Tag: wordpress

Just Ask

Someone asked me why I spoke at some events and not others. Or why I was on some podcasts and not others. For WordPress, I do generally apply to speak if I’m going (for what I consider obvious reasons, I’m good at it and I actually enjoy it, shut up Jenifer, you were right) but I also like going to WordCamps just to learn and be social in a businessy sort of way. This is my job, after all.

So why did I talk on WPWatercooler or MeetWP or The Matt Report? Why did I do the interview with Code Poet? It’s so simple you’ll laugh.

They asked.

I very rarely say no. The two days I tend to are Fridays and Saturdays. I’m not online Saturday, and Friday is usually pretty busy for me. Okay, and I admit Sundays I’m usually out at the archery range or solar (it’s an arts and crafts thing), but still, with enough warning I can make some time. The point being, I’m totally fine with people asking me “Hey, can you be on our thing?” Unless you’re totally hate filled, anti-everything, jerks (which is … surprisingly hard to find in the WP world), I’ll likely say yes if I have the time.

Mind you, I don’t listen to or watch most podcasts or hangouts in real time. I just don’t have that time anymore. I have a backlog saved, and when I’m at work, I play them on my iPad when things are slower.

I am sorry to have had to turn down WordCamp Orlando last year, but I’d just come off of three funerals and 6 events in 8 weeks, and I was burning out emotionally (I’m putting you on my list for 2014!). I’m sorry I had to turn down a same-day request from the Matt Report once, but it was just phenomenally bad timing that day. I didn’t even see the email until it was almost too late. Yeah, that kind of day.

The point to all this is that while I know a lot of people don’t find me super approachable because I like having my personal space respected, and I feel that an unsolicited email is roughly the same as a phone call, my real intent with that viewpoint is to make you think. Think about what you’re asking. Think about what you’re giving to people and what they’re giving you. Don’t take brutal advantage of their good nature, and always respect them as humans with lives and agendas that may not be 100% the same as yours.

See that’s not hard? Give and take is what makes WordPress great.

7 February, 2014
SSL for One Domain on Multisite
To start with, I made a mistake and assumed, bad me, that the Terms of Service that let me collect donations for my ebooks would similarly be okay with collecting payments for said ebooks. Alas, no. “Digital goods including digital currency” are not permitted, and that was my bad. It resulted in me losing my entire account and having to fight to get my customers their money back.

Meanwhile I decided to get started on making an easy way for people to pay and stay on my site (like Stripe), and this, no matter what, means I need to have SSL.

Normally that’s not too much of a problem, but my store happens to be a subdomain of a mapped domain on a multisite. My WordPress install is at ipstenu.org. This site is actually tech.ipstenu.org, and my store (store.halfelf.org) is actually hshop.ipstenu.org (stands for HalfElf Shop…). I used domain mapping to point halfelf.org to tech.ipstenu.org, and store.halfelf.org to hshop.ipstenu.org. While I could just edit the site and home URL in the ‘Edit Site’ page, domain mapping is needed for in order to tell WordPress that the domain is really a thing.

Setting all that up was the easy stuff, though. The SSL part was something I’ve poked at before and given up, since multiple domains and one SSL cert is a pain in the ass. But today, if you go to the Half-Elf Warehouse, you’ll see it’s all SSL! (NB: It was. It’s now only SSL on pages that need SSL, to allow for better caching.)

You will need….
- An SSL Certificate
- An add-on domain
- wp-config.php edits
- .htaccess edits
- WordPress HTTPS Plugin
SSL Certs

This is the easy part. You need an SSL certificate for the domain you need to protect. If this is the only domain you want to add this on to, it’s relatively easy. If you need to add SSL on to multiple domains, check with your webhost.

I actually have multiple SSL certs. The problem with multiple SSL certs is that a wildcard one for subdomains costs around $300 (this is on Comodo), and I have three domains I need to protect on one server… Oh. Wait, wasn’t this a problem before? As it happens, I’ve got SNI on my Apache instance now, so that was fixed. I picked up a cert for store.halfelf.org and set it up, done. Except…

Add-on Domain

Why this? Well it’s funny. I used to always tell people ‘Use Parked Domains, it’s way easier’ and this is still true, it just has a caveat of ‘unless you’re trying to use SSL.’ Now that I am, I hit a sticking point where a parked domain cannot have it’s own SSL cert, but an add-on domain can. This was a simple fix. I deleted the parked domain and flipped it to an add-on domain. Then I added the certificate in for my site and now I have https on ipstenu.org and store.halfelf.org but not halfelf.org. Why? Because halfelf.org and store.halfelf.org are separate add-on domains. Had I bought a wildcard cert for halfelf.org, I could have made halfelf an addon, and store.halfelf a parked domain on top of halfelf, but this works too.

