Tag: open source

Dr. Jekyll and Ms. Hyde

I like WordPress. I like the community and I like the way I can invite other people in on it. But. I wanted to run a site, a small site, with static content for the most part, no comments, and just the basics. So why not Jekyll? After all, I’m big on self-hosting, and while most people I know seem to be running Jekyll on GitHub, you know me. I want to do it myself, I want to have it all here.

Six drinks later…

My major issue with Jekyll is that the ‘Simple’ directions aren’t obvious the way everyone seems to think they are. I mean, yes, they’re simple, but they lead you to some pretty crazy misconceptions based on how websites and CMSs work, and have worked, for a long time. And given all the posts I’ve read about how terrible WordPress is, my remark on that is: No, Jekyll is not terrible, but it has an audience.

Look, of course WordPress can be terrible. So can your car. It’s all in how you use it, what you add on to it, and what you fuel it with. I have a lot of reasons to use WordPress, and I really like it for many reasons (least of which is if you asked me to explain Jekyll to someone who emails me a PDF of a Word Doc to post on WordPress… Well, yeah, no, it’s not simple.)

Misconception: Where Do I Install Jekyll?

DaFUQ?

Okay… you think “Hey, Jekyll’s running my site so it’s all on Jekyll, right?” Nope! Jekyll is installed on my laptop. It’ll be used to create content that I will deploy to my website. Jekyll generates the webpages. Just bear with me. Yes, it also runs the site, but it doesn’t have to. In fact, it generates all of my pages into a subfolder called _site, which you can actually load as a webpage. If I copied all of that over to a folder, it’d work as is. So option one here is that I could just do that. But that’s not what I’d call ‘friendly’ and it means all my code has to be on the server where a sneaky person could go get it. Part of why Jekyll interested me is that it’s more secure by being a flat site.

Option two is to use a Jekyll ‘front end’ deployer, like Octopress or Prose. Option three was to stop and think “Maybe I just don’t get this and I should start simpler.” It’s very odd to me to have my ‘content’ on a server, but the ‘source’ not there. While if it’s just me running a site, that’s great. But as soon as I have to tell my dad to check code out… Maybe this is a bad idea. I don’t want end-users to have to learn all this. I want to tell them “Write your content. Save it here. Magic.”

Revise: Needs vs Wants

When I get really bogged down in thoughts like this, I step back and ask my self “What are my needs?” That’s similar to asking “What problem am I trying to solve?” but it’s a little broader, as I may not have an actual problem, I may just need a small change.

I’m looking for a product with a small footprint, no comments, a way to subscribe to updates (RSS or email), separate content and design (so my writers don’t mess with the layout), and it needs to have a workflow that does not involve me having to teach svn or git commands to a music major. Oh and it has to be easy for me to upgrade (one click or git pull will do).

Say what you will that git is easy (it is for me, albeit sometimes confusing). It’s not necessary for everyone to learn. I really feel a journalist shouldn’t have to learn to use it in order to write content! Still, after banging my head on this, I finally decided I was making my life too complicated by trying to self host before I understood the actual workflow of the process. So I went one step further back and decided not to self host right now.

KISS: GitPages

Everyone uses GitHub Pages. So fine, so will I. They walk you through the setup, so that’s nice. It was pretty painless to make a repo. But what did that have to do with Jekyll? I can edit everything within GitHub which is nice but I don’t want that. I wanted to learn Jekyll… Scroll to the bottom and there’s a nice graphic saying I can use Jekyll!

And they link to the Jekyll quickstart. Okay, thank you, I can install Jekyll. How do I hook them up? I had to actually Google to find the link to Using Jekyll with Pages and frankly, after reading it… I don’t want to. Oh I did it, but it’s not “simple.” It’s a total pain in the ass. It reminds me of the old MoveableType when you had to fuss with cgi-bin. It’s all manual. And this is fine for a dev, but I don’t want to have to install this on my Dad’s laptop. Did I mention he was on Windows?

So using this for a version controllable, static website, is actually far less tolerable than I wanted it to be. I can use it, I kind of understand it (the whole source folder is confusing me a little…) but it’s not something I could easily roll out to a medium-technical person without some serious training. In fact, I need some serious training to get good at just pushing my content, and when I compare that to WordPress…

I get why people like it, though. The static files alone are pretty cool, but it’s going to be a learning curve.

