Tag: plugins

eCommerce Dream
At the end of my WordCamp San Francisco talk, I said I had a dream. A dream about a plugin that can share an inventory between WordPress sites on a Multisite Network.

Imagine, if you will, a store with a physical products (Geisha dolls). The store has a bunch of different types of dolls. The store has satellite stores, one in Ariel (their flagship store) but now one on Bellerophon and another on Whitefall. While the Companion-Style dolls sell well on Ariel and Bellerophon, the Cowboy-Style ones sell best on Whitefall. Also each store has a different kind of clientele.

So the Dollhouse Store makes a website, and then using Multisite, makes another site for each location: whitefall.dollhousestores.com and so on (or maybe whitefalldollhouse.com even). At first, the webpages are just a list of the local store products, come and buy them here, photos of the locale, employees, and local events. Then they decide to sell stuff on line. But they only want to list items for sale under specific criteria.
1. All items for sale are stored on the network admin
2. Each store can select what products they have at their store
3. Each store controls product volume.
4. Stores can request more product from homebase
Now of course they could have a separate store for each site, but they want to manage what possible items could be sold online, so having that controlled by the network makes sense, doesn’t it?

Meanwhile another store sells cows. All the cows live at Persephone, and are shipped out to Jiangyin and other stores. They’re doing well with everyone going to cowship.com, but they too want to have jiangyin.cowship.com and so on. Each store lists what cows are for sale that live well in each location because Holsteins’ don’t like Bellerophon, who knew? This way, someone on Jiangyin can order Holsteins but not Texas Longhorns. Obviously they need to control which product can be sold at each location, same as the Dollhouse, but they also have a different problem. Their product amounts must also be stored in one location and shipped out from there, so they want to make sure they don’t oversell their cows.

Their criteria:
1. All items for sale are stored on the network admin
2. Network admin controls absolute amount of products
3. Network selects what products they have at each store
4. Orders per store base product volume on the network amount
These are pipe dreams. Today there is no plugin that ‘shares’ an estore across multisite sites on a network. You can’t even do it with ‘digital’ products which now that I say it aloud, I think Pippin should totally get on that.

Today, all sites are separate, and since estores have their content saved per-site, there isn’t an easy, friendly way (if there is at all) to pull data between sites in a way that preserves shopping carts and such. I wish there was. I get asked about this at least once a week, and I have to say “Today, there is no plugin that can share an inventory between WordPress sites on a Multisite Network.”

But this is a complicated thing. Multisite itself isn’t actually built to handle that kind of thing, since the network doesn’t have posts or pages. You’d have to dedicate a site on the network to the shop and pull in content from there, which of course has a switch_to_blog() overhead penalty. I can’t even begin to get past the paper thoughts I have here.
6 December, 2013
Is SEO Best Handled by a Plugin or Theme?
I’m not an SEO expert, but I know a heck of a lot more than many people who claim they are. For the record, I’ve been messing with SEO since it was ‘correct’ to put hidden text in the source code of your site. I used to spend time getting sites to rank well on Lycos and Altavista, back when I was but a wee intern for my friends. It’s fair to say I’ve been around the block with SEO.

I don’t consider myself an expert because of skill, though in the last couple years, I’ve decided not to keep up as closely with things like schema, mostly because I don’t have to. I still retain a solid grounding in what does and does not make for good SEO (content!), and I understand that part of good SEO isn’t just content, it’s how the content is displayed for the reader, but also how the information is sorted for the computers at search engine companies.

Credit: Plymouth UK
About every couple months, someone asks me if I prefer using a theme or a plugin to manage my SEO, and I have been giving the same answer for a couple years now. I don’t use either.

This does not mean that the themes I use aren’t ‘SEO’ optimized, of course. It means that I don’t use their ‘extra’ features. I use, primarily, StudioPress’ Genesis Framework right now, and that comes with an SEO settings page which I never use. Ever. In fact, I turn it off in any child theme I make. This is not because I don’t think that it’s useful, but that what I do ‘use’ for SEO is already included.

My SEO consists of making my content fantastic, using a theme that includes schema headers (or adding them myself if not), and following the guidelines Yoast outlines in his article WordPress SEO Tutorial. I don’t do everything he says (he likes ‘category/postname’ for permalinks, I like ‘year/postname’ but if date doesn’t really matter, I use category instead), but I do read and think about what it means.

