Monthly Archives: August 2010

New WordPress plugin: Simple Import Users

My palz Mikhail and Luke over at Blogs@Baruch needed an easier way to add users to sites in the WordPress network. They’d been using DDImportUsers, which worked, but was finicky: DDIU required you to specify too much information, its formatting was tough for instructors to understand, and, most importantly, it didn’t deal well with existing accounts, which it simply ignored instead of adding as new users to the site in question. So they asked me to modify the plugin for their purposes.

The result is a near-complete rewrite, released today under the name Simple Import Users. Instead of entering all sorts of information about username, password, display names, etc, Simple Import Users accepts only a single argument: email address. That makes it simple enough for anyone to use. Insert a list of email addresses into Simple Import Users, and it checks each email address in the following way:

  • If a WP user is *not* found with the email address in question, SIU creates a new user with that address. The username is automatically generated from the part of the email address before the @-sign, which means that this plugin will probably work best for those setups where you can guarantee unique email prefixes (like schools). Passwords are randomly generated.
  • Then the new user (or the existing user, if one was found) is added to the blog.
  • The user is then sent a customized welcome email. All users get a message saying that they’ve been added to the blog, with information on how to access the dashboard. In the case of new users, it contains their login info as well.
  • If you’re running BuddyPress, the email to new users also contains a message encouraging users to fill out their BP profiles, with a link to the Edit Profile page.

The plugin has no settings, and is intended for this very specific purpose. But if you’ve got a setup like Blogs@Baruch, it could save you a lot of time and effort.

Get the Simple Import Users here.

Enabling Popularity Contest for WordPress networkwide use

Alex King’s Popularity Contest is a pretty cool way to collect data about which posts on a WordPress site the most popular. The data collected is more sophisticated and customizable than simple analytics, because it distinguishes between page views and things like trackbacks, comments, and other kinds of hits. The plugin supports WordPress Multisite in the sense that it’s possible to activate network-wide; when you do so, the plugin keeps site-specific popularity stats. But what if you want popularity rankings across your entire network?

I recently modified Popularity Contest to do just that. The idea is simple: in order to keep network-wide stats, we need a network-wide table (instead of the default site-specific tables). How do you keep information about all networkwide posts on a single blog? I used Donncha O Caoimh’s Sitewide Tags as a bridge. All posts across the network are copied to the tags blog, and popularity data is indexed on the tags blog.

To make this work, several things are needed. I can’t just give you the files because I’ve altered them in other, irrelevant ways, but I will walk you through the process of setting it up. Also, keep in mind that we’ll be modifying the plugin code for both Popularity Contest and Sitewide Tags, modifications you’ll have to make each time you upgrade the plugins. Make sure you back up your work.

  1. Install Sitewide Tags which can be downloaded from its website. You have to activate a few things in order to turn it on – read the readme carefully. Be sure to take note of the tags blog id number, as we’ll need that in a later step.
  2. In sitewide-tags.php, look for the function sitewide_tags_post(). Near the end of the function is a line that says restore_current_blog();. Immediately after that line, enter the following code:
    [code language=”php”]update_post_meta( $post->ID, ‘tags_post_id’, $p );[/code]
    That line makes sure that every time a post is aggregated on the tags blog, the original post gets a piece of metadata noting the post id of the corresponding tags blog post. We’ll use that information in a later step.
  3. Download Popularity Contest from its website. I don’t recommend that you activate it yet, especially not networkwide, because it will create a lot of tables that you don’t really need.
  4. The next few steps will require mading some modifications in the main Popularity Contest plugin file, popularity-contest.php. The first modification is to change all references to $wpdb->posts (which, when activated networkwide, will refer to the posts table for the individual blogs) and change them to point to the tags blog post table. A search and replace that replaces $wpdb->posts with wp_posts (or wp_x_posts, if your tags blog is not site number 1 but is instead site x.
  5. The next modification involves the function akpc_init(), near the end of the plugin file. That’s where the table names for the Popularity Contest custom tables are found. We need to make sure that they point to the tags blog. Replace the existing function with this:
    [code language=”php”]
    function akpc_init() {
    global $wpdb, $akpc;

    $wpdb->ak_popularity = ‘wp_ak_popularity’;
    $wpdb->ak_popularity_options = ‘wp_ak_popularity_options’;

    $akpc = new ak_popularity_contest;
    $akpc->get_settings();
    }
    [/code]
    If your tags blog is something other than blog 1, you could change these table names to match (e.g. wp_15_ak_popularity) but it isn’t really necessary.

  6. Now we have to make Popularity Contest aware of the identity relationships between the tags posts and the original posts. Two snippets of code should do it in most places. First, find the function record_feedback, which starts around line 700. Right before the switch($type) line, insert the following:
    [code language=”php”]
    if ( $tags_post_id = get_post_meta( $comment_post_ID, ‘tags_post_id’, true ) )
    $comment_post_ID = $tags_post_id;
    [/code]
    Next, find the function akpc_api_record_view(), which starts around 2550. Right after array_unique($ids); (around line 2555), insert the following:
    [code language=”php”]
    $tags_ids = array();
    foreach ( $ids as $id ) {
    $tags_ids[] = get_post_meta( $id, ‘tags_post_id’, true );
    }
    $ids = $tags_ids;
    [/code]
    These two modifications make sure that Popularity Contest knows which post on the tags blog corresponds to the post being visited/commented on on the child blogs.
  7. At this point, you can activate the popularity plugin networkwide. Here’s what happens, very roughly:
    • The plugin creates the necessarily popularity tables – just one set for the whole installation.
    • When you publish a new post on any site, it gets copied to the tags blog. Our modification from step 2 makes sure that the copied post ID (let’s say 36) is saved to the original post.
    • When someone visits the original blog post, Popularity Contