Tag: plugins

Why CDN Media Needs a Plugin
I wanted to write a blog post for work (something I try to do once a month) so I thought “I should write about using a CDN for images. I wonder if you can do this without a plugin…”

One hour later, and 1200 words, the answer is no. You cannot.

My initial goal was to move media files (and only the media) from http://example.com/wp-content/uploads/ to http://static.example.com/wordpress/ on DreamObjects. I’ve written a plugin that does that, but to my frustration, I found you cannot do this without a plugin for one incredibly simple reason.

But before the big reveal, let’s break down, in simple terms, what I would actually need to do in order to move the uploads. My two assumptions are that I already have a WordPress powered site (check) and I already have DreamObjects (check)
1. Setup a bucket on DreamObjects (or AWS whatever) to house my images, and give it a CDN alias.
2. Copy all the images to the bucket.
3. Change the Upload URL to http://static.example.com/wordpress/ (my CDN alias for the bucket).
4. Edit all posts and GUIDs to the new URL.
The thing is, I can actually do all of that!

Setup a Bucket on DreamObjects

Log in to your Panel, click on Cloud, go to DreamObjects, and create a new bucket in DreamObjects. I called my domain-static because that’s easy for me to remember. Static content lives here. Once you have your bucket, click on the “Change Settings” link and add an alias of “static” to the domain you’re hosting all this on (example.com in this example).

You can name your alias anything you want. I just picked static because I knew I wanted my URLs for images to be http://static.example.com/wordpress/2016/01/happynew.jpg and this makes it simple. I like to leave my CDN available for more than just WordPress, and doing this will let me have more folders like wiki or gallery.

Next, scroll down to “DreamSpeed CDN” and turn on CDN Support. You’ll notice that tells you a special URL for CDN:

Connect to the accelerated DreamSpeed CDN version of this bucket at: examplecom-uploads.objects-us-east-1.dream.io

Don’t worry! You can use your custom URL too. You don’t have to, but most of us want to, to feel special. In order to use your custom alias that we just made, scroll up a little and check the box for ‘CDN’ on your alias. Press save and you’re good to go!

Copy all the Images

Set the bucket public first!

Just trust me, here. Okay? Good. Set the bucket public and then upload all the images. I used Transmit. Cyberduck also works.

Change the Upload URL

This part was scary.

We need a moment of history first. Up until WordPress 3.5 this was actually pretty easy to do. You went to your media page and you changed things. As of 3.5, WordPress decided that this was more trouble than it was worth. Too many people were accidentally doing silly things, breaking their sites, and it was too dangerous. So they removed the part of the screen that let you change this.

I have issues with this, since for what I want to do, it makes it a hassle. But given the flaw in my great plan, I recognize the change as one that protects people who know less than I do.

Using a plugin to restore this missing setting would be the easiest on many levels. And there are a few plugins that do this but I like Upload Url and Path Enabler. It’s simple and to the point.

Of course, I love wp-cli and we have it on all our servers at DreamHost, so this command is similarly awesome:
```
wp option set upload_url_path http://static.example.com/wordpress
```
The last option for this is the secret WordPress page called “All Settings” — This is hands down the most powerful and dangerous page in all of WordPress. It lists all your options and settings that you have in the database. And yes, you can edit many of them in your browser at http://example.com/wp-admin/options.php

Go ahead. Take a look. It lists a lot of things, most of which you should never, ever, ever, touch. If you were going to use this, search for upload_url_path, change the value from empty to http://static.example.com/wordpress, and press save.

Edit All Your Posts

This is a sucky part. You have to edit all your posts now to move the existing images. This is because those changes you made are only for images going forward. Which is really cool and means you didn’t break anything so far. But WordPress hardcodes the paths to images in your posts (for many reasons) so you need to change all of them.

If you know how to use the command line, this is actually really easy:

wp search-replace http://example.com/wp-content/uploads/ http://static.example.com/wordpress/

Run that command and WP-CLI will magically fix all your posts.

If you don’t want to use the command line, I recommend Velvet Blues Update URLs.

Done!

And to be clear on things, this worked perfectly. My media library showed properly, all my images showed, and everything looked perfect. So I decided to run some basic tests and upload new images…. and that’s where my house of cards fell apart.

You cannot save files to another server.

