Tag: plugins

Mailbag: One Analytics to Bind Them
Mailbag on Monday because Angie Meeker asks:

Do you have an article about getting Google Analytics right on Multisite, so SA can see indiv stats for each site, but also parent. Where the SAdmin owns the entire GA account (site owners don’t need their own GA account)

There are a few ways to do this, and they’re all pretty easy.

Google Mod_PageSpeed

This is the ‘easiest’ way if you already have PageSpeed installed. You can put in your GA filter in the .htaccess and be done with it:
```
ModPagespeedEnableFilters insert_ga
ModPagespeedAnalyticsID <Analytics ID>
```
That’s actually what I do here, because I’m incredibly lazy and I have Pagespeed set up on my server. I can even make this a little more special by using if statements in Apache 2.4:
```
<If "$req{Host} == 'www.domain.com'">
    ModPagespeedEnableFilters insert_ga
    ModPagespeedAnalyticsID <Analytics ID>
</If>
```
MU Plugin

But if you’re still on Apache 2.2 or don’t want to mess with .htaccess for whatever reason, then you should try an mu-plugin, my favorite things in the world. And all you have to do is this:

// Paste your Google Analytics code here
18 August, 2014
How Many Plugins Is Too Many?

Have you ever played “Name That Tune”? They used to have this show where they’d play music and you had to name that tune. One of the mini-games in the show was called “Bid-A-Note” where the host read a clue and the contestants would alternate bidding. “I can name that tune in X notes..” where X was a whole number, and the bids ended when one of the contestants challenged the other to “Name That Tune” (or if someone bid one or zero notes).

Well. I can crash a WordPress site with one plugin.

When people ask why their site is slow, sometimes my coworkers will say “It’s the plugins, right? He has 40 plugins!” and I’ll say “Maybe.” Then I look at what the plugins are, because it’s never the number of plugins, but their quality. Take a look at Jetpack, which is 33 plugins in one. Is that going to cause more or less overhead than if you had 33 separate plugins installed?

WordPress is wonderful and beautiful because you can use plugins to do absolutely anything. At the same time, that beauty is it’s downfall, because you can use plugins to do anything. There are over 32,000 active plugins in the WordPress plugin repository. There are probably 4000 or so that are delisted or disabled. There are around 3000 more plugins on just one popular WordPress theme and plugin site. We haven’t even started listing themes.

It’s a mathematical impossibility to test every possible plugin combination with every theme on every server on every host with every extra (like mod_pagespeed or CloudFlare) added on. It’s impractical to expect every combination to play nicely together, not because of any defectiveness in the code of the plugin or WordPress, but because of the reality that all of those things vary from place to place. We build out things to be flexible, after all.

I love the flexibility. I think it’s awesome. But at the same time, I worry about it when people complain their site is slow. There’s, very rarely, one perfect answer. Not even “Oh, he was hacked” is the answer to why a site is slow, though it can be. The answer is invariably in the combinations and permutations of what someone has done with their site, what the visitors do with it, and how they interact. A site that posts once a week is different than one that posts four times a day. A site with no comments is different than one with 30 per post. And the more of those little differences you factor in, the harder it gets to determine how many plugins is too much.

Maybe it’s your memory. One plugin may need more memory than another, but the combination of two may need more than either would individually! Sadly, it’s not something you’re going to know until you start studying your own site. There are cool tools like P3 Profiler which do a great job of giving you an idea as to what’s going on, but it’s not the whole picture. It can’t be. Just look at all the tools we list for performance testing and consider how many and varied the results are.

How many plugins are too many? However many it takes to kill your site.

Oh, the one plugin I can run to crash a site? It was BuddyPress and I was using PHP CGI. Once I changed it to a different flavor of PHP, the issue went away.

1 August, 2014
Diving Into Varnish
We use it at DreamPress a lot, and I’m still learning its ways, but with me, the best way to learn a thing is to do a thing. So when I had a random server crash with nginxcp, I decided to play around and see about using Varnish on my server instead.

Varnish is an HTTP accelerator designed for content-heavy dynamic web sites (like WordPress). Unlike nginx, there’s no support for SPDY or SSL, which I can’t use anyway unless I spring for another server in front of my Apache box to be a true nginx box. Since I wasn’t getting any benefits out of nginx for those, I’m not too worried about it here yet. Should the world go to SSL, then my POV will change. The Varnish gurus aren’t fans of SPDY as it happens, which I find fascinating.

