Tag: mailbag

Mailbag: What Plugins Do I Use?

This was actually a bit of a shill from someone I didn’t know, asking to help him with his own ’roundup’ of various experts. I didn’t reply, mostly because I was super busy and favors like this from random people are low on my list of things I’ll ever reply to. But the question is interesting.

Which WordPress plugins do you use most in the following categories: Seo, Social Media, Commenting, Performance, Captcha and Payments.

Answer to all: None.

Seriously, though. The only ‘Social Media’ plugin I use is Jetpack, and that’s just to push my content to Twitter and Facebook reliably. I don’t use any SEO plugins though when I do, I use WordPress SEO because I trust Yoast. Most of the time, my themes handle SEO for me just fine.

Captcha I never use. I won’t. I hate captcha. Captcha isn’t accessible, as I’ve been saying for four years. Similarly I don’t use commenting plugins because I don’t need them, and I like owning my content. When you put up barriers to comments, you get fewer comments.

Performance plugins are a weird area. Yes, I use plugins for that, but it’s got to do with what I installed on my server. I have memcached and ZendOptimizer, so I use a couple things for that. Zach Tollman’s memcached object-cache.php plugin and Batcache. But really most of the work is on the server already having the backend required for those. That’s the same reason I have Google Pagespeed on the server.

Payments… I don’t know how I could answer this. I use Easy Digital Downloads for sales, and I handle payments through Paypal and Stripe right now. But that isn’t so much a plugin question as a who do I trust with my money question. I’d be using them regardless of if I used EDD or not.

Asking me what I use ‘most’ is a very weird question since I use what’s right for the job I’m facing. If that answer is ‘Not WordPress’ then I don’t use WordPress. So with that in mind, I rarely blanket recommend any plugin out there. I listen to people, what they’re asking, what they mean, and how they sound, and I try to recommend based on all to those aspects. There’s rarely one perfect answer for everyone.

If you think I’m joking, read Chris Lema on the perfect WP shopping cart plugin. There are a lot of choices and decisions and options out there, but you’ve got to know what you really need before you make a choice.

Of course for me, when the choice is between two equally well written plugins, I pick the one where I’ve worked with the developers before hand.

26 December, 2014
Mailbag: Can I do it on WP (Legally?)

This one comes from Zara:

I’m about to create a website on wordpress. My website is an escort website. It is adult oriented. The new website would look exactly like my current website […] and I’m considering to build a new website on wp.

Since my friend’s website is built on wp and is escort oriented, plus it was banned by wp, now I’m worried about it all.

Is it allowed to build an escort website on wp?

Yes.

I’ve mentioned it before, that you can use WP for porn because the freedoms of the GPL allow it. More specifically, WordPress states that you can use it for anything you want.

So what’s Zara talking about when she says ‘it was banned by wp’ if that’s true? We’re talking about a couple things here, one is WordPress.org and the other is WordPress.com and yes, it’s a headache.

WordPress.org is the home of the software. WordPress.com is a hosting service that runs nothing but a locked down, managed, WordPress Multisite instance that you can use for free (or pay for add-ons). As a hosting company, WordPress.com has specific rules and bylaws that they restrict their users to. This is, in no way shape or form, a violation of your GPL permissions. They’re not restricting WordPress usage, they’re restricting your usage of their servers and their system.

So yes, Zara, you can use the WordPress software for your escort website, but you need to find a web host who will give you permission to host it. My advice to you is to make sure what you’re doing is legal where you live. Also, make sure it’s legal for your webhost. At DreamHost, I know we allow any website that’s legal in the state of California, which means we host a lot of sites I personally disagree with but will defend their right to publish with my dying breath. Not every website has the same rules, so just ask them if they allow escort sites. They should be able to answer, or pass you on to legal for confirmation.

Good luck!

19 December, 2014
Mailbag: .htaccess Magic with Subdomains and Subfolders
From Ginger:

Hiya, I enjoy your blog and humor within

In case you still do posts from the “mail bag” — I have seen mention of .htaccess on your site and I’m curious how it relates to the subject of redirects. For example, in my day job we have a site that has two ways to access an external support site.