The other option, of course, is a multi-domain cert, which is too much money for my tastes, and I don’t need it all the time. I have SNI, which makes this so super easy for me, it’s silly. Just add the cert for the domain and have a party.

WP-Config

But today I only want to force one of my mapped domains to be SSL:
```
if ( $_SERVER["HTTP_HOST"] == "store.halfelf.org" ) {
    define('FORCE_SSL_ADMIN', true);
    define('FORCE_SSL_LOGIN', true);
}
```
No that was it. If it’s two domains, it’s this:
```
if ( $_SERVER["HTTP_HOST"] == "store.halfelf.org" ) { ...}

if ( $_SERVER["HTTP_HOST"] == "ipstenu.org" ) { ...}
```
and so on and so forth. Why not using an OR check? Because it failed miserably when I did that. I suspect it’s due to ipstenu.org being my main domain, but I was tired and stopped here.

.htaccess

Okay, now I want my domain to default to SSL when people visit too!
```
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^store\.halfelf\.org
RewriteCond %{SERVER_PORT} !443
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ https://store.halfelf.org/$1 [R,L]
```
That was easy.

WordPress SSL

What about making everything on my page load SSLish? Install and activate? That was it? Oh. Okay.

Verify!

Hey! Looks good! Actually I’d had a problem when I first ran this.

Yeah, that little yellow triangle. What the heck did it mean? I trotted off to Why No Padlock? and got an error:

SSL verification issue (Possibly mis-matched URL or bad intermediate cert.). Details:
ERROR: no certificate subject alternative name matches

That didn’t help me at all, so I viewed page source and looked for http://store and didn’t find anything. Then I looked at the console and saw that it had an error on some JS:

//Moral? Always read the ToS.
5 February, 2014
Why Not Multisite?

My most popular post ever has been Don’t Use WordPress Multisite, which I wrote in 2011. It’s 2014 so it was time for a revisit of this concept.

The point I made in 2011, and again at WordCamp San Francisco in 2013, was that while Multisite is amazing and awesome and wonderful, it’s got limitations. I love it, I think it’s perfect for me, but I always keep those limitations in mind and try to educate people as to what they are. I think I have a pretty good grasp on them by now, and so does Nacin:

@jbenton @Krogsgard Basically read everything @Ipstenu has written (including when she suggests to not use it).

— Andrew Nacin (@nacin) December 20, 2013

This may make you wonder what I could possibly say that hasn’t been said before? The questions remain the same, but the answers change a little as time goes by. I want to stress that for every single reason I’m going to list as a case for not using Multisite, I probably have broken. Rules aren’t meant to never be broken, their meant to make sure we understand what and why we’re doing what we’re doing.

The absolute number one aspect about Multisite that you cannot forget is this: Multisite is for running multiple WordPress blogs (aka sites) on one install (aka a network), with separate content but a shared base for code and users.

If I was to make it a rule it would be this: Don’t use Multisite unless you want to run multiple WordPress sites, each with their own admin section.

But …

You know how I made that list of reasons? Like you don’t need it to categorize posts and make a site that’s all the same (or even all different), and I still firmly think that no one has any reason in the world to have a site that duplicates content 100%. Sometimes you do need Multisite for this stuff. Or rather, sometimes you can use Multisite, and it’s not the wrong choice!

You don’t need Multisite

WordPress comes with categories so just use that. Want to remove the word ‘/category/’ from your permalinks? WordPress SEO (by Yoast) can do that, as can No Category Base. Need to limit an author to a category? Use Author Category! In addition, there are Custom Post Types, which you can create for each ‘category’ and then limit authors using Custom Post Type Privacy.

WordPress comes with categories and Custom Post Types which let you keep your site looking exactly the same from page to page to page, which is awesome. This is, in an essence, what WordPress was made for. If you don’t want your ‘sections’ to look the same, hey theme templates will let you customize the look and feel of each category (or CPT) as you want. WordPress is crazy flexible, and plugins are phenomenally wonderful to let you customize WordPress to the nth degree. Like categories as subdomains, which means it’s theoretically possible to do the same for a CPT. I know you can map CPTs to domains already.

Before someone gets all snippy about how too many plugins make your site slow, I have to point out that too many poorly written plugins do this. It’s not the number, it’s the quality. A bad theme can slow your site down too, and I see that every single day.

You could use Multisite

So why would I use Multisite for those situations?

What if your ‘sections’ aren’t just meant to segregate content? Like you’re selling eBooks and you want to run a whole special ecommerce tool for tracking and payment. Or maybe you’ve got a membership tool and want to set up a news site where people can register and write, but keep them off the ‘main’ site where you’ll be linking featured content back. What about a site that will exist for a year to represent an event like a WordCamp, and then be ‘retired?’ Suddenly we’re talking categories in a different light, and maybe, just maybe, Multisite would work for this.