19 February, 2014
Open Source Olympics

I try never to argue about the ‘spirit’ of the law these days and god help me if I ever consider talking about the spirit of GPL. But I do have a firm belief in the spirit of what Open Source is and how that impacts what we do.

I generally tell people I’m a Socialist and that’s why I love Open Source. It’s also true that I love the Olympics not because I want my country to win (I rarely keep track of medal counts) but because I want to see people exceed their expectations and go higher, faster, stronger. I cheered when the Dutch finally won the shorter length races in speed skating. I was sad when Simon Ammann did not place in ski jumping (I’ve been watching him jump for 16 years!). I was delighted to finally see women’s ski jumping!

But if I wanted to sum up exactly why I love the Olympics so much, this single viral photo sums it up:

If you watched the US broadcast of the men’s cross country finals (individual sprinting – they’re basically doing running on skis, it’s brutal), you saw Anton Gafarov wipe out, or at least part of it. They readily admitted they missed why he fell, but rewound so you could see this poor guy, skiing in his home country, come flying down on his back, behind the other skiiers, and crash into the wall. He lay on the snow in anguish, because he knew he would never get a medal now. He had trained his life for a moment that may never come again, and that hurt.

But, and this is what you didn’t see on NBC, Gafarov got up and kept racing.

And then he fell again, because (as you can see), his ski was broken beyond repair. It would be illegal for him to finish on foot. His race was totally done. In a sport where the difference between first and second is tenths of a second, he was out the moment he fell, but now he wouldn’t even be able to place and would end his Olympic experience disqualified. If you’ve never been a part of a competition where you DQ’d, I promise you that hurts way worse than not placing well.

That’s not where the story ends, though. Go back to that first picture. See the guy on the right side getting him set up with a new ski? That would be Canadian coach Justin Wadsworth.

Wadsworth took new skis out, helped Gafarov put them on, and thus the Russian finished the race (in dead last) to rousing cheers from the crowd. When asked by Canadian news site The Star why he did it, the answer was simple: “It was like watching an animal stuck in a trap. You can’t just sit there and do nothing about it. … I wanted him to have dignity as he crossed the finish line.”

We love to say that the Olympics are about overcoming adversity and doing amazing things, but much of Olympic spirit is inclusion and helping others. It’s never ‘us versus them’ but ‘look at how cool humans are.’ And to me, that’s what I mean when I talk about the Spirit of Open Source.

Open Source is about people creating amazing things in an open environment, without fear of restrictions. It’s giving incredible freedom to let the art of code shine through the function, and it allows for astounding advancements because of that. But it’s also about making things better by doing it together, and by enabling the next guy to take your work and do more.

If we see someone who has a need, we try to meet it. Not always for those wants (like I’d love a new iPad and laptop, but I don’t need them), but when someone’s in a massive car accident, or loses a job, or wants to go to an event and can’t afford it, we move heaven and earth.

Open Source would bring Gafarov a ski.

14 February, 2014
Why Does The WordPress Background Auto-Upgrade Work?

Way back in the stone ages I wrote an explanation as to why the WordPress Upgrade didn’t work all the time. In that post, I pointed out that servers and your installs are special snowflakes and not all the same, and that’s why an upgrade doesn’t work all the time. I’m amused that no one pointed out to me that stance (one which I still maintain by the way) seems contradictory to my proclamation that we should love the built-in updater as of WordPress 3.7.

Allow me to challenge myself.

Your server, with your install and your plugins and theme and tweaks, is still a special snowflake.

The background updates for WordPress keep this in mind.

Oh, I have to go further into this? Fine. The reason the updates are restricted to just minor, security/maintenance, updates is that, in general, they do not cause the problems people experienced 2010. It’s been three years. We’re smarter, we learned a lot, and most importantly, if the problem in 2010 showed up again, WordPress would not to install. I heard the sounds of brakes screeching. Let me explain. We want WordPress to not install itself if it can’t. We’re not defining that as a ‘failure’ because while your install did fail to upgrade, your site didn’t break.

Let’s get the down low from the man himself:

All "Update Now" clicks to WordPress 3.7.1 have a 99.75% success rate. That 0.25% is mostly just temporary download failures.

