Tag: wordpress

Unique vs Common
Someone asked me if I could explain why sometimes I tell people to name their functions uniquely and sometimes I don’t.

I get how this is confusing, even though it makes perfect sense to me. Here’s how to remember:
- What’s yours is unique to your plugin
- What’s common is unique to what’s common
Okay, maybe that didn’t help. Let’s try a practical example!

I have a plugin called ‘Genericon’d’ which includes the Genericons library inside. In that plugin, I have the following enqueues:
```
        wp_enqueue_style( &#039;genericons&#039;, plugins_url( &#039;genericons/genericons/genericons.css&#039;, __FILE__ , &#039;&#039;, self::$gen_ver ) );
        wp_enqueue_style( &#039;genericond&#039;, plugins_url( &#039;css/genericond.css&#039;, __FILE__ , &#039;&#039;, self::$gen_ver ) );
```
The first one is for Genericons, the library. There I use the common name of genericons which means if anyone else also enqueues Genericons with this name, one of ours will win depending on load order. For my personal plugin CSS, I use the name genericond (notice that D?) as it matches the name of my plugin and, therefore, is less likely to conflict with someone else’s plugin.

Conflict is the name of the game here. I actually want genericons to conflict. Well, not conflict. I want it to be recognized as a shared library, so WordPress only loads it once. If I had named it genericond-genericons then, in the event someone has Jetpack or a theme like TwentyFifteen which both include Genericons, they would load the entire library twice! And I would suck. On the other hand, if we all share the library name, WordPress will check, see it’s loaded, and carry on.

Name what’s yours in a way unique to your plugin or theme.

Name what’s shared in a way that’s unique, but also stupid obvious and easy to share.

Font-Awesome? Use font-awesome for your enqueues.

As for functions and class names, even if you put in a check for ‘if this doesn’t exist…’ the logic works the same. If it’s yours and yours alone and only exists in this code, name it unique to your plugin/theme. If it’s a shared library, like the aws-sdk, name the class in the standard way and wrap it in an ‘if this doesn’t already exist…’ so that if it does exist, it only gets called once.

Standard names for shared libraries.

Unique names for your personal codes.

And bonus! If you keep your names to a standard, while being unique, someone may call your functions too.

By the way, anything global like DEFINE( 'FOO', true ); should always be unique. Those are globals. Everyone uses them. I’ve made that mistake too.
4 March, 2016
Baby Steps Security

It’s a simple question. How do I make my site login secure?

My answer is simple. Use https for your admin dashboard and use a strong password.

Your username is not a secret

My gmail user ID is ipstenu@gmail.com

My WordPress.org username is Ipstenu. So is my Twitter handle. Facebook? Yep. GooglePlus even.

And my username here on this site is Ipstenu.

I hear a lot of people telling folks that their username on their WordPress blog should be a secret and, for the life of me, I can’t understand the logic. Your username is not a secret. It never really has been. It never will be. We used to log in everywhere with our emails, then it became our commonly used nicknames, and based on Twitter and Peach and whatever social network comes next, that’s where it’s going to remain.

But… Admin?

But why do people tell you not to use ‘admin’ as your username, then? Well it’s the same reason you have a top lock and a knob lock on your door. The knob lock is your username. Everyone has one, and they have roughly the same level of protection. If you only use a knob lock and don’t have a good top lock, the brute force of someone kicking your door in is pretty easy.

The top lock, the bolt and chain, that’s your complex password. Not everyone uses them. You should, but some of us are lazy. When we do use them, we make our lives more secure and safe.

Back to admin as a username. Using admin is like using the same key for all the doors in an entire apartment building. If you’re the apartment owner, that sounds great. But if you’re the resident, you’re probably not super happy about that idea, right?

Changing your username to something unique to you makes your lock safer. Reusing it means you have the same master lock for all your accounts. It’s better for you, you can remember it, and it’s sneakily helpful for your branding. Yeah, I slipped SEO in there.

But your passwords are a different matter. You don’t want to reuse your passwords for a simple reason: If you do reuse your passwords, then once someone gets one password, they can get access to all your accounts.

All. Your. Accounts.

Your bank account.

Two Factors

A lot of this is mitigated by something called Two Factor Authentication, which gives you the ability to have a username (publicly known), a password (private and secret), and a one-time-use password (generated by an app and only good for 60 seconds or so). Now you have three locks! One of which you don’t even know how to open until you’re actually opening it.