That’s the crux isn’t it? I don’t blindly follow advice, or use a plugin or theme because people say I have to. I read, I think, and I come to logical conclusions, and I apply them after I write my post.

For example, Yoast says not to use ‘stopwords’ in titles and make them SEO friendly. I take this to mean your human readable title should be gripping, but the title slug should be short, to the point, and descriptive. So I customize every single title. I come up with four or five before I post, and then when I have one with a good grab, I tweak the title slug to be as short as possible, while still being descriptive. Sometimes I’m better at this than others, but I keep working it.

Next I customize my ‘publicize’ lede. This has to be good and it has to be short. I know I’m using my helf.us yourls, so the URL itself will be tiny, but that doesn’t mean I should use just my title for Twitter. I customize it, trying to make it a little more witty and pithy, to reflect me and my readers. Finally I customize my excerpt. Oh yes, my excerpts are all custom written, and they are intended to grab you hard. Like Yoast, I feel the only well written description is a hand written one, and I do it. For everything.

This puts me at a funny disadvantage. Most plugins and themes I’ve seen tend to want you to make a custom meta description. There are plugins (like the one I do use, listed further down in this post) that allow you to use your excerpt as descriptions, but I’ve never quite understood why themes make this so hard. In Genesis, I have a field for “Custom Post/Page Meta Description” in every post, which if I use it, will change the meta value for description.

When I dug into the code, I saw that it was pulling this:
```
genesis_get_custom_field( '_genesis_description' );
```
Clearly all I need to do is make that default to what I want. And when I figure that out, I’ll let you know. Right now, all I could do was remove Genesis’ function and replace it with my own. Not elegant at all.

Now all that said, there are times when I see to ‘improve’ upon the SEO I’ve been given, because someone else is handling the content will far less care than I give. When that happens, I grab Yoast’s WordPress SEO Plugin. But for the most part, I don’t do anything on a regular basis that involves having to ‘customize’ my SEO, so it’s infinitely portable to any theme I want.
2 December, 2013
Extending Chrome
I had a problem.

If you know me at all, you know this is how 99% of my code lessons start. I have a problem I can’t solve easily, so I dig into it and write about it. In this case, my problem was one of those really stupid, messy things where I needed to force some code to run on certain pages and I didn’t have any access to those pages. Why? Well … let’s just say I wanted to make something like the Hey Girl chrome extension okay? Yes, I need an extension for Google Chrome.

It doesn’t really matter what you’re making, what matters is how easy it is to make a Chrome Extension. It really only needs two files, a manifest.json and then your content files. Let me explain by making Google Red.

Manifest

The manifest is where you list what’s in the Extension. It’s going to have the name, summary, what files to call, when and where. A really simple example would be like this:
```
{
"name": "Half-Elf's Chrome Extension",
"description": "This is an example extension that doesn't do anything useful at all.",
"version": "1.0",
"manifest_version": 2,
"content_scripts": [
    {
      "matches": [
                 "http://www.google.com/*",
                 "https://www.google.com/*"
                 ],
      "css": ["mystyle.css"],
      "js": ["myscript.js"]
    }
  ]
}
```
This is pretty straight forward. Name, description, etc. The value for manifest_version has to be the number 2, no quotes, no matter what. This is mandated by Google. They don’t use it yet, but they will. Then we get to the fun stuff, content_scripts, which is also pretty obvious. Using “matches” says “Only run this when the URL matches…” This is an inclusive match. For a different example, here’s an extension I want to run on every website, but not when I’m in wp-admin:
```
"content_scripts": [ {
	"matches": [ "http://*/*", "https://*/*" ],
	"exclude_globs": [ "http://*/wp-admin/*"],
	"css": [ "mystyle.css" ],
	"js": [ "myscript.js" ]
} ]
```
You can take this even further and only have it take action at specific actions (like when you make a tab active). The content_scripts documentation is pretty overwhelming, but it has all sorts of options. Today, though, saying we want to match just Google’s pages is okay.

In order to do this, I made a blank file called manifest.json and saved it in my ‘Development’ folder called~/Development/Chrome/extensions/GoogleRed but this doesn’t actually matter. Save it anywhere on your computer. Just know where it is. I also put blank files for mystyle.css and mystyle.js in there because they’re my content files! They’re blank, we’ll get to the real code soon.