Actually You Can… if you sudo

Now I have to tell you something. I lied. You totally can do this. The problem is that it’s hard and requires mounting your bucket as a local filesystem so that it would be available via the file-path of the server. You see, you could save files to /folder/location/wordpress/ anywhere on the server. I save mine to /home/user/public_html/static/ on one set up, and I have a static domain (domain-static.com) that runs from that folder.

What that means if I had a location I could access, I could tell WordPress to save there, making it ‘local’ enough to trick it. You can do this with tools like s3fs-fuse, however they’re incredibly complicated and weird for the layman. And that right there was my problem.

If you’re trying to present something as ‘Without a plugin’ then you don’t want to make the tradeoff be ‘..but with sudo access to a VPS.’ That’s unreasonable.

And it’s why, right now, if you want to use a CDN for your media in WordPress, use a plugin.
20 January, 2016
Say Thank You Publicly and Be a Better Coder

Takayuki Miyoshi is one of the best developers for WordPress you probably don’t know about. Miyoshi-san is quiet, thoughtful, and had written a handful of plugins you probably do know. Like Contact Form 7. He’s also written a wonderful multilanguage plugin called Bogo.

He gave his very first presentation in English about why he uses free plugins. Miyoshi-san’s reasoning is plain and simple. By giving back to WordPress and open-sourcing the code, you have a greater chance of people helping you make your code better. More people will find bugs, more people will help you fix, more people will use it, and things will be made better for everyone.

This is much the same idea as Pippin Williamson has about his open source philosophy. Now Pippin is pretty upfront that he thinks you should open source your plugins. And he’s got some strong views on supporting your site projects (and the responsibility there in). But he also mentioned once that he supports putting premium (i.e. paywall’d) products on Github.

For free.

That’s right. He said you can totally put your code up on Github for anyone to download or edit or fork.

I thought about it for a moment, and how open and honest Pippin has always been with his code, and how some of his early WordPress code was not the greatest. Yes, I have been around WordPress long enough that some of the people I think of as being ‘The Real Shit’ about coding for WP were pretty bad. Maybe not as bad as I was when I started, maybe they were. My point is that Pippin, like everyone else, started out as a beginner. And some of his beginner code was bad, like everyone else’s.

Would Pippin be as good a programmer as he is today without open source and without people giving him code corrections and suggestions?

I think not.

Furthermore, I don’t think that you’re going to lose any money here. The intersection of people who would both buy your plugin and are technically capable of using Github to install plugins is pretty small. I say this as someone who understands well the desire of people to get things ‘free’ from the internet and the seriousness of customers. If you make it easy for someone to buy your products (and in the case of WordPress, get updates for it), people will pay you. Because they like convenience. Remember the tale of Oatmeal vs HBO. If you stop people from being able to get your product easily, they just won’t.

Most people are afraid of monetary loss, which I get. But you have to rethink things. First of all, most people won’t use Github. They won’t like not getting security updates, for one. And if you present Github as a technical place, they won’t use it. Done. Secondly, I happily bought the Person of Interest DVDs once Netflix got punched by (I presume) WGN on re-broadcast rights and couldn’t show me Season 4 before Season 5 airs. I get the added bonus of watching it on my Blu-Ray player, in super ultra HD. This behavior is NORMAL. Amazon made it easy for me to get what I wanted, and now I own it and if the Internet is out, well I’ll watch Root and Shaw and the Machine all day.

And there’s something else to consider. The people who would use Github to get something for free are the folks who wouldn’t have paid in the first place. You’re losing money that you’d never have. To help explain this, I’ve made a little Venn Diagram for you, to show you how small this intersection is:

I’m serious here. This is non-mathematical but based on my allegorical experiences of years in support be it free or paid. This is coming from someone who lives and breathes WordPress plugins. If you make it easy for them to pay, you will not lose money by putting the code up in a way for other developers to submit pull requests. That small sliver of green, the people who can use Git and would still pay you, those are your contributors. Those are the people you want. Because Open Source Code means more eyes, and more eyes means more reviews, and more reviews means better code.

Everyone wins.

And like Pippin and Miyoshi-san, I think that having your code available for others means I may learn new things and become a better developer. When I say ‘pull requests welcome’ what I mean is ‘teach me what you know, I love to learn!’ Even if I say “No, I don’t want to add that feature” trust me that your lesson was welcome and absorbed.

When I went to WordCamp Tokyo, I had the intention of seeking Miyoshi-san out to tell him how much I like Bogo. That it solved a problem for me. That it just worked. That the code was good. Miyoshi-san also wanted to tell me thank you for the things I’ve done for him.