— Andrew Nacin (@nacin) October 30, 2013

About 24,000 auto updates have taken place without any problems. Half of all installs are now being told to update as the rollout continues.

— Andrew Nacin (@nacin) October 30, 2013

Oh no! After 29,000 auto updates to 3.7.1, one site had a critical error. Haha just kidding, the updater simply rolled the site back to 3.7.

— Andrew Nacin (@nacin) October 30, 2013

3.7.1’s fixes were written in such a way to ensure a working site despite any failed file copies. So even a critical failure isn’t critical.

— Andrew Nacin (@nacin) October 30, 2013

Those seem pretty straight forward. WordPress 3.7.1 was made so that a failure to update didn’t break your site, because if it couldn’t apply the install, it would rollback seamlessly to 3.7 without you noticing. Well, except for the email you got to say “Hey, this didn’t work, man. Sorry.”

Why does this work and the major upgrade does not?

That’s the real question, isn’t it? Why are we having such a monumental success for 3.7 to 3.7.1, where we didn’t from 3.6 to 3.7? Actually, we did, but you’re not comparing the right things.

First of all, the 3.6 to 3.7 upgrade is one of the more stable ones we’ve had in a while. 2.9 to 3.0 was the birth of my OMGWTFBBQ!!! post in the forums (and the catalyst for why I’m working for DreamHost). It was a major overhaul, with a lot of changes, and a lot of complicated tweaks. Let’s be frank, it was a re-write of a crap-ton of modules, and it was just going to break things. WPMU folded into WordPress and changed to Multisite? Yikes! But as time has moved on, I’ve been reporting more and more “Everything’s okay in the forums.” This does not mean everyone is perfectly happy and perfectly safe, and the upgrades were a 100% success. We have the same type of complaints as we always have. Themes and plugins were not robustly tested enough with the new release, so they broke when the upgrade happened. This is (currently) unavoidable.

So again, why is this working so well?

Because the core team who wrote the update script learned from their mistakes in the past. The changes made in WordPress may be bold and large, but they’re also done carefully. Instead of just saying ‘What’s done gets into the new version,’ 3.7 took the ‘feature teams’ trend started a few releases back to the next level. Only if the feature was done-done did it get into 3.7. This meant that while we did not have a major ‘feature’ this release (like we did with the Media Release in 3.5), we had the opportunity to make each feature rock solid on it’s own. And this worked better than many expected because of “features as plugins.”

While some aspects of core have to be developed in core, others begin their lives as plugins. Like the password-strength improvements and auto-upgrades were both plugins before they were added to core. Also if you look at 3.8, pretty much every major feature that can be a plugin is one. This means that one feature, a new post editor, didn’t make it because right now it’s not ready. Having things be plugins also lets more people test them, by installing the plugin without having to upgrade to a beta version of WordPress!

Finally, and this is really important, not everyone gets upgraded at the same time. Within 24 hours of the release of WordPress 3.7.1, only 75% of English installs were updated. This was done to keep an eye out for load issues on WordPress.org’s boxes, but also on shared webservers. Which by the way are doing just fine. As we go forward, Nacin’s said he expects this to be sped up, especially for a 100% security release.

How does it work? Glad you asked! The best explanation I got at this was over beer with Nacin, and sold me. At 7am and 7pm your site pings WordPress.org to see if there are updates. When this happens, your URL is hashed into MD5. Then the first three letters of that is converted to a base 10 number (MD5 being based on base 16, which doesn’t do you any good unless you have 6 extra fingers) and that’s used to decide if you get an update or not. The cool part of this is that it can be used to push to only one out of four thousand sites.

I know this is all probably sounding like fan service. Like I can’t see anything wrong with this. Nothing is perfect. I’m well aware that things can break. I’m well aware there are possibilities like WP being DNS highjacked, or a plugin circumventing the updater. But. If the DNS is jacked, the API just won’t work unless the jacker has a duplicate that works. And the evil plugin would kind of have to do the same thing, or they would only be able to impact you when a natural upgrade occurred. And neither of those are actually related to background updates. They could have happened at any time in the past. They could happen tomorrow.

Why do the upgrades work?

Because WordPress grew up.