Content Files

This is the fun part. The content files are what makes the magic happen and the super cool thing? It’s all basic JS or CSS or HTML. Seriously. Anything you can do in those languages, you can do in an Extesion and call it a day. For example, here’s one I used to strip referrers from URLs on Facebook (I was experimenting):
```
document.body.innerHTML = document.body.innerHTML.replace(new RegExp('?fb_source=pubv1" target="', 'g'), '" target="');
```
I set this to only run on Facebook.com and it was exactly what I needed. I admit, there are better JS ways to do this, but I suck at JS still, so this was as far as I got.

The Example

Google actually already made the files, so you can download them from Chromium “Make Page Red” and toss them in your folder. My files are as follows:

mainfest.json
```
{
	"name": "Page Redder",
	"description": "Make the current page red",
	"version": "2.0",
	"permissions": [
		"activeTab"
	],
	"background": {
		"scripts": ["myscript.js"],
	    "persistent": false
	},
	"browser_action": {
	    "default_title": "Make this page red"
	},
	"manifest_version": 2
}
```
myscript.js
```
// Copyright (c) 2011 The Chromium Authors. All rights reserved.
// Use of this source code is governed by a BSD-style license that can be
// found in the LICENSE file.
	
// Called when the user clicks on the browser action.
chrome.browserAction.onClicked.addListener(function(tab) {
  // No tabs or host permissions needed!
  console.log('Turning ' + tab.url + ' red!');
  chrome.tabs.executeScript({
  code: 'document.body.style.backgroundColor="red"'
 });
});
```
That’s it. Two files. But how do I get it installed?

Adding it to Google Chrome

Go to chrome://extensions/ in Chrome and you get this kind of view:

See the box on the upper right? Developer Mode? Check it. Now you get extra information!

What interests us the most here is “Load unpacked extension…” but also that ID code jcpmmhaffdebnmkjelaohgjmndeongip is really important. This tells me where the extension lives on my computer, because I can go to ~/Library/Application Support/Google/Chrome/Profile/Extensions/jcpmmhaffdebnmkjelaohgjmndeongip and see all the code for the other extensions. This makes it super easy for me to fork them. Since this is all just for me, and I have no plans to release them, I’m less worried about licenses than I might be, but I still am in the habit of checking what they are and so should you. Your folder locations will vary depending on your OS, and how many Google Profiles you have (I actually have 3 – me, work, fansite).

Click that “Load unpacked extension…” and select the folder:

Once you upload it, you get this:

Now you know where the file is, but also you get a special link for Reload (⌘R) which is a life saver. Click that and any changes you made to your source files are re-installed into Chrome! This is great because Google’s example of making pages redder? Doesn’t work.

Okay, that’s not fair, it does work, just not on every page. It didn’t work on https pages for me until I edited the manifest and changed permissions from "activeTab" to "activeTab", "tabs", "http://*/*", "https://*/*" and then clicking on the magic button worked:

It’s kind of nice to be able to bully things around that way.

I’m just dabbling my toes into the Extensions water, and I find it highly powerful to push Chrome into my paths right now. Have you written any extensions?
27 November, 2013
Plugin Wish: Login With Google

Now I know what you’re thinking. “Mika, there are a hundred plugins that let you log in via Google!”

That’s not what I mean. Let me explain with a story.

You have a business, example.com, and you use Google Apps for everything. Then you start tying this into other companies, like a time sheet company, that let’s you ‘Login with Google’ and redirects you to the right company settings. Cool, right? Kind of like this:

And you think you’d like an internal, private, blog, where people can post cat pictures. Or whatever. What if you could just have the login screen be that Google button? And you know there’s a bajillion plugins for it, but you want to have it be only people on example.com. So you@gmail.com can’t login, but me@example.com and dad@example.com can too!

I want that.

I have not yet seen it, but I think that would be an amazing plugin. By default, the domain it ‘validates’ would be the one on which it’s installed (so here it’d be halfelf.org), but you could override it (which is good, since I’d want to use ipstenu.org). Then you’d want it to ‘generate’ new users if they don’t exist, since you don’t want to have to add every single new person, right?

Oh and you don’t have to terribly worry about that fired guy, bob@example.com, because once he’s fired and you disable the email account, he can’t log in!

Some concerns of course would be Two-Factor Authentication. Also how do you handle multisite? I would envision a default nothing-set option for Multisite, where the network admin could network activate, and set the default domain there. Add in a check box for “Allow individual sites to override?” at the very least. Maybe a sneaky “Always allow the super admin to log in” setting too, though that gets complicated fast.