So, we want to redirect: www.example.com/support and support.example.com to the same external support site. In the past, I would go to our host and edit the DNS to redirect on these URLS to the external site. Is that the best way or should I be handling this in the .htaccess file now that we’re on WordPress?

Depends on how lazy I am.

DNS is great because I can just send support.example.com over, but this only works if the external site lets me do that. I can point my domain at tumblr.com all I want, yet until I add my custom domain to their settings, the URL won’t work. This is why your domain mappings in Multisite don’t always work, folks. You have to tell WordPress, the name servers, and the server that the domain lives there. If you can? Super simple for the subdomain, but not for the subfolder.

Which brings us to .htaccess:

Apache 2.2
```
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^example\.com [NC]
RewriteRule ^support(.*)$ http://supporturl.com/ [L,R=301]

RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^support\.example\.com [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*) http://supporturl.com/ [L,R=301]
```
Apache 2.4
```
<If "%{HTTP_HOST} == 'example.com' ">
	RedirectMatch ^support(.*) http://supporturl.com/
</If>

<If "%{HTTP_HOST} == 'support.example.com'">
	RedirectMatch (.*) http://supporturl.com/
</If>
```
Now someone will note that specifying the HTTP_HOST for example.com is silly, but I disagree. This lets me use http://foo.example.com/support/ to redirect somewhere else. I don’t worry about the www part because I always force no-www on all my domains. Saves me steps later.

Oh and I’m glad Ginger likes my humor. I don’t know how to turn it off!
12 November, 2014
Mailbag: Translations
The second hardest thing about translations is trusting the translator.

I sometimes joke that I barely speak English, so when someone said he translated my entire ebook about Multisite into French, I was delighted and scared. While I do kind of understand French, I’m not qualified to translate it, so having someone else do it would be a fantastic offering. But since I can’t translate it, I have no way of knowing how to gauge if they understood my meaning, which is hard enough to figure out in English.

After a while, I decided to tell him that I’d like to see them, but I wasn’t sure if I’d want to put them up online to sell or give away. Of course he was welcome to give them away all he wanted!

The problem isn’t that I trust him, or not, but that I don’t have a failsafe. With coding, I have coworkers who can spot check me. With blog posts I could use an editor, and it’s the same with books. If this was a contracted book, I’d be able to let my publisher find someone we all agree fits the bill. When you’re on your own, it’s a lot harder.

The same goes with my plugins. I don’t actually package anything in my plugins by way of translations. The closest I have is my Varnish Plugin, which has a folder on github for people to store translations. Since they don’t have to be included in core, it’s easy enough for me to say “Use at your own risk.”

With code, there’s a lot more you have to do in order to make your code translatable though. With my books, I just write. With my code, I have to remember to escape properly. Which I nearly never get correct the first time out. With code, you have to remember from the start to write your words in a way that can be translated, and you have to worry every time you change things that it will be broken for everyone on the next update.

It’s chaining, really, to realize I can’t just ‘write’ in my plugin like I do on my blog.

So what’s the question and the answer? Should you translate your work? Maybe. You should always make it translatable, but whether or not you should manage the translations is a really strange question without a perfect answer. Unless you’re fluent in two languages.

I keep the following links bookmarked, just to keep me on track when I start editing any plugin, and I try to work backwards to fix all my old ones, but it’s really slippery.
15 August, 2014
Mailbag: I Don’t Woo, But I Do CPT
A preface to this, I don’t actually use WooCommerce so I can’t give anyone a specific answer to that, but Geovanni asks:

Im in a pinch. I have a woocommercesite and i want to make a part where i can have users who already registered can have their your own URL and page where they can make post. I read a post u made on http://wordpress.org/support/topic/allow-users-to-post-events-on-their-own-page?replies=6 ,but u didnt say anything about how u got it to work or if u have. Can you help me?

This was a post from two years ago, where someone asked the following:

I’m working on a WordPress site that will allow artists to post their own events. I can’t find a plugin that will allow these posts to link up to their own pages. Each user that registers has their own URL and this page has all of their information. I’m trying to make sure that the tour dates posted aren’t ending up on every users page!!

