Half-Elf on Tech

Thoughts From a Professional Lesbian

Tag: wordpress

  • Fetch As Google Failed

    Fetch As Google Failed

    Once upon a time, I got an email from Google recently saying that Fetch as Google was failing for ipstenu.org.

    I eyed them like they had a fifth eye. I was on ipstenu.org. I was on halfelf.org. They were clearly wrong. So I went to Google Webmasters Tools and checked out what was going on. I had a whole page that said “Temporarily unreachable.” I gave it a day. Sometimes that’s just Google being weird. But no.

    Google's error - temporarily unreachable

    After cursing a little while, I turned off all the plugins on the site and switched to the default theme. And the fetch worked. So I turned them on one at a time until it stopped.

    And the moral, ladies and gentlemen, is that even though it’s been ten years of WordPress, when someone asks you to make sure you go through the normal debugging steps, you do it.

    • flushing any caching plugins you might be running, as well as server and/or browser caches.
    • deactivating all plugins (yes, all) to see if this resolves the problem. If this works, re-activate the plugins one by one until you find the problematic plugin(s). If you can’t get into your admin dashboard, try resetting the plugins folder by FTP or PhpMyAdmin (read “How to deactivate all plugins when you can’t log in to wp-admin” if you need help). Sometimes, an apparently inactive plugin can still cause problems. Also remember to deactivate any plugins in the mu-plugins folder. The easiest way is to rename that folder to mu-plugins-old
    • switching to the Twenty Fourteen theme to rule out any theme-specific problems. If you can’t log in to change themes, you can remove the theme folders via FTP so the only one is `twentyfifteen`. That will force your site to use it.
    • manually upgrading. When all else fails, download a fresh copy of the latest.zip file of WP (top right on this page) to your computer, and use that to copy up. You may need to delete the wp-admin and wp-includes folders on your server. Read the Manual Update directions first.

    So yes. Do try it.

  • Custom Excerpts Read More for Genesis

    Custom Excerpts Read More for Genesis

    I nearly always make a custom excerpt for every post I write. This has the benefit of letting my lede be extended into a great sub-headline. It has the downside of killing my ‘Read More’ links.

    The objective is simple. Have a custom excerpt and a read more link. The problem is that there are multiple excerpts and WordPress handles them all in different ways.

    1. The teaser – This is what you write in a post and end with a <!--more--> tag.
    2. The automatic excerpt – This is the first 55 words of a post.
    3. The custom excerpt – This is what you put in the ‘excerpt’ box on a post.

    Those are parsed in reverse order, so the custom excerpt is given the highest priority. That means in order to show my read-more links, I need to put this in my theme’s function.php file:

    function new_excerpt_more( $more ) {
	return ' <a class="read-more" href="'. get_permalink( get_the_ID() ) . '">' . __('Read More', 'your-text-domain') . '</a>';
}
add_filter( 'excerpt_more', 'new_excerpt_more' );

    But. I’m using StudioPress’ Genesis theme. This means I’d like to take advantage of some of the awesome accessibility friendly features so that my read more link looks like this:

    <a href="http://example.com/cookies-and-cake" class="more-link">Read more<span class="more-link-title screen-reader-text"> about Cookies and Cake</span></a>

    Okay, cool. How do I do that? Back in the old days, this was how you’d edit the link for Genesis:

    //* Modify the WordPress read more link
add_filter( 'the_content_more_link', 'sp_read_more_link' );
function sp_read_more_link() {
	return '<a class="more-link" href="' . get_permalink() . '">[Continue Reading]</a>';
}

    As of Genesis 2.2, we’re into a world of properly accessibility friendly code, and the function get_the_content_limit() has a major change where it calls genesis_a11y_more_link and that is the function that added in the span for the screen-reader, which requires me to add in the genesis-accessibility theme support for my theme.

    // Customize the read-more links in all situations
add_filter( 'the_content_more_link', 'sp_more_link_text' );
add_filter( 'excerpt_more', 'sp_more_link_text' );

function sp_more_link_text() {
	return '&#x02026; <a class="more-link" href="'. get_permalink( get_the_ID() ) . '">[' . genesis_a11y_more_link( 'Continue Reading' ) . ']</a>';
}

    And as far as it goes, that’s perfect. It makes sure everything matches nicely and is accessibility friendly. But it doesn’t take care of my custom excerpts. For that I need a force command:

    add_action( 'genesis_after_entry_content', 'sp_force_more', 15 );
function sp_force_more() {
	global $post;
	if ( has_excerpt( $post->ID ) && !is_singular() ) {
		echo '<p><a class="more-link" href="'. get_permalink( $post->ID ) . '">[' . genesis_a11y_more_link( 'Continue Reading' ) . ']</a></p>';
	}
}

    If there was an genesis_after_entry_excerpt sort of function to hook into, I’d be happier, but this works. It puts a [Continue Reading] paragraph at the end of each of my excerpts for my front page, my archives, and not my individual pages. This helps my readers who are, perhaps, not always as aware as they might be about where to click.