The current issue with Two Factor Authentication is its usability. It can be confusing to people to set up. You need a smart phone, which are not universal quite yet, and you need to be able to take a picture of your screen for most of them. Even once you have it set up, you need to read and enter a code.

I’ve found mixed information regarding how well this works, or doesn’t, for people who are visually impaired. For the most part, I suspect these tools are only barely accessible. They’re probably a nightmare for the blind to use. If you have to rely on getting a text message to log in, then you’re absolutely fucked if you’re overseas or out of range or have no bars.

And then there’s the issue I see faced by everyone, and that would be what happens when you lock yourself out. If you [get locked out of Apple](George’s link), it’s a headache but survivable. But if you get locked out of your own site, what do you do? Who do you call? Your webhost? Why? It’s not their responsibility to unlock you. And don’t ask WordPress.org to unlock you.

No, you have to know how to do ‘something’ to fix this. Be it disable a plugin without being logged in, or be it editing a file, you will need access to your system and some technical chops to pull this off. And no, folks, the majority of WordPress users don’t have it.

Security in Steps

We cannot all become secure tomorrow without possibly alienating the user base. WordPress has a 26% market share these days, and that’s a non-insignificant number of people. For them, we absolutely must consider the cradle to grave usability of our products. How useful are they? How safe are they? How easily can someone untangle their site?

Two Factor is one of the ways to go, but it’s only one possible future. It has a higher hurdle than many people understand. Even Google has a less than 10% adoption rate for 2FA. Facebook probably has less, and if I was asked which user base most matches the skill level of the average Wordpress user, it would be Facebook.

WordPress faces a hurdle of its own creation. It’s too popular with too many people of questionable technical ability to just switch on two factor authentication and force it for everyone. Much like multisite, it requires an understanding of some technical aspects of the web, not WordPress, to use safely.

Or as my friend Jan puts it: You must be this tall to ride.

24 February, 2016
What’s In a Plugin Name

Not terribly long ago, we stopped letting people use someone else’s trademark or company/plugin name as the first term in their submitted plugin.

Example:

“Girl Scout Cookie Tracker by Mika” would no longer be accepted.

However “Mika’s Girl Scout Cookie Tracker” would be just fine.

The point we try to make here is that your name, your product name, should be first.

Of course, that second name is pretty poor, and I’d be more inclined to name it “Cookie Order Hunter” with the description of “Hunting down Girl Scouts to buy your next hit of Thin Mints has never been easier!” Yes, I know you can buy them online, not the issue here.

This new name is sort of neat. It’s got a kick to it and it has a distinct name. Suddenly I have a sort of branding all my own and this is good! I am now unique and I will stand apart from the other similar plugins.

Of course there are times when you don’t want to do this. I wrote a plugin called “EDD – Prevent EU Checkout” and I submitted it as “EDD Prevent EU Checkout” because it was a “Prevent EU Checkout” plugin only for Easy Digital Downloads. If I was doing my normal thing, where I pick a fun name, then I would have used the dev name: “EDD – Sucks to be EU.”

Here, though, I started the plugin with EDD – a search term often used – and ended with a description of what the plugin was. The fact that I keep the name as I do just means I haven’t finished the new version. I will soon be rebranding it to “Prevent EU Checkout with Easy Digital Downloads” because that’s a better SEO friendly name.

But here I’ve pointed out two things. The display name and the submission name are two different things for a reason. The display name is what people see, and the submission name is what sets your URL in the repository. Had I used “Prevent EU Checkout with Easy Digital Downloads” then my URL would be https://wordpress.org/plugins/prevent-eu-checkout-with-easy-digital-downloads and that’s not a friendly URL to anyone.

Submit a plugin with the ‘name’ you want for your URL.

Let’s take an example just for fun. Commoji – A plugin that lets you reply to comments with emoji reactions. No it’s not real. Yet. I would submit this as ‘commoji’ (all lowercase) and in the description I would put only the short description, leaving the readme to be read on it’s own. Remember: The readme is vital, so every pertinent piece of information that a user should have must be in that readme.

Within my plugin code, and that readme, the plugin’s display name would be “Commoji – Reply to comments with Emoji” (and if I’m feeling puckish, I’d add ? at the end).

Now I have my cake and Edith too! A short plugin slug, a descriptive plugin name, and a unique name that people will remember. I’m not stomping on Emoji’s trademark, such as it is, and I’m demonstrating my own individuality.