It’s possible we both got a little teary eyed.

And he and I agree on the big things. Make your code available for others to review and comment on and get pull requests. It will make you better.

30 November, 2015
New Plugin: @Reply Two

This blog has a cool trick in the comments section. The ‘reply’ link in comments will auto-generate your reply starting with “@person: ” and it does that with my plugin @Reply Two.

The name is a pun because it’s a fork of the plugin @Reply (which has the slug reply-to), but it also has a ‘reply to’ feature (two … to … right?). I strip-mined the original and made sure it worked on the modern versions of WordPress. I made sure it looked good. And then I added in a feature I wanted, which was to allow for a way to see parent comments on the admin dashboard.

That is, if you go look at a comment on the dashboard, you’ll see a little arrow that says “Show Parent Comment (15 words):” (or however many words). It strips out all HTML, so it’s a pretty accurate count. I wouldn’t want to use it on a site with a lot of really, really long comments where everyone was always replying to each other. It would make the comments page really slow to load.

Stephen Cronin’s Show Parent Comment does the same thing there. His uses JS, and mine uses html5 with details-shim for fallback. Except for IE8. I hate IE8.

I forked the plugin almost two years ago but I had it irregularly updated until Jeff posted about his experiences moderating comments on WP Tavern.

The sad truth is that you can’t automate ‘enough’ of what makes moderating a pain in the ass. You can’t make it faster because it requires a human to read and pay attention to what they’ve read and process what it means. The part of the work that takes all the time is the part of the work that won’t be possible to teach a machine to do until we invent an AI.

There’s a reason why spam-trapping isn’t perfect. While we have gotten pretty good about it, things will always get caught incorrectly, or let through when it should have been blocked. Why? Well we don’t yet have a way to scan someone for the intent in their heart. Metaphysics aside, we can’t find the answer in the soul of the person beside us.

What we can do is make it easier for humans to look at a thing and go “Wait a second, that isn’t right!” Humans are generally good at that. We know what we’re ‘used’ to seeing and what we’re not. Hopefully that’s what @Reply Two does. Pun and all.

9 October, 2015
Mailbag: Curbing Comments By Count

Someone had a rant in my mailbox about my strong stance on comment moderation, which can be distilled to this question:

I noticed you really have strong opinions on comment moderation. Do you use anything other than bad words to flag for moderation or outright block?

Sure do!

I’m very careful about ‘bad words’ since ‘anal’ will also pick up ‘canal’ and I only moderate for for things that are generally only used as a pejorative. Example? Okay, I have ‘dyke’ and ‘kike’ in my mod list. The first one I get called a lot. Still. The second has fallen out of favor. But because people have a remarkable talent to say words with the sole intent to be hurtful, even under the veneer of “I was just being funny, stop being so sensitive!” I have cherry-picked the popular ones on my sites and tossed them into moderation.

The only thing I blacklist are people. People’s emails (and user names sometimes) go into the blacklist. That’s why I wrote Sitewide Comment Control, I’m able to blacklist people from the whole network easily. But I only use this for people. People should be blacklisted when they prove themselves to be untrainable.

That leaves one thing up in the air and that’s moderation. You have three choices with default WordPress: Moderate all, moderate un-approved, moderate none.

I have “moderate un-approved” which means I have to manually approve all first time comments. To add on to that, I use Comment Probation in order to restrict people I’m not entirely sure about.

And finally, I moderate by length.

I month ago, I mentioned on Twitter that I was playing with an idea to have my comments moderated by length. If a comment was over X words long, it should be flagged as needing approval before showing.

Caspar Hübinger, in the time it took me to get a cup of coffee, wrote Comment Moderation by Word Count. I made one, small, patch to it, and I’m using it now.

This simple WordPress plugin will send any comment that would otherwise be approved automatically by WordPress to the moderation queue if it contains more than a given number of words.

The theory I have is this: If your comment is over a certain length, you really may want to consider making it a rebuttal blog post of your own. My limit is currently set to 250 words here, which is half a page of content.

My one change was this:

If current_user_can( 'edit_posts' ) then they should be able to leave a comment of any length without moderation.

My theory here was that admins and editors are trusted users.

And now you know!