Back on point. I’m going to use Varnish as a proxy, which means when someone comes to my server to ask for a file, Varnish will first check itself for a cache and then if it’s found, serve it without touching Apache. Apache is slow. This is good! While nginx can handle static files rather well, I found that where I ht slowness people told me to use a CDN. That’s nice, but I don’t want to right now, so it makes nginx less of a draw. On the other hand, Varnish will fill in the gap where Apache + mod_php == poor static-file performance. And yes, I’m using mod_php.

Installing Varnish

First change Apache non-SSL port to 8080. I’m on WHM for this particular box, so I go to WHM -> Server Configurarion -> Tweak Settings and set value of field Apache non-SSL IP/port to 8080

Next I install the Varnish RPM for RedHat REL6. This can be either Varnish 3x or 4x, but I picked the latest version.
```
rpm --nosignature -i https://repo.varnish-cache.org/redhat/varnish-4.0.el6.rpm
yum install varnish
```
Edit the config file – /etc/sysconfig/varnish – and set the VARNISH_LISTEN_PORT to 80.

Now we edit /etc/varnish/default.vcl with what we want.

Deep breath. A whole heckuvalot changed from 3.x to 4.x and it took me a couple hours to bang out, since my examples were all from Varnish 3.x. In the end, I made my own fork of DreamHost’s Varnish VCL. Grab my Varnish VCL Collection and I use the wordpress-example.vcl as my default. It’s a whole ‘nother post on how I did that one. A lot of trial and error.

The default VCL is skewed to WordPress in a specific way: If you’re logged in or have a cookie that isn’t the default WP cookie, or are on SSL, you do not get cached pages. This means my site will be slower for me.

Configuring Your CMS

Speaking of WordPress… Here’s the major difference between it an nginx: I need a plugin for WordPress. I took over Varnish HTTP Purge last year in order to fix it (instead of fork it) for DreamPress, and in doing so I’ve added a lot of little tweaks, like a ‘purge all’ feature and a button on the toolbar.

Oddly, this is the reason I didn’t want to use Varnish. Where nginx just works, needing a plugin means I have to either install and activate for everyone using WordPress or any other CMS on my system, or I have to figure out a way to not need a plugin? Oh, and I don’t just used WordPress. Ugh.

This is moderately trivial to do with Mediawiki but I came up full short when I looked at Zenphoto. While I don’t post often to it (once a week generally), I do post a lot of data and I need the purge to be done. Certainly I could code in a system for it, like I did with WordPress, using a CURL call.

But it’s the need to do that for Varnish that made me make faces.

Not using Varnish

At the end of the day, while I did get Varnish up and running, I chose not to use it. Yet. I have to overcome some hurdles with other apps not knowing how to play well with purging, and figure out how to command purges like I do with WordPress. You can see I have my work cut out for me porting a WordPress plugin to Zenphoto.

In addition, I’m not really sure I like the fact that I have to do that. Certainly I can just let the cache expire on it’s own, but that seems to somewhat defeat the purpose of having it be able to handle dynamism as well as it does if it can’t magically detect when my content changes, and the cache needs a bump.
14 July, 2014
Mapping Domains Without a Plugin
Recently I wrote WordPress Murder Mystery. The day I released it, I got on a plane to fly to Miami, and proceeded to have a pretty awful travel day, thanks to a storm that pretty much knocked travel to the SouthEast out of commission. While I waited for my flight to DFW, I got pinged. “Hey, I can’t add anything from your store to my cart!”

I pulled up my laptop and thought about what I’d changed. Oh. I’d turned off domain mapping. But not really.

You see, I love the WordPress Domain Mapping plugin. But I’m not using it here. No, I’m actually doing something I expressly and patently tell people not to do … because time has changed with 3.9 and it’s almost okay to do things this way. The change here is that WordPress is smarter now, and it’s safer, and you actually can just edit the home and site URLs in the Network Dashboard. But you know how I said ‘almost’ back there? Your ability to shoot yourself in the foot is directly proportional to how smart you think you are.