17 February, 2016
Chickens, Eggs, and MVP
There’s a lot of weight to shoulder for the WordPress REST API project. It has a lot of hurdles to overcome and a lot of doubters to win over.

I’ve been silent about it, thoughtful about it, and questioning about it. I personally want the REST API if, for no other reason, than once it’s in-core, we can set the XMLRPC on fire. Which means…

My MVP – Parity with XMLRPC

That’s right. If the REST API can do everything that XMLRPC can do today, I think that part of its code needs to be in Core today. Get it in. Get people using it. I don’t think the measurements of how many plugins are using the REST API are a valid argument, since you get these numbers (roughly):
- 115 plugins use XMLRPC
- 25 plugins use V1 of the REST API
- 21 plugins use V2 of the REST API
Now, this is not the right measurement because looking at both XMLRPC and the REST API, we are not clocking the number of plugins but the number of sites – non WordPress sites even – that are calling these features. And that is a number that cannot be measured. There’s no way on the planet to really know for sure how many people use those features because, for the most part, they’re not doing it within WordPress. All the plugin scans will tell you is people who are extending it, for the most part. WooCommerce, Advanced Custom Fields, those are plugins adding their own endpoints and hooks.

And those, yes, are important. But more so is the real-world.

Can we detect how many WordPress sites are using the JSON API? Not really. Sure we could probably violate trust and get a list of every site that’s asked for an upload or install of the plugin, that wouldn’t tell us who has it active and who is using it.

We’re Not Ready (Until We Leave Beta)

We’re not wrong to be cautious about this. There’s a freedom a plugin has that a core feature does not. Once the REST API is in core, it’s done. I don’t mean development or innovation stops, I mean we can no longer make breaking changes.

While we believe the API is now stable enough for public testing, we may continue to break the API in the future as we improve it further. Only use the API in development, and do not use version 2 in production environments.

That’s what the documentation for Beta 1 says. And when I look at the changelog for 2.0 Beta 12.0 (released February 9, 2016) I count six changes labeled ‘breaking change.’ That’s bad. I hesitate at saying it’s deplorable, as I understand why it’s happening. They’re iterating fast and hard and trying to get to a place where they’re ready.

That said, this is a real world problem, as Eric Mann expressed in a series of Tweets:

My client installed the REST API before it included post meta. We had to build a bunch of custom work to support meta.
Then the REST API updated to include meta and broke our integration. I spent a chunk of hours refactoring to compensate so we could update.
Now, apparently, the REST API is pulling that meta support out and putting it in a separate plugin …
Yet people still criticize me for saying I’m wary of placing too much dependency on the stability of the API …

Eric’s point is a good and valid one, and it actually supports both ends of the argument.

The REST API is too much right now. It’s too much of all the things, and pulling meta out and letting it iterate quickly is a good choice. That said, the rest of the API needs to consider the same things. What’s done? What’s ready and locked and will not be ‘breaking’ changes? That should be ‘stable release #1’ and that goes into core.

From that moment on what’s in core cannot not receive any breaking changes. Lock down: These are done and will not be broken. Give the developers your promise in blood that this is what it is.

WordPress is backwards compatible for a million miles and frankly the REST API has not been. So make it. Put it in stone. But the REST API plugin itself is really too big to continue developing as it has been, and that’s to it’s detriment. It’s simply not sustainable the way it has been because it’s trying to serve two masters.

On the one hand, it wants to grow rapidly. On the other, it wants to be secure and safe and solid and ready for code.

But right now we’re stuck in Beta, and that hurts the perception. Also we’re still breaking things, and that hurts adoption. No one wants to start using a beta product that changes things in a way that breaks their sites. No one wants to use this for clients yet.

I Propose a “Release Candidate”

Go back to my first point.

Parity with XMLRPC. That’s all the REST API core plugin should be right now. Pull out everything else and slap the designation “Release Candidate” on there. You do not break things in Release Candidates. This candidate is your candidate for core inclusion. When it’s good, that goes into core and we close the existing plugin. Of course we do one final update to notify people ‘Hey, this is included in core now! Woohoo!’ It’s called ‘disabling’ the plugin, and anyone who has a feature plugin thats been moved into core, if you want it disabled, contact the plugins team. We will be happy to retire you plugin.

What about everything else? They get punted out into their own mini plugins. Like meta, they can be iterated and they can break all they want until they hit Release Candidate.