And that’s pretty cool.

4 December, 2013
Give Back Or Die

One of the things I hate in the world is people who don’t give back.

I call myself a software socialist because I strongly believe in giving back to the things that make me successful.(This is, in no way, a blanket approval of everything Socalist. Snarky political comments may be deleted.) This is why I give back to WordPress, spend so much time on it, and so on and so forth. Thus, it’s logical (or at least internally consistant) when I say that the part about WordPress that I hate is people who take and never reciprocate. More than this just being a pet peeve, though, people who do this with Open Source code are biting the hands that feed them, and it’s terribly frustrating to watch.

Look. You get this totally awesome software for free. People volunteer (sometimes we’re compensated, sometimes not) to make it better, safer, more secure. And we give these updates, again for free, back to you to make a living from. That gives all of us ownership in the software and a responsibility that I see a lot of people dropping the ball on.

So let me state this for the record: If you use a product that is free that enables you to make your living, and you do not give back in some way, you annoy me.

I’m going to use Mediawiki as an example here. I cut my teeth on it, which is something few of you know. I’ve been using it longer than WordPress, as a self-hosted Wiki install. I learned about caching tools not because of WP, but from Mediawiki. I learned about config files and extensions, and why you never edit core files, and theming all from Mediawiki. It’s safe to say that had it not been for my foray into that world, I’d never ever have been the WordPress Guru I am today.

At the same time, I have never once given a single line of code back to Mediawiki. I’ve probably reported no more than 5 bugs in my lifetime, and it’s not because they don’t exist. I actually do know how to do more than just theme in Mediawiki, I know how to trace a bug and fix it, but given my use-case of it it’s been pretty rare that I’ve even had to report it, because every time I’ve found it already handled in the next release.

By the way, the whole reason I mastered Git? Mediawiki. I needed an easy way to upgrade and keep up with a trunk release that fixed a critical bug for me.

But if I don’t give back code, do I annoy myself? Nope! Much like WordPress has a WordPress Foundation, Mediawiki has a Wikimedia Foundation. And yes, I donate money.

And this is my point. We’ve already proven that sponsored software can work. At the time I wrote this, Aaron Jorbin’s charge to raise money so he could work on Post Formats was a couple hundred from goal. I’m confident that by the time this is posted, it’ll be met. (I’m also confident the Indians will sweep the White Sox, so Aaron, you can do your ten support tickets for Post Formats if you want. If they lose, I’ll patch something for your plugin.)

The point is simple. Giving back is not just code. I talked about this at WordCamp Portland, and I talk about it all the time. You don’t have to code, or file bug reports, all you have to do is be here and do something for the community at large. Heck, if you want to help clean up after a meetup? You gave back!

So please, don’t be greedy. Give back to open source. Don’t just take and take and then complain it’s not everything and more. Do something, anything, that helps someone else. Even if you’re doing it altruistically, you’re not living in a vacuum.

26 September, 2013
To Fork Or Not To Fork

Sometimes the question you have to ask yourself is if you should fork. With a plugin, this is a fairly easy conversation. You want functionality, the original author doesn’t, you fork. But when you look at a theme, you start getting into messier territory.

In many ways, a theme is ‘simpler’ than a plugin. Theme devs, don’t shoot me! What I mean is that a plugin can be or do anything, but a theme is always a theme. While it may change how your site looks in amazing ways (and I am constantly in envy of people who can visualize like that), it really is just a theme. This is why reviewing themes is easier to monitor and manage than plugins. But that’s another conversation. The point here is that when you want to extend a theme, you make a child theme. Done.

What happens when you’re already using a child theme, though? StudioPress, a theme shop I love, makes child themes and sells those. This site is using a child theme, though it’s currently one of my own devising. Previously, it was using a child theme called Streamline, however, and it had a lot of changes.

So when do you make a child theme, and when do you extend it in other ways? It really depends on what you’re doing. While I sat and tried to figure out where my personal breakpoints were, I realized that since the best themes know they are a theme, and not a plugin, it was really easy. A great theme lets you seamlessly use a plugin to add in functionality. They may even tell you what the best ones are. Recently, Coen Jacobs wrote about how good themes never bundle plugins and he’s right. A plugin is a plugin, a theme is a theme. Keep ’em separate, keep ’em safe.

