Tag: wordpress

Google Apps
I don’t like Google very much. However when my grandmother had a request for something to be added to her website, I realized Google’s email would actually be much easier for them, especially since her domain, taffys.org, is mapped to this server as a part of my Multisite network. Oh, it’s not terribly hard to make emails for her, but she wanted someone local to do that.

There’s a minor story behind that, but the shortest version is she’s doing some totally awesome not-for-profit work with Parkinsons patients. One of the things she wants is an email, used by many people, to ‘collect’ messages like ‘I’ll be there.’ While I could do this on my site, it’s actually easier to get this up on Google, where I can tell people login to go to http://mail.google.com/a/taffys.org or http://mail.taffys.org and it’s something they know.

I chose to do this by command line, for the experience. If I wanted to do it via cpanel and WHM, you’d go in to edit the DNS zone for the server and add in the mx records.

MX Records

The command dig mx taffys.org tells me what I have right now, which I knew was self referential.
```
; <<>> DiG 9.3.6-P1-RedHat-9.3.6-20.P1.el5_8.5 <<>> mx taffys.org
;; global options:  printcmd
;; Got answer:
;; ->>HEADER<<- opcode: QUERY, status: NOERROR, id: 20605
;; flags: qr rd ra; QUERY: 1, ANSWER: 1, AUTHORITY: 2, ADDITIONAL: 1

;; QUESTION SECTION:
;taffys.org.			IN	MX

;; ANSWER SECTION:
taffys.org.		14010	IN	MX	0 taffys.org.

;; AUTHORITY SECTION:
taffys.org.		78943	IN	NS	ns1.ipstenu.org.
taffys.org.		78943	IN	NS	ns2.ipstenu.org.

;; ADDITIONAL SECTION:
taffys.org.		6943	IN	A	50.28.84.96

;; Query time: 11 msec
;; SERVER: 69.167.128.254#53(69.167.128.254)
;; WHEN: Tue Nov 13 08:09:06 2012
;; MSG SIZE  rcvd: 104
```
Looks like that for all my stuff. Okay, no problem, I go in and edit /var/named/taffys.org.db and find this:
```
taffys.org. IN MX 0 taffys.org.
```
Change it to this:
```
; Original
; taffys.org. IN MX 0 taffys.org.

; Gmail
taffys.org.             14400   IN      MX      10 ASPMX.L.GOOGLE.COM.
taffys.org.             14400   IN      MX      30 ASPMX2.GOOGLEMAIL.COM.
taffys.org.             14400   IN      MX      20 ALT1.ASPMX.L.GOOGLE.COM.
taffys.org.             14400   IN      MX      30 ASPMX4.GOOGLEMAIL.COM.
taffys.org.             14400   IN      MX      30 ASPMX5.GOOGLEMAIL.COM.
taffys.org.             14400   IN      MX      20 ALT2.ASPMX.L.GOOGLE.COM.
taffys.org.             14400   IN      MX      30 ASPMX3.GOOGLEMAIL.COM.
```
And then I ran /usr/sbin/rndc reload taffys.org to refresh it. But ... wait. Why does it still say I'm on taffys.org? Per usual, I didn't bother to change my TTL. As everyone always reminds me, if you make a change to DNS without lowering your TTL values, you're gonna have a bad time. Since I'm (rarely) in a rush for this stuff, meh. Besides, it takes 24-48 hours from changing TTL for it to be usable, and then I can make my change. Followed by waiting again, and then changing it back? DNS is pretty zippy these days. 72 hours max, and usually less, so I just don't.

While I waited on that, I went ahead and made a Google Apps account for taffys.org. When you go to Google Apps they only show you business and education. I'm neither (though I suppose what I'm doing for Taffy would be non-profit). Really they're trying to sell, which makes sense. If you go to their pricing model, you'll see the free option. Unless you're running a business, click that.

The rest of the directions are really straight forward, and Google shows you what to do. It's really just set up the account stuff from there out. The directions to make mail.yourdomain.com are under Create a custom web address.

If you want to do it with a GUI, it's even easier. I went into my DNS management setup on cpanel and did this:

Will I do this for other domains? Maybe. I think I'll be doing this for hosting going forward, since the people I host rarely (ever?) use cPanel. Congrats, Taffy! You're the first! Liv's the second.

Now I have to fix up Taffy's site.
14 November, 2012
Sidebar Login Widget

This comes up a lot.

The basic concept is you want to allow users to log in and out via a sidebar, and never see the admin-end of WP. There’s an awesome plugin called Sidebar Login that already does this, but I decided to play around and make a dead simple widget. There’s no ajax going on here, and very little code since it all calls the built in functions and filters.

It lets you make a few choices, as to what verbiage you want to use, and if you want to show login/registration info or not. The registration link won’t work if you have registration turned off, natch.

All the code is here at Hack: Sidebar Login Widget

Really those hacks are more ‘mu-plugins’ that I don’t want to support, but still wrote, but you get the idea.

I’ve taken to writing up the code, when I can, for people in the forums a little more, since it helps me as a developer get better with WordPress. I’m still new at wrangling widgets, so this was a new, and interesting, experience for me. That brought up questions for me, as to where people like the plugin ‘settings’ to be.