You see, that Release Candidate is your promise that you believe you are ready to go. Everything works the way you want it to, everything is ready for real-world testing. No more breaking changes.

In Hindsight

Looking back, I think the REST API is a perfect example of why the Featured Plugin system is both perfect and problematic. We are trying to simultaneously treat development like a plugin (fast, light, and iterative) and like core (adaptive, backwards compatible, and reliable). The whole reasons we started breaking out things like MP6 into Feature Plugins has come home to roost and shown that the idea is solid, but the methodology needs to be more set in stone as to what they should and should not do.

For a Featured Plugin, Beta is the time for breaking. RC is the time for testing in the real world. We need to be more firm about what we will include in our Featured Plugins and what we will not. We need to be harder on adding new features. We need to say ‘No’ a little more, and let things be developed outside of the plugin.

We need a plan that includes the retirement of the plugin when it’s job is done.
15 February, 2016
Mailbag: The Trouble of Rollbacks
Anonymous asks:

Why doesn’t WordPress let me rollback a plugin?

Answer: Because the education of developers as to how to properly tag and number releases hasn’t hit critical mass.

Other answer: Because no one’s paid me enough yet to sit and manage every single WordPress plugin release to ensure the developers are properly using tags.

Other answer: No one’s written the code to enforce proper tagging for plugins.

Look. Let’s step back. Why does rolling back WordPress work? I’m going to assume you disabled auto-updates for a moment. They work becuase WordPress understands semantic versioning.
- 4.4 is a major release.
- 4.4.1 is a minor release (bug and security fixes)
Now go look at your plugins. Look at their versions. Let me show you what I, a plugin reviewer, sees:
- 20151205-295323 is a major release
- 3.2.3.1 is a minor release
- 4.2.1 is a major release
- 14.4 is a critical bug fix
- 738741 is a minor release
It goes on and on.

But even if we fix that, we have to trust that people will remember to actually use the SVN tags folder. They don’t. Trust me, about half the time I contact a plugin developer about a problem, I have to ask them to please use SVN properly.

The trunk folder is for the ‘latest’ version of your plugin. This may be a beta, and it may be the same as your stable release. Either way, trunk should be a working version.

The tags folders are for your releases. Finished up version 1.3.4? Great! Update the plugin readme and the main file to have the new stable version and run svn cp trunk tags/1.3.4 to copy it over. Done. But no, they don’t do that.

This is the ‘fault’ of open source and freedom, of course. We let plugin developers do what they want, a lot more than themes, and with that freedom comes risks and responsibilities. Different people rise to those responsibilities differently. Most of us stumble along, make mistakes, figure out what best practice works for us, and move on.

Should WordPress enforce proper behavior? I gotta tell you, I don’t think it would be sustainable. Not without a much smaller repository and not without some sort of signed contract with developers to agree to the guidelines. And I don’t think developers would like it.

I don’t think we’re (yet) at the point where auto-updating plugins is wise. Themes, yes, but I don’t think plugins are quite there yet. Maybe we’ll get there, but there are so many hurdles before us it’ll be a while yet.
5 February, 2016
Packaging and Shipping Resource Folders
No, I don’t mean resources to get help.

Have you ever opened a plugin or theme and seen a folder that says bower_components or node_modules? Yeah, I hate those. I don’t hate Bower or Node, I use them quite a lot. I hate how people use them in their plugins.

What Are Those Folders?

In order to make life easier, Bower is a package manager that lets you install libraries that your plugin needs. Making a plugin that needs AWS SDK?

bower install aws-sdk-js

Boom. And you can easily upgrade it too with bower update – which I love. This is a great idea.
```
$ bower install aws-sdk --save
bower aws-sdk#*                 cached git://github.com/aws/aws-sdk-js.git#2.2.28
bower aws-sdk#*               validate 2.2.28 against git://github.com/aws/aws-sdk-js.git#*
bower aws-sdk#~2.2.28          install aws-sdk#2.2.28

aws-sdk#2.2.28 bower_components/aws-sdk
```
But notice that last line? bower_components/aws-sdk is where it saved my files. And if I go in there, the JS file I need is bower_components/aws-sdk/dist/aws-sdk.min.js and that is surrounded by other files:

Now as a developer you have a couple choices here. You can leave the file where it is and just call it from there or you can move it. If you move it, you want to make a simple way of updating it. After all, the whole point of using Bower here is to make life easier. Personally I use Grunt for these things. I talked about it last year but my basic idea is to use Bower to download the latest and greatest versions, and then Grunt takes care of (a) updating the Bower packages and (b) copying the files to where I need them.