I’ve done it in three different ways for three different sites, and I’ll explain my rational below.

The Simple

One site is simple. Every ounce of functionality I needed, and more, was in the core code of StudioPress, not even a child theme was needed. All I wanted was to change some colors and add in a couple CPTs and shortcodes. That was easily done via Jetpack, which has a CSS editor, and a couple plugins. Actually, 99% was the CSS, once I sat down and looked at it. All the weird stuff was normal plugins.

Sometimes simple is a teeny bit complicated, and when that happens, I may make a custom mu-plugin or two, but in general, not so much needed unless I want a Custom Post Type. And anyway, I never put a CPT in my theme if I can help it.

The Complicated

On the other hand, one site is hella complex. I found a theme I really, really, liked. Almost. And worse, this was a child theme. It was exactly what I was afraid of. There was no way I would get what I wanted out of this theme unless I edited the functions.php file, a lot of the CSS, and a ton of the images. Could I still have done this via CSS and a couple plugins? No. Well, the CSS yes, but not the code. I had need for some crazy functions, a total re-write of comments, and the list went on.

In this case, I forked. I ripped out the small amount I never wanted. I added in the medium amount I did want. I directly edited the theme’s CSS, added in a post template, and changed all the images to my chose color. I even added in a different font. Could I have re-written from scratch? Of course, but the theme had 90% of what I already wanted to do.

There actually is a step before forking, and that would be using plugins. I know I mentioned plugins before, with the simple themes, but actually most theme frameworks are extra special. They often have custom plugins like Simple Hooks, which fundamentally lets me do everything I might do in a functions.php file for that theme. This means most of the time, I don’t fork. But. This theme really was so complex that I needed more than just the simple hooks. Genesis Complex Hooks may have done it, or another plugin to make a transient functions.php (ala CSS editing). And that would have done it except for when I wanted to change a lot of images, add in JS, and then a custom page template …

Well you see how it goes. The point here, however, is that I sat and thought about it, studied my setup, and made a long term decision. Originally I was using the plugin way, but when it stopped being extendable, I decided to do this, and I regret nothing.

The Original

The last option I had was I theme I kind of liked, but it was old. It was pre-HTML5, it didn’t have microformats, but more-over, it wasn’t aging as well as I would have liked. I made a list of what I liked about it, what I didn’t, and what I really wanted. While the list was short, it was also clearly not going to just be CSS. I wanted a custom front page, an extra page template, images, and Genericons built in. In short, I wanted this theme to be something that could carry me onward, regardless of a plugin, even one I wrote.

I have not made my own, 100% from scratch, child-theme in a long while, and this one may not really count since I was designing it to look like something else. This took me an afternoon to bang out the basics, and a couple days of minor fixes here and there to perfect them. Release and iterate, as they say. Certainly, I could have taken someone else’s theme, but it was going to be a surprising amount of work to do that. Instead, I made a list of my needed features and my desired options, and went to town. It’s still a pretty simple child-theme (which speaks well to the inherent extensibility of the parent), but now it’s mine, and it’s easy to extend it and expand it.

The Rest…

What about you? What do you think about when deciding how to handle a theme that needs changing?

17 June, 2013
Not RSS 2 Email
Back in 2011, I made an RSS powered email list using rss2email. The last new version was released that year, and while the last two years have worked perfectly well, there’s one small problem. The developer appears to be done with it. This happens, and the beauty of open source is that people can pick up the code, fork it, and carry on. The annoyance is that sometimes the new coders do things that break it all for you. In this case, the running fork of rss2email uses Python 3.2 or higher.

If you’re using Python 3.2+, grab rss2email the new version and off you go! But if, like me, you’re on a server that doesn’t come with that version of Python, you can start swearing. This is not something you can just upgrade, either as Daniel Eriksson explains how to do this on CentOS 6 (my flavor). Many different flavors of Linux use the old 2.x branch of Python, and there are no plans I’ve seen to upgrade any time soon.

Now I’m faced with a dilema. Do I mess around and upgrade on my own, or do I find another answer. You know I went with option B, right?

