here I am, doing it. Personally I’ve been using Gary’s Automatic Updater on all my sites for months now, because I know my WordPress setup is tight. I love the Chrome and Firefox auto updates, because I don’t customize those things ever. While I do customize the hell out of WordPress, I do it smart and I do it right. My code is doing_it_right() and the plugins or themes I add on to my sites are all well vetted and Elf Approved. The same can’t be said for everyone, but after a lot of thinking, I think if WordPress auto-updated, people would have an initial clamor of pain with all the shitty code out there that broke, and then the bad code would Darwin itself right on out of use.

But that’s not the point of this. In my head there’s a difference between ‘core software’ like PHP, and ‘app software’ like WordPress. The lines are clear, they should never be crossed. Auto-Updating works for apps, not for core. And what happens when your app doesn’t even auto-alert for updates? How do you handle updates?

I’ve already mastered using git as a ‘deployment’ tool, and svn has been old hat for me. That means I know how to quickly update my code, but I need to know when to do this.

The Solutions…

There is a light at the end of the tunnel. There are some easy ways you can keep track and, conversely to the devs, make it easy to keep people up to date, and it all starts with the code’s website. You do have a website for your code, right?

Check the website

If there’s a blog, there’s probably an RSS feed. This is really easy, since most (if not all) blog and CMS tools use RSS.

No RSS? No blog? Maybe there’s a mailing list. This is actually my favorite option. I hate email, but I love getting emails for software updates like that. If that’s not your thing, see if the mailing list has an RSS feed. I know people use Google Groups for a cheap mailing list, and if you visit the Groups page and click on the about link (see the image, not the dropdown, the link), you get a whole mess of RSS options!

This only works for public groups, but why would a private group be an announcement list for your app releases anyway? If it’s private, get used to email.

Speaking of mailing lists, MailMan, my list of choice, does not have RSS feeds. It’s the old spavined mule of lists, I know, but for people who love it, check out MailMan-to-RSS.(The irony I feel in writing that, which is the opposite of how I handle things with my post2email plugin, is deep and unfathomable.)

But what about those other guys? You know who I mean, the guys who use GitHub as not just a version control tool but their code host? After all, Github Pages are pretty cool, and free, so why not? Time for a practical example.

My amazing friend Mel made a site for Dashicons. They’re like Genericons for your WP Dashboard, and if you’re using MP6, you’re looking at them now. (Mel pointed out to me she did not make all the icons, only some, but the site is hers, so her I pick on.) The site is awesome. It’s fantastic that people can make sites like that, and you can even put a custom domain on it.

But look at it! No feeds!

Thankfully, Github pages are built on Jekyll, and you can set up feeds. But let’s be frank, if it’s not automatically set up for people, they’re not going to do it. And most people don’t do the ‘blog’ part of their Github page sites either. Now what?

Well thankfully, for anything on GitHub, since most people push releases with tags (note to self…), you can use this for rss: https://github.com/user/project/tags.atom — Sadly, I couldn’t find one for branches.

The Real Answer…

Look, at the end of the day, if you’re releasing public code, it’s incumbent upon you to make a way for your users to be able to find out, easily, when you’ve updated. Expecting them to come to your site and check is not going to work. Making an automated way to push your code, your changelog, and your update notices to people, will put it all in one go for you and make it easy. If, like me, you’re afraid people will end up getting too many alerts, make it a blog post and only do it when you know you’re ready.

Making it easier to get alerts for needed upgrades is going to make everything safer, in the long run. Think of all the security patches people are missing, just because we don’t get notified of them!

Now if you’ll excuse me, I need to sort out how to better use branches and tags.

28 May, 2013