Okay, but what if I have something a little more complex?

What Resources Do I Need?

This seemingly innocuous question is surprisingly deep. It’s not just ‘what package/library am I trying to manage’, but how do I manage it and with what? What if, instead of the javascript, I wanted to use the PHP AWS SDK instead? Well, the AWS SDK for PHP is not available in Bower! Instead it uses Composer.

Here’s where things get weird. Composer is a package manger. Grunt is a package manager. Node and Bower are too. This means I have to stop and think hard. Which one do I need? Why do I need it? What am I going to be managing?

It’s time to ask this:

What Are My Packages For?

Within Node there are two kinds of packages:
- “dependencies”: these packages are required by your application in production
- “devDependencies”: these packages are only needed for development and testing
Take a moment to think what you need to dev and what you need to run. Your test code doesn’t need to be in your release, does it? No, of course not. It would make perfect sense to have in your Git or personal repository, but the WordPress SVN repository is not actually for your own code management. It’s a release management tool. That’s another post for another time. Just keep in mind that you should really only be pushing your code to SVN when it’s a version ready for use (be that beta testing or releases).

Back to what things are for. When talking about the AWS SDK javascript, I’m talking about front end packages. So that’s a dependancy. But Bower? It’s a devDependency. The users don’t need to know (or care) that I’m using Grunt and Bower to package things up. That means they shouldn’t be installed in my plugin!

In the case of my AWS SDK a ‘devDependency’ is Composer. I only need it to build my packages.

My dependencies are as follows:
```
    "require": {
	    "aws/aws-sdk-php": "2.*",
	    "doctrine/orm": "*",
	    "monolog/monolog": "*"
	}
```
Adding that to my composer.json file is a simple thing and now I can just run composer update to get everything I need!

Where Should My Packages Live?

This is generally pre-destined. If you use Node they go in node_modules and Bower likes bower_components and Composer uses vendor and so on and so forth. You can, of course, customize these. I often make a folder called ‘assets’ or ‘assets-dev’ so I can easily ignore it in my version control. Frankly I don’t need them and neither do my users and it’ll help save space.

There’s a cool thing about composer. If you use composer init then it asks, at the end “Would you like the vendor directory added to your .gitignore [yes]?” This is great, because if you looked at the folder vendor you would see a lot of folders and files you don’t really want. I actually only want one folder vendor/aws/aws-sdk-php/src/Aws/ and I want that folder to be located in aws/Aws please and thank you. Composer adds this into .gitignore for you.

You’ll still have to add that into your SVN ignore file, which is a little more annoying. To ignore all composer.* files it’s this:
```
svn propset svn:ignore "composer.*" .
```
And if you want to ignore multiple files or folders use the following command to bring up the text editor:
```
svn propedit svn:ignore . 
```
For SVN I would ignore composer.json, composer.lock, and the vendor folder.

How Do I Move Folders?

Remember I want to move things to another folder? I use Composer’s scripts to do this. I admit this is ugly code. I have this in my composer.json:
```
	"scripts": {
        "post-update-cmd": [
	        "rm -rf aws/Aws",
	        "cp -r vendor/aws/aws-sdk-php/src/Aws aws/",
	        "rm -rf aws/Doctrine",
	        "cp -r vendor/doctrine/common/lib/Doctrine aws/",
	        "rm -rf aws/Guzzle",
	        "cp -r vendor/guzzle/guzzle/src/Guzzle aws/",
	        "rm -rf aws/Monolog",
	        "cp -r vendor/monolog/monolog/src/Monolog aws/",
	        "rm -rf aws/Psr",
	        "cp -r vendor/psr/log/Psr aws/",
	        "rm -rf aws/Symphony",
	        "mkdir -p aws/Symphony/Component/EventDispatcher",
	        "cp -r vendor/symfony/event-dispatcher/* aws/Symphony/Component/EventDispatcher/"
        ]
    }
```
This runs whenever I run composer update in this folder and it copies everything where I need it to be. I did tell you it was ugly, right? But it does work.

The Result?

The result is my vendor code is never uploaded to WordPress.org’s SVN, my users never see the stuff they don’t care about, and I have a faster way to update my plugins when I need to make sure all the packages are right.
3 February, 2016