I sat and thought really hard about what I, personally, needed this to do. This is a key component to any code you’re going to write. Make sure you know what you need. Let’s break things down:

Needs
- Email to be sent to a specific address automatically when there’s a new post.
- No email sent on pages or CPTs
- Post ‘excerpt’ is message content
Wants
- Change ‘to’ email on the fly.
- Select full post or post excerpt in email
- Customize ‘from’ email address
Dream Future
- Ability to say “no, not this post”
- Customize email message
- Allow options for different post types to get emailed
That’s pretty simple, isn’t it? It’s clear cut what I need, what I want, and what I’d like to have if I have time. Not every project is this simple, but today it is.

I actually knew how to do my ‘needs’ already, but as soon as I tested it I found I had to expand on what I meant by ‘when there’s a new post.’ If I hooked into the publish_post action, the email got sent every time a post was updated too. This lead me down to Notifly, which emails a list of people for every post and comment, but not post updates. That gave me the magic of transition_post_status, which solved that first problem.

At this point, the question became “Why not just use Notifly?” The first problem I had was that it sent out emails for comments too, with no easy way to turn that off. I could have forked, and I started looking into that when I ran into problem two, which was I couldn’t change the ‘from’ email. This was something that became a bigger issue later, when I realized I needed to be able to change the from email to work better with restrictions on certain hosts and with certain mailing lists. I could still edit the plugin, but I looked at what that plugin did and what I needed and wanted. Editing Notifly to do what I wanted would mean overcomplicating it and adding a lot more options. I could fork it, but I’d be stripping everything out and rewriting if I did that, so I decided to carry forward with my own thing. I would say the plugins are similar, cousins, but approach the goal in different ways. Semantics, I know.

Once I mastered only emailing on post publish, I had to tell it not to email on non-posts. No emails being sent on CPTs and pages was easy and I could have used is_post_type() and checked for posts, but I decided to use get_page(), because that let me expand on some other features later. This was new to me, but since I wanted to use the post excerpt, this was going to be, bar none, the fastest way to pull that in.

While I love being able to read whole posts in my RSS reader, I lose a lot with it, in regards to formatting. For the site I desired to run this on, the layout is a huge thing. On top of that, thanks to some idiots, I had to turn on hotlink protection, lest they crash my server again. Also I use a lot of embedded media (HTML5 video, twitter, etc). That means the ‘whole’ post generally looks like crap. So for every single post, I custom craft an excerpt. And this is why get_page() was awesome, because I could use that to pull the excerpt.

The default WordPress emails are sent from ‘wordpress@yourdomain.com’ with the name ‘WordPress’ and while that’s great, I wanted mine to be sent from ‘Blogname’ (the email address was fine, I’ll just add it to the email list as a moderator). That changed my ‘want’ of being able to customize the from info into a ‘need’ but it was also pretty easy to do.

If I was only going to use this code on one site forever and ever, I’d probably leave it at this. But … I know I’ll want to use this around other places. I started by looking at my ‘wants’ and put those in as well.

So what did I end up with?

Post2Email

This is a simple WordPress plugin that lets you set a to email, a from email, and a from ‘name’. It uses the RSS settings to determine if your email body is the full text or the excerpt. It only emails on posts, not pages or CPTs, and not for private posts. You can only set one email because of reasons, first being I only need to send to one address, but second is that I really hate when people send me emails I don’t want or need. Limiting the number of emails you can send to will help that. It also helps you not piss off your webhost by spamming people. Seriously. You use my plugin to spam people, I will hurt you.

What about my dream features? Handling the different post types means using get_post_types(), which isn’t horrible. In theory it’s just a check ‘If the option for that post type isn’t checked, fail out.’ It’s not something I need, and I really don’t feel like auto-emails for everything is a good idea (pages and CPTs are not posts!), so I’m going to wait and see if this is a need for people.

Flagging per post I have no idea how to do, since I don’t yet know how to put a custom post option like that per-post and check it on publish. Yet. Since public posts are public, I think that it’s fine having it email on all public posts. Opting out like that is not for me, but if enough folks come up with it, I’ll consider it because it’s a good excuse to learn something new.

Customizing the message is easy and when I went back in to fiddle with internationalization and proper content serialization, I added it in. I also went and used wp_parse_args to remove setting the defaults in the database, and make it easier for me to add more options in later.
22 May, 2013