Cliff Seal pinged me about this and said he’d been fidddling with https://github.com/logoscreative/wordpress-openid but he never finished. Who’s up for the challenge?

And no, it did not escape me the hilarity of me, a loud “I don’t like Google owning all my data!” person suggesting this.

22 November, 2013
SEO Slides Is A Pie
This review is of the FREE version during the beta release!

I wanted to love you. All my friends rave about you and tease me for using PowerPoint. “Don’t you want to own your data!” they harangue me. And it’s true, I do! So the idea of having my slides on my server, embedable into posts? Hey that sounds great!

The cake, is, alas, a pie.

It’s not really a ‘lie’, but there are points that I just don’t love like they do. This is not to say I don’t like it, in fact I am happily using it, and I’m going to keep using it, and for a lot of people, this will be perfect to make slides. It’s not (quite) perfect for me, but that’s because of my current usage. I can see the future of slides and WordPress, and it really is going to be SEO Slides for many (if not all) of us.

Before I get deep into this, you have to register to import PDFs. This is perfectly fair and understandable. They’re converting a PDF into images on their server and importing. Okay, I’m jiggy with that. I could conceivably make the images myself, but this is fine. The problem, or rather the part I don’t like, is that they really all just images. And they’re named things like c6ddd0b82e5a45c70fb2718869cad3e1-7. So once I import, I have to go back and change all the titles and (if I want) copy in my notes.

So why not just write it in SEO Slides? Because of Presenter View.

Say what you want about PowerPoint, but the fact that I get a presenter view, filled with my notes, is actually very important to me. I make notes, as you may have noticed reading my post from WordCamp Portland, 2013. Sometimes they’re exactly what I’m going to say, sometimes they’re slightly different bullet points than my slide has. Sometimes I have NO bullet points on the slide, so they’re all in the text. I really try to use that aspect of Power Point. I don’t really script my talks to 100% detail, but I treat those notes as flashcards to keep me on topic and on pace. They even will have time notations.

As a presenter, keeping to my time limit and topic is important to me. Since I do give similar talks a lot (example: I used ‘A Tale of Two Servers’ to talk about Managed WP hosting in Boston, but I also have a Degrassi themed one called ‘Whatever it Takes’), the notes are often the same, but the pacing will be different. I try to cater to my audience. For now, this is the absolute number one reason I’m sad-panda about the plugin. But if that’s not your thing? You have no worries!

The important factor to me is embed-ability. I have to be able to embed my content on a page. I use that page with a custom shortlink and put it in my slidedeck. Now with SEO Slides, I can just use the page, but it doesn’t let me put text or notes around it, so I’ll still want this to be embedded. Problem? Embedding with SEO Slides is not as obvious as you’d think. I read the Embedding FAQ and this just did not happen for me:

When you “Publish” your presentation, you will be provided a link to “Use presentation in a new post.” This option will embed your presentation directly into a new blog post.

I thought I was doing something wrong, but finally I realized the ONLY way to get this “Use in presentation” link was to save the post once published. Gah. Why not a nice button? Still, this was not insurmountable, and in the end, I really did like the look of the embed way better than the Slideshare one.

Except … I’m not really thrilled with having to upload all my media. It makes me want to make a dedicated SEO Slides site on my network so I can isolate content. Part of the issue is with how I like to write my slides. I know for a WordCamp where I speak for 45 minutes, in order to leave room for questions, I should have no more than 30 slides, and that’s only if I’m doing roughly a slide a minute! I try to keep it closer to 20-25 honestly. A 45 minute talk should have at least 5 minutes for questions. I like to keep the text on my slides minimal, so I have a lot more to actually talk about.

I hate slides that are pretty much what the person reads off… thanks. And that’s really a totally personal thing, but it means my slides are really image heavy. So that adds a lot of weight to a site. It’s not a plus or minus, just something I have to consider.

The other problem with embeds is the embed CODE. You get a lot of parameters but the ones that jump out at me is this:
```
site_src="http://slides.ipstenu.org/site_title="Slideshows"
```
It looks cool, and I can change the site_src and site_title…. What I can’t do is change the output. I mean, I can’t remove that ‘source and title’ at all. I can’t change the default so it’s always ‘halfelf.org’ instead of my placeholder site. And worse? I can’t turn it OFF so other people can’t embed my stuff. I mean, what if I don’t want them to embed my warez? This means if someone looks at my slides, clicks the slick plus-sign, they get the code for embedding and they get my slides.ipstenu.org link. Now if you go there, you get redirected, but that’s not the point! Why have this customizable if I can’t… customize it? There are no settings options save entering my API key and allowing for tracking (which I turned off). Why not have an option for customizing output!