[polldaddy poll=6676462]

8 November, 2012
I’ll be in Tybee!

There’s an upcoming WordPress Community Summit, and I’ll be attending! I was invited before I was employed here at DreamHost (who is providing lunch, yay!), so now I’m serving two purposes! The first is as a community support leader, and in that auspice, I plan to represent the common user. The second is as DreamHosts’s WordPress Support Manager, and there I will represent the support my company provides you DH users.

Do you have any topics you’d like to see me address at the meetup? Any annoying WordPress/DreamHost issues taht you’re not sure is WP or DH? Leave a comment and I’ll do my best!

24 October, 2012

WordPress Cancel Post Button

Someone asked about this in the forums. I can see why folks would find it useful, so here’s a simple addition to add a ‘Cancel Post’ button to your publishing metabox.

This plugin checks what post-type you’re on and redirects you correctly for pages and CPTs.

To Install

Make a file called cancel-button.php and put it in your mu-plugins folder (if you don’t have one, just make it in /wp-content/). In that file, paste the following (yes there’s no ending PHP tag, it’s okay, you don’t need it):

<?php

/* 
Plugin Name: Cancel
Plugin URI: https://halfelf.org/
Description: Adds a 'cancel' button to posts, next to Publish.
Version: 1.0
Author: Ipstenu
License: GPL2

*/

add_action( 'post_submitbox_misc_actions', 'author_in_publish' );

function author_in_publish() {
    $screen = get_current_screen();
    $cancel = get_admin_url();
    if ( $screen->id == 'post') {$cancel = "edit.php"; }
    else { $cancel = "edit.php?post_type=$screen->id";}
    
    echo "<div class=\"misc-pub-section\"><a class=\"button\" href=\"".$cancel."\" id=\"post-preview\">".__('Cancel Post')."</a><input type=\"hidden\" name=\"wp-cancelpost\" id=\"wp-cancelpost\" value=\"\"></div>";
}

This will add the button for all your sites on a network, if you happen to use Multisite.

19 October, 2012

Auto Multisite Registration
There are plugins for this, and I’m rather fond of them. If you just want all new users to be added to some (or all) sites, then I suggest you use Multisite User Management. It’s a great plugin, and lets you pick and chose. But similar to how sometimes you want users to register per site, you may have a situation where you want users to be added to any and all sites when they visit.

So how do we do this? It’s really not that painful, just make a add-users.php file in your mu-plugins folder with this:
```
<?php

/*
Plugin Name: Add Users
Description: Add users to blogs when they visit.
*/

function helf_add_users( ) {
    global $current_user, $blog_id;

    if(!is_user_logged_in())
    return false;
 
    if( !is_user_member_of_blog() ) {
        add_user_to_blog($blog_id, $current_user->ID, "subscriber");
    }
}

add_action( 'wp' , 'helf_add_users' , 10);
```
This code will automatically detect “John Doe is logged in.” and “John is not a member of this site.” If both of those are true, then it says “We will add him as a subscriber.” You can change subscriber as you see fit.

Would it be more efficient to just do this check on registration? Sure. But there are moments you don’t want this. If you wanted to get extra sneaky, you could set this to only run on a specific page, and make that page password protected.

If we want to add in a couple extra layers, that’s also not terrible. Let’s say we want people to press a button ‘Join This Site’? I have to admit, this actually took me longer to hash out than I wanted it to, mostly because I decided if I was going to do this, I should do it all the way.

That’s why I came up with Join My Multisite, which is a handy plugin to give you some more options. It’s per-site configurable, so your site-admins will get to decide if they want everyone logged in user to be added to their site, or if they want a widget, or if they want nothing at all. I put some time into thinking about if it would be a good idea to have the network admin be able to pick, but when I got down to brass tacks, I realized there was no way to easily force a widget (i.e. the button to join the site) for all sites and make it always look good. If you need that, you should fork the plugin and hard-code in the widget.

In a way, this is an extension of the old ‘Add Users Sidebar’ plugin, which drifted off into the wayward lands of not-supported. I never looked at that code, though, and instead wrote all this from scratch.

In addition to all that, Join My Multisite gives each site the ability, if registration is open, to easily make a per-site registration page. That one was Mason James’ suggestion.
17 October, 2012
Instagram oEmbed
This isn’t hard, so it’s just a nice example of how to handle instagram.
```
wp_oembed_add_provider('#http://(www\.)?instagram\.com/.*#i', 'http://api.instagram.com/oembed?url=', true);
```
Per usual, I have a file called oembeds.php in my mu-plugins folder, where I toss all these. This will work with and without www in the URL. I will warn you, Instagram’s embed is ugly! Here’s http://instagram.com/p/QU1OfbHBTe/

http://instagram.com/p/QU1OfbHBTe/

See? No formatting, nothing to tell you it’s bloody Instagram.

Meanwhile, here’s the tweet it came from:

#chucknorris http://t.co/6RD1E0lL

— Sarah (@fevered) October 3, 2012

Much nicer, eh? Of course, Instagram is weird, in that they don’t let you browse images.
3 October, 2012

Tag: wordpress

Google Apps

MX Records

Sidebar Login Widget

I’ll be in Tybee!

WordPress Cancel Post Button

Auto Multisite Registration

Instagram oEmbed