  • Mailbag: An Appropriate Solution

    Mailbag: An Appropriate Solution

    Y’all know I don’t really like to answer these questions. I mean. Presumably you’ve noticed I don’t answer this a lot anymore?

    I don’t care if you use Multisite. And I hate this question because you’re (innocently) asking me one of the most incredibly complicated questions possible.

    I’m working with a college who wishes to create a portfolio system for their students. Basically, a student can create their own website – or multiple – to share with employers and others. I’m thinking WP Multisite may be a good option. I could have super admin access, the college’s admin can have super admin access, and each student will have admin access to their individual sites. Would you agree that WP Multisite would be an appropriate solution?

    I agree it can be an appropriate solution.

    I will never agree it’s the solution.

    Read the post I linked to above, will you? The one that explains exactly why this is such a damned hard thing to answer.

    Now. Ask yourself this:

    1. Are those students the people who will be happy where they can’t install a plugin or a theme, or will they badger you endlessly to install them?
    2. Will those students ever want to easily export/move their sites?
    3. Will they ever need ‘more’ than WordPress and, thus, need shell or DB access?
    4. What do you want them to be able to do when they’re done?
    5. How much time do you have to fix their sites?
    6. Are you able to review and ensure security for all plugins and themes they may want?
    7. Do they already have webhosting? (Most universities give you some.)

    Figure that out and you’ll know if it’s the most appropriate solution for them and you.

  • Stupid Easy

    Stupid Easy

    You have made yet-another stupidly easy plugin. I love it!

    My buddy James said that after testing a plugin I wrote for WordPress that has no settings.

    Frankly those are my favorite plugins, the ones where you install them and walk away because they do one thing, they do it well, and you’re done.

    A plugin without options means it does the one thing, I don’t have to decide how I want it to work, and it just goes. Now, at the same time, a black box plugin with no information can be complicated and tricky, which means you have to sit and make the decisions thoughtfully at the beginning.

    The first question I ask is “Who is it for?”

    I love W3TC, but dear god is it complicated. It’s doing a lot of things and while it does them all very well, it’s hard to understand what all the settings mean and how they all need to work together. When I set about adopting a Varnish plugin, it was picked by my coworkers specifically because it was simple and it worked the majority of the time. Can you break it with other plugins and themes? Sure. That’s the nature of WordPress interoperability. But at the same time, it works without user interaction.

    That was the key, we felt. A plugin that just runs, no user interface needed, just let it go. This was simple, this was easy, and this was direct.

    Since then, I’ve added in two ‘options.’ One is the ability to define your true IP address. This is for people who are behind proxy services like CloudFlare. The way a Varnish purge works, is it sends a command to the domain name. If your domain is handled by CloudFlare’s servers, then it gets messy. The second was a ‘purge all’ button on the toolbar, which let you manually flush the entire site.

    Those two settings are hard and easy to access. The defining the IP can only be done via editing your wp-config.php or via command line. Why? The majority of people don’t need it. It’s actually often a latency issue when you cache a cache with a proxy, so it’s not really the best idea in the first place. The purge button is limited only to the admins of a site, because they’re the only ones who should be flushing the cache for an entire site anyway.

    Does this work for ‘everyone’? No. No it doesn’t. Of the 6000 people who like it just fine, there are about a dozen who want things differently. They want a settings page, where they can allow more people to flush cache and define the IP. They want a per-page flush button. They want better error reporting.

    I’m with them on the last one but the others… well it’s interesting. Adding more complications will certainly expand the usability of the plugin, but is that the goal of this plugin? No. In many ways, it would be much better to make a second, different, plugin. Maybe an add-on. Call it “Varnish Advanced” for those people who need more power.

    But the majority need the simple because I knew my target audience were the people who didn’t know or want to know the technical stuff. I handed them a plugin that works in the majority of use cases. I made sure it handled the majority of situations. And I made it so they could just install and walk away.

    I do agree that it needs a little better error reporting, but even that has to be handled carefully. You can’t just hand an end-user an error without simultaneously giving them a direct way to correct it. And no ‘Talk to your host.’ is not a fix. A fix means the user can do something (hopefully simple) to correct a problem. Now, my ‘edit the wp-config file’ fix is not super simple for everyone, but at the same time it serves an important purpose. It makes someone think about how big a change is and what it means.

    Knowing my users means I know they need that stop to think, and it means I know they will think.

  • Mailbag: Curbing Comments By Count

    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.

    Mod by comment length is a very basic field on your Comment Settings section

    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!

  • Mailbag: Chocolate Cake is a Need

    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!