A final minor note with SEO Slides, the title is also wonky. This may be because I’m running Trunk but I get this weird title thing in my … well … title:

Not really super happy about that. I did report it though. Also I reported that I ‘ran out’ of uploads of PDFs. In the free version, you get three free PDF conversions. I did it once. I tried a second time and it said “Upload Error: Your subscription has exhausted the use of this service.” So I filed tickets for both of those on November 14th.

On the good side? These guys are WAY responsive to my enquiry about something (which they changed promptly), and helpful when I said “DaFUQ?” about embedding.

I’m not sure if I want to use it going on. I may end up using it for embedding, though, but it won’t be a replacement for PowerPoint for me any time soon. Now I just have to decide if I want to pony up the $200 a year just to convert my PDFs. There are enough ‘little’ things missing that frustrate me, like no quick-edit if you just want to change titles, no categories, no tags, no main ‘slides’ page (that is – the custom post type has no archive page).

Of note! Since this initial review was written, but before it was posted, SEO Slides upgraded me, so I’ll have to come back and re-review once I bang on the Premium Version: Is it worth it? Since, clearly, the brunt of why I’m ‘meh’ about this is the presenter mode, I may fall in love with Premium! The software’s only been out for two months at the time I wrote this, there’s a LOT of room for growth and I’m probably just being really really impatient.

As this moves from Beta to Live, I expect a lot of great things from SEO Slides. Do I love them? Not yet. But I like them a hell of a lot more than I like PowerPoint, with that sole exception. The presenter view. God help ’em, no idea how you’d tackle that! Can’t wait to see how they do it.
15 November, 2013
No More PHP Code (In Widgets)
I consider Otto one of my friends. He’s a guy I don’t mind hanging out with in a bar for hours. His code advice (and debugging advice) has furthered my career. He’s also one of the more realistic folks out there when it comes to work/life balance. Enjoy your beers, bro. So you can guess my surprise when, a couple years ago, he lamented to me about his plugin, PHP Code Widget, and how he wished everyone would quit using it. “I use it.” I replied, and earned an Otto-Grumpy Cat glare. “Don’t.”

Further conversations illuminated the situation. The code works, but it’s not great since people can use it to insert anything PHPish. Sure, in the wrong hands that is hella dangerous. I was about to broadly declare “I’m not the wrong hands!” when I thought back on everything I do, and where I do it, and I sheepishly replied, “I guess I’m just lazy.”

And that’s the crux. I am lazy, and I looked for the easier way to include a PHP file in my widget areas. I was using it to show ads (the ones you see all over this site) via include("/home/foo/public_html/blah.php");. Why? Because I use the same ads on multiple places. But that’s it for my PHP usage. Which means for me, replacing it with anything else is super easy!

Shortcodes

They work in widgets, so hey! I knew I just needed to include a specific PHP file from a specific location, so for me, this was pretty simple. Also it meant I could call a do_shortcode in other places in my theme functions to add it in.
```
// My Ads [myads name="name"]
function myads_func( $atts ) {
        extract( shortcode_atts( array(
                'name' => 'placeholder',
        ), $atts ) );

        $filename = '/home/foo/public_html/ads/'.$name.'.php';

        if ( !file_exists($filename) ) { return ''; }

        ob_start();
        include($filename);
        $content = ob_get_clean();
        return '<div id="'.$name.'">'.$content.'</div>';
        }

add_shortcode( 'myads', 'myads_func' );
```
I put in the little fail check to be hidden, so I would know where to look. This obviously works well for me since I’m pretty limited in how I was using Otto’s code. Before this, though, I was also using it for some BuddyPress sidebar trickery which could not be done (easily) with shortcodes, and really nor should it be, so that brings us to number two…

Make Your Own Widget

Widget code is … weird. It’s not as easy as a function, and it’s way the heck larger than shortcode code, for many things. But you should remember that better or worse is subjective, I know, but for me it wasn’t worth the time to do it. It takes me way longer to master widget code, which I can’t use everywhere (in post content, in footers etc). But Otto’s general advice has been to make a widget.

It’s also probably way safer than doing an include like I am, but when I started needing the shortcode all over the place, that’s what it was.
5 November, 2013