18 September, 2015
Mailbag: Chocolate Cake is a Need
Adrian in Florida has a long one! I’m going to break it up.

I watched your presentation about “don’t use WP MU” have decided I shouldn’t use it but wanted to ask your advice on some other things. First I want to start by pointing out re the presentation:

• I noticed that for the Wordpress.com network sites I noticed the WP toolbar does show on the sites giving them away as network sites except for one, Gigaom (perhaps there is a way to remove it?)

• For some of us chocolate cake is a need, not a want.

No, the cake is a want. And I use that example for a reason. We can joke all we want about how we need the cake, but fact is this: We need food. We want treats. If we can be clear in our hearts about needs versus wants, webdev is much simpler. I don’t need coffee. I like it. I can live without it. I don’t want to and choose not to. I can blog without WordPress. I don’t want to. I choose not to. It’s very important to be clear on needs and wants and choices in life in general.

As for turning off the .com toolbar on Gigaom, I noticed when I visit there’s a blip where it shows the space for the toolbar and then it’s gone. So that suggests it’s CSS fixing itself. But the answer is “They’re a VIP customer and probably paid out the nose for that.”

1. I just want to learn one theme/framework to make websites with and not change. I had already paid for Elegant Themes to get Divi which is supposed to be customizable and seems to have good video tutorials, before I saw your recommendation for Studiopress. I don’t know how to tell if I should scrap Divi and pay up again for Studiopress. Would you?

I like Studiopress a great deal. It’s secure, it’s stable, it’s updated responsibly and reasonable, and Andrea Rennick is one of my BFFs. Divi I dislike because of how they handle sessions. But whichever you use is up to you. If you want a free theme to start with, I’d pick up Theme Hybrid. Justin’s code is second to none.

2. I want to be able to make each page in my Wordpress site show up under its own subdomain. I’ve tried a few plugs like “page links to” which doesn’t work. I saw that there are some plugins that do this for categories. Do you know a plugin that enable each page resolve to a subdomain otherwise do you recommend one of the category plugins over another?

This stems from his URL design which is page.example.com and … I just wouldn’t. It’s a waste of time and effort and locks you into a categorization that will be insane to unroll later.

Now as a category that’s less weird and you can try one of these plugins:
- https://wordpress.org/plugins/subdomains/
- https://wordpress.org/plugins/main-category-as-subdomain/
- https://wordpress.org/plugins/wp-subdomains-revisited/
I still wouldn’t use Multisite unless you really enjoy logging into a separate site for each post and not having an easy way to cross reference.

3. Is there a plugin out there that allows different people to receive ad revenue for their posts? We have two different writers for one website, each should get ad revenue related to each’s own posts on the same website.

This is actually why I bothered to answer. This is a cool question and I had no idea at all when I first read it.

Turns out, yes you totally can have separate ads per author. If you’re using Google AdSense (you didn’t say), then try Multi Author Adense, which looks like you could set the code per author. There’s also Revenue Share which may be a little simpler.

Good luck!
11 September, 2015
Mailbag: Finding A Rogue WordPress Setting
After helping someone track down a weird WordPress setting, he asked the logical question:

How did you even find that!?

The issue was that a person was missing the menu option to edit their themes. I asked if they were also missing the menu option for editing plugins. As soon as he said yes, I knew it had to be the define to disable the plugin and theme editor:

define( 'DISALLOW_FILE_EDIT', true );

That literally says “No editing files!” So we looked first in the wp-config.php file for it and came up empty. Now as much as we yell at people for editing functions.php or at themes for creating a mess of settings that aren’t needed, I knew the fastest way to find it was this:
```
$ grep -R 'DISALLOW_FILE_EDIT' ./wp-content/
```
And as expected, that gave me a file: ./wp-content/plugins/ninjafirewall/lib/firewall.php

Since we had wp-cli, I opened that file and looked for the term:
```
// Disable the plugin and theme editor ?
if (! empty($nfw_['nfw_options']['disallow_edit']) ) {
       define('DISALLOW_FILE_EDIT', true);
}
```
Then I ran this: wp option get nfw_options

If you don’t have wp-cli, just pop into the database and look at the option value for nfw_options — either way you’ll see this:
```
array (
  'logo' => 'https://www.example.com/wp-content/plugins/ninjafirewall/images/ninjafirewall_75.png',
  'enabled' => 1,
  [...]
  'disallow_edit' => 1,
  [...]
)
```
I’ve snipped out a lot of the data, but you can see that disallow_edit is set to 1.

We had the user change that setting. Imagine that. It worked!

The moral of the story? Don’t make settings changes without reading what they do!
4 September, 2015