It’s easier in Multisite to totally re-skin a section because it’s using its own theme. You can quickly spin up a child theme just for one site, or use a plugin like the CSS Editor that comes with Jetpack to allow each site it’s own custom CSS.

Because each site is separate, I can limit plugins and prevent load creep per site. Not every ‘section’ needs the same plugins, after all. And at the same time, the ones that do can be network activated. Also a growing number of plugins are taking Multisite into consideration, like W3 Total Cache now lets the network admin configure a large amount of caching settings for the network as a whole! This number grows every day.

Which Should I Use

There isn’t one perfect answer here, but that’s true of all things WordPress. I think my cardinal rules of Multisite are mutable and all colored with a great deal of “It depends.” For every single reason I wouldn’t use Multisite, I also would (and probably have) used it. You have to take into consideration supportability most of all, though. Multisite’s worst flaw is that it leads to cases where your eyes are bigger than your stomach, and your network becomes huge and unwieldily before you’re ready to cope.

The one rule I’ve yet to break, and one I strongly feel no one should, is this: Never use Multisite if your users cannot know about other sites.

Other than that? Hey, the world is your oyster!

Multisite is big. It’s daunting. It’s complicated. It’s still, and probably will always be, harder than running a single blog, which makes sense. You’re no longer running a site, you’re running a network.

3 February, 2014
Giving Back Anew
One of the things that makes WordPress special is that people give back. Even people who make their living off WordPress via their plugins or themes give back in some way, be it testing new versions, submitting patches, or even making suggestions and asking questions. I got my start by giving back and answering low-tech questions in the forums.

Thus it’s natural that, while testing Easy Digital Download’s new version, I reported problems upstream:

And perhaps more natural that I made my first attempt at a patch on Github for it as well:

My code patch is a total of three lines. Four if you count the one I deleted. That’s all it takes to help contribute. You could even fix a typo.

What does this have to do with ebooks? The patch I submitted was for the display of the [downloads] shortcode, which will allow you to more easily display a flexible column list of your downloads. If you’ve seen my Catalog page, the books are listed with multiple items per line. But I’m not using any columns. With my code patch, you’ll be able to do this:

[downloads columns="0" thumbnails="true" orderby="title" order="ASC" buy_button="no" category="wp" price="no"]

Which outputs no columns and no breakpoints at all. Then you just need some CSS.
```
.edd_download_inner {
	float: left;
	width: 290px;
	margin-top: 10px;
	margin-bottom: 20px;
	margin-right: 15px;
	position: relative;
	height: 300px;
	padding-top: 10px;
	background: #F7F7F7;
	border: 1px solid #ddd;
	text-align: center;
}

.edd_downloads_list.edd_download_columns_0 {
	width: inherit;
}
```
Voila! Flexible columns!
31 January, 2014
Genesis Design for Gummies

You’re not a dummy, right, you know how to write and you know what’s good and what’s not, but the last time you had to edit your CSS your site went white. It’s worse now that you’re using this awesome theme called Genesis where every design is a ‘child’ theme that you don’t even want to edit because if WordPress taught you anything it’s that you don’t touch the plugin and theme files!

Well great. Now what?

I’m not a consultant. I suck at it, I hate it, and I don’t enjoy it. My friends the Norcrosses over at Reaktiv Studios are a dev agency that makes themes and plugins and even updates (they’re not paying me or compensating at all for this statement, I don’t even use ’em, I just like ’em). They’re good at it, and to make their life, and your life, easier, they came up with a new plugin called Genesis Design Palette Pro.

Previously, if you want to edit your theme, I would have said to use Jetpack’s CSS editor. Heck, that’s really what I do here, since it keeps revisions of your css changes. But most of what people change are the standard things that make your site look like an individual. The CSS is just a wall of weird, codey, text thing that made no sense when I first looked at CSS back in 1999. And that’s really how everyone did stuff back when Prince was en vogue.

But now there’s that nice Theme Customizer built in to WordPress that lets you edit the most basic (and most commonly used) aspects of your site right there and see the changes live! Wouldn’t it be nice if every theme let you play with its design like this?

Come here. Closer. The Genesis Design Pro plugin does that for you in a way that looks ‘right’ and familiar. Don’t believe me?

Looks familiar, don’t it? Okay, it’s not exactly the same, yet, but give it time. You can edit for mobile or desktop, adjust colors and padding with simple interfaces that are way easier for a lot of people to master than the weird CSS world. You can even add that freeform CSS if you want.

I think my only wish for it would be to have an export to css function, so I could design everything, save it, and then plunk it on a site as is.