Any help would be greatly appreciated!

I suggested that one could accomplish this with Custom Post Types, which was a theoretical remark, since I didn’t have the details, but when the OP later said “I need everyone to be able to create an event and post it on their own page…” I agreed it would probably be a better fit for Multisite, since they may have more than one of their own events.

So what did I mean about Custom Post Types? Well sometimes the answer is to think about the problem in different ways. Obviously the easiest thing in the world is to tell people ‘their’ page is http://example.com/author/name, and then have them post in a specific category (say… events). Thus all events are in an event group, and everyone has their own page. But I also know users can be a little confused by WordPress and categories, so you have some options here, when it comes to management.

First of all, there are plugins like Restrict Categories, which let you restrict users to a category. That works, but if you don’t want the URLs to have
```
/category/
```
in the slug for just that one thing, you really do need to look at Custom Post Types. That leads us down the road of things like AAM – Advanced Access Manager which will let you make a custom role for ‘Event Manager’ who can perhaps manage all events, and ‘Event Poster’ who can only post.

All this does highlight a flaw/annoyance in WordPress, and that is complex roles. WordPress’s role system is, at once, stupid simple and crazy complex. It’s a total headache to restrict people to specific areas, and in general, I hate having to do it because I find I spend more time messing with that than I do working on the site. At the same time, I dislike giving people more ‘power’ than they need. I can’t make a person a ‘comment moderator’ without giving them access to write/edit posts, for example, which is not a far-fetched wish. You can use plugins, like Disqus, to do that, but that means you’ve offloaded comments, and I don’t like that.

Of course… for the question posited by Geovanni the answer is “Use WordPress Multisite.” Install WordPress, activate Multisite, give the user a site, let them go to town.

That, of course, may not answer all his questions.
8 August, 2014
Mailbag: Playing the Middle

This is from Ben in Minnesota and … It’s not about WordPress as much as learning and support, but here is the meat of his issue:

I’m just learning things. I’m really familiar with Drupal and okay with a vps, but I took over a WP install on a dedicated server and I’m way out of my league! I don’t understand half the questions. They treat me like I should know everything already because I’m experienced and tell me to just ask the vendor. But the hardware scares me and I don’t know how to get the information I need to solve things!

Do you have any advice, besides learning faster?

My least favorite role is when I have to play the middle man between two tech groups. Group A has a problem, so they ask me to ask it of Group B, and I have no familiarity with what the subject is. Happens a hell of a lot, and it exposes the lack of depth of knowledge in specific areas.

I hate it. It makes me feel like I’m stupid, and then when I ask for clarification, I get vague, top-level answers and what I need are examples. Much of this has to do with how I learn best, but the other problem is people have a tacit assumption that I know what the hell they’re talking about, when I clearly do not.

Basically? They’re giving me shitty support based on their preconceived notions about how “everyone” thinks. And yes, it pisses me off and I have been at the point of tears of anger me frustration over this before. I’ve been there, man, and recently too. It’s worse probably because I am clever and can pick things up quickly. They assume I know, or will figure it out, so I get half-assed help.

So. What do I do? Well first I quote them. “My DB guy said this [quote]. Do you need any specific information? I’ll ask him, but I’m not familiar with this topic.” Sadly that tends to net me a pretty generic reply like “Just filter it.” It does make me want to scream, you’re not alone there.

Lately I’ve been stopping them before it gets that far, though. When I’m told “Can you ask Group B about this?” I say “Can you explain like I’m 5, real fast, so I can make sure I ask them the right things and make sure that I don’t have to go back and forth really a million times and bug the hell out of you?” If I already understand a little about it, I may say “I thought that ModSecurity could hook into IP Tables and auto-block people who hammered my login files?” to set the tone of what I did know.

Basically the only path out of ignorance is to explain that you are uneducated in this topic, and while you will learn as fast as you can, you need a little more help than that. If they still won’t help you out, take them aside and ask if you’re doing something wrong, because you need their help in a different way than you’re getting. Be firm. Be up front. Be honest.

Good luck, Ben! And just for some fun, here’s a scene from Office Space:

People skills!

18 July, 2014