What I did? It’s basic but assumes you already know how to add a domain onto another.
1. Go to Network Admin -> Sites
2. Edit the site in question
3. Change the URL to the mapped domain, check the ‘change home and site URL’ box, and click update
That was it! Three steps and everything still worked! This also let me force change a site to https all the way, and since I didn’t have content, I didn’t bother with a search/replace. If I had, I’d use that Interconnectit Script or WP-CLI for it. Still, like a wise person, I always get the domain ‘right’ before I add content.

And at this point, everything seemed to work just fine! And so I left it as is and published my book. And as you know, it all failed, spectacularly. I rolled everything back (because I knew what I’d changed last, see? always remember that!) and it worked again, so I knew I had to have missed something big here. Since I was stuck in an airport with choppy wifi, I disconnected everything and fired up my localhost version of my site. Banging on that for a while, I saw I missed a small, but hugely important factor in the plugin.

See most of what it does is that pretty interface to say “Pull domain.foo content from site #2 (aka foo.example.com)” and force redirects. It also lets you do cool things like “Allow users to log in from foo.example.com instead of domain.foo” but really I didn’t need any of that. The meat of the code is in the sunrise.php file, which when I studied, I realized was just doing the redirects “Send Site #2 to domain.foo” and for me, by renaming the home and siteURLs, I was already doing that.

So what had I missed?

define( 'COOKIE_DOMAIN', $_SERVER[ 'HTTP_HOST' ] );

That was it. I forgot to tell it “Cookies belong to the domain you’re on.” What this means is that if you log in at example.com, the cookie you get is for example.com and not domain.foo! For the most part, this isn’t a problem since no one logs in but me … until you try to make a purchase and it validates a cookie which doesn’t match the domain. I added that to my wp-config.php (down at the end of my Multisite section, where the SUNRISE define had been earlier) and everything magically worked.

Two lessons! First, test everything. Second, you can map domains without a plugin, safely.

I will note that, over time, it’s possible those settings for home and site URL may vanish from display. They’re powerful and dangerous settings, and you should not mess with them without a good backup.
12 May, 2014
Whatevergram: The Honeymoon is over
I’m not a photographer. I’m not artistic in that particular way and I don’t want to learn to have to be. The joy of Instagram is I can take a photo, slap a filter on it, put a border, and boom. Done. Share it with friends. The sad part about Instagram is putting that photo on my blog. It’s all machinations and annoyances.

What I wanted:
1. An easy way to take ‘styled’ pictures.
2. An easy way to push those pictures to my blog.
3. An easy way to determine how I want the pictures to post.
That’s all, three things. Now, Instagram wins at #1, and Pressgram wins at #2, and the both suck at #3.

That third one is the hardest, I guess, but what I want is that when I upload a file, it either makes an individual post or makes a gallery post of the whole day. And in both cases, I get the option of making a post publish right away or save it as a draft. I kind of love the idea of ‘This week in [Insta|Press]gram’ as a post for a photo blog. In looking at my options, I determined there’s one Pressgram plugin and a million Instagram, but none really do all of that.

But really … Pressgram 2.0 fixed most of my issues with UI, and for that I’m very happy about the new version. It’s easier to read and use, the layouts make sense. I’m even okay with the in-app purchases for things (though charging for some of the things Instagram offers for free strikes me as a poor call). Lacking the nice, snazzy filter names (imagine naming them after WP Themes) and borders/patterns means that if I want those in a quick way, I use Instagram and the maybe Pressgram to upload.

Except that isn’t what happens. I take a bunch of photos. At the end of the day I manually upload them all to my blog. Manually. What an annoying thing. I can’t do the one thing I want, which is make a gallery post. By default Pressgram 2 publishes my posts, so I have to use a plugin to not do that. Or I can use a plugin to import from Instagram (though again, it’s a single post per image). Of note, people recommended Instagrate to me, but it’s not Multisite compatible (says so on the plugin page) and that means it’s either poorly written or it’s doing something really wrong, since Multisite shouldn’t matter at all for that. Also it’s manual.

The best plugin I found was one that daily pulls in my Instagram pictures and saves them as draft, leaving me to manually merge and make a “This week in Instagram” gallery. There was another that can make a weekly post, but it’s old, out of date, and doesn’t actually save as draft anymore. There’s not really a perfect way to do that, though, as even the ‘import on demand’ plugins seem to have gaffs and time delays. Obviously Pressgram’s ‘Post direct’ method is going to be more precise, but even then it doesn’t have a ‘collect everything from a week’ if it’s going that.