10 January, 2014
Welcome the Warehouse

It’s January and my ebooks are now located at http://store.halfelf.org/ and managed by Easy Digital Download. The WordPress Multisite books have been seriously updated for WP 3.8, with new screenshots, new plugin recommendations, and some simpler layouts. If you downloaded them before, you may want new copies now (and there’s a new one on plugin support!). But let’s go back to EDD.

It was really that easy

About three years ago, I thought about selling my ebooks on a dedicated site (ebooks.ipstenu.org) but it never worked right, and I didn’t like it. Then I tried just tracking the downloads with a plugin, but that was more work and I was getting a little twitchy and obsessive about the metrics. So for most of 2013, the downloads weren’t tracked at all on this site. But when I was redesigning my site, I knew that I really wanted to try this plugin my friend Pippin wrote: Easy Digital Downloads

I want to note that I had decided to play with the plugin before I read Chris Lema’s post on Easy eCommerce & Membership Sites using WordPress. Which doesn’t have anything to do with anything except that he’s right, it’s easy, and anyone can do this. And as Chris pointed out, the tools can make it fast and easy for me. A couple years ago, I’d tried to make an online store for my wife and ended up telling her “This is too complicated, I can’t do it. Let’s use Etsy.” But that was physical products and this is digital, and we’re in California now which has a different law about selling digital items that is so clear, I understand it at first glance.

Publication 109, Internet Sales

Your sale of electronic data products such as software, data, digital books (eBooks), mobile applications, and digital images is generally not taxable when you transmit the data to your customer over the Internet or by modem. However, if as part of the sale you provide your customer with a printed copy of the electronically transferred information or a backup data copy on a physical storage medium such as a CD-ROM, your entire sale is usually taxable.

That is so much clearer than anything iBooks or KDP ever said, it’s hilarious. Since my stuff is all 100% digital and I live in California, there will not be taxes, which means I can sell things off my site, not have them be ‘donate if you want.’ Don’t panic, now they really are “Pay if you want.”

About the Warehouse and Pricing

If you’ve checked it out, you may notice the default price is no longer zero but $7.98 cents. As I started working on this, I really did get all the way through with a zero option before I realized … that was dumb.

I had a couple logical reasons for pricing at zero when I started out with this two years ago. First of all, I was entering unknown territory without any information. Secondly, I wanted to get my name out there. Third, I didn’t want a hassle. I still agree with Cory Doctorow about how DRM is evil, and the problem with only selling books is that people don’t really know if they like your writing, or if the book is worth it. Mind you, everyone could read my blog and sort that out for themselves, but I understand there’s a weird leap about paying even $0.99 for something you don’t know about.

But let’s think about what this means. With a normal book, you buy it, you own it, and if you hate it you can bring it back for a refund. With eBooks on the Kindle or iBookstore, you ask for a refund, they take the book back. Since I’m DRM free, I don’t have any way to revoke the book if you want a refund. Yes, that means if you demand a refund on the Kindle you keep the book and I get bupkis. (Two people in the history of ever have asked for a refund – both accidentally clicked ‘Buy Now’ twice.)

What am I getting from people not paying for the books? A whole lot of reading, that’s what. 3% of people who got 70 pages of Multisite knowhow paid ‘something’ for the book. And I’m not ungrateful to them. Getting that book out was really part of the whole process that landed me my job, speaking at WordCamps (which I surprisingly enjoy), and I’m incredibly happy with my life. But still, nothing from nothing, carry the nothing, does leave a person feeling a bit grumpy cat.

So would I incur the wrath of the Internet by saying that, as of 2014, you have to pay for the ebook? I think I would have. Especially since I said I would never force people to pay (even tweeted that whilst working on the site). With that in mind, I decided to do this differently and have it default to pay, but also super easy to not pay. My wife called it the “RTFM Tax” because if you read the site, you’ll see the code, and pay nothing.

On the sidebar is a notice about discounts for either 100% or 50% off. There’s also a ‘secret’ code of PIGS which drops the price of one ebook to $0.99, which is the cost of Angry Birds. I thought it would be funny.

How did I come up with the price of $7.98? Amazon helped me here. Initially I mathed the average donation to $8, and I adjusted my price on the KDP a couple times before I sussed out that people actually like non-even numbers like $7.98 so I did that and then publicized the discounts. No matter what you pay, you get to download the epub and the pdf. The ebooks are all DRM free. You’re still permitted, no, encouraged to duplicate and give ’em away.

Think of it like a GPL plugin you bought. Yes, you pay for the code, but once you bought it, it’s yours to use, burn, give away, or expand on. The one thing you can’t do is resell it as if it was yours. Which I hope you think is fair.

Let’s have fun with ebooks in 2014! After all, my next ebook is about … ebooks.

3 January, 2014