I know I said the Honeymoon is over, but to be honest, I don’t know that it was ever here to begin with.
9 April, 2014
Embedding Videos from TVGuide
This one goes out to my fellow fansites.

There are a lot of you guys who use WordPress (probably that’s my fault) and like me, you bash your head in when a news source makes a video embedable, but only if you use their code. Why is this a problem? Most of us like using WP’s visual editor, and that means we have to switch to text mode, paste this in, and then never ever ever visit that page in the visual editor again:
```
<script src="http://player.ooyala.com/player.js?width=600&amp;amp;video_pcode=VlajQ6DTdv9-OYPHSJq6w4eU0Bfi&amp;amp;embedCode=NwdzM3aDp4BB3-MEdPemlMJK5XH7ZVdn&amp;amp;height=337&amp;amp;deepLinkEmbedCode=NwdzM3aDp4BB3-MEdPemlMJK5XH7ZVdn"></script>
```
Augh!

In part this is because WordPress uses TinyMCE for editing GUI-like, and switching between visual and text mode kills things. But on the other hand, how come we can just paste in a YouTube URL and that works? Well it’s a magical thing called Embeds, and basically WordPress sees that URL for YouTube and knows “OH, I should be a video and YouTube has a special code on it’s sever to tell me how to display it! Yay!”

Not everyone has that. TV Guide, CBS, etc. I’m looking at you. Where this makes sense is where they do not want you to embed a video because they want the traffic to themselves, which is fine. We can link. But where it’s daft is when they make it embeddable, give you that link, but it’s flipping ugly and can’t be used in the visual editor!

For TV Guide, at least, there’s a fix. Ooyala Video Browser.

While the search function doesn’t work ‘great’ right now, probably because I’m searching for their videos with the wrong keywords, but still I was able to embed a video like this:
```
[ooyala code="NwdzM3aDp4BB3-MEdPemlMJK5XH7ZVdn" player_id="undefined"]
```
The ‘code’ is the ’embedCode’ from the embed they gave me before.

I can also use this:
```
[ooyala code="NwdzM3aDp4BB3-MEdPemlMJK5XH7ZVdn" player_id=&"VlajQ6DTdv9-OYPHSJq6w4eU0Bfi"]
```
Using ‘video_pcode’ for ‘player_id’

So this wasn’t super obvious, and personally I would love it if Ooyala had an oembed and then a ‘share this on WordPress’ link for things, but seeing as Automattic (and Pete! Hi Pete!) helped with the plugin, this may be as good as it gets for now. Maybe they could marry it into the Media Uploader, below ‘Insert from URL’ – have ‘Insert from Ooyala’. Dreams. I haz them.

There’s a lot to this plugin that I didn’t need, though. After all, since I don’t have an account, I don’t need all the search stuff, so I stripped it down to just this (which is an mu-plugin):
```
/**
 * Ooyala Shortcodes
 * Usually for crap like TV Guide
 * Example: [ooyala video_pcode="VlajQ6DTdv9-OYPHSJq6w4eU0Bfi" width="222" embedCode="NwdzM3aDp4BB3-MEdPemlMJK5XH7ZVdn"]
 */
add_shortcode( 'ooyala', 'ooyala_shortcode' );

function ooyala_shortcode( $atts ) {
	extract(shortcode_atts(array(
		'width' => '500',
		'video_pcode' => '',
		'embedcode' => '',
		), $atts
	));

	$width = (int) $width;
	$height = floor( $width*9/16 );
		
	if ( !is_feed() ) {
		$output = '<script src="http://player.ooyala.com/player.js?video_pcode='.$video_pcode.'&amp;width='.$width.'&amp;deepLinkEmbedCode='.$embedcode.'&amp;height='.$height.'&amp;embedCode='.$embedcode.'"></script>';
	} elseif ( $options['show_in_feed']  ) {
		$output = __('[There is a video that cannot be displayed in this feed. ', 'ooyalavideo').'<a href="'.get_permalink().'">'.__('Visit the blog entry to see the video.]','ooyalavideo').'</a>';
	}
	return $output;
}
```
And that is that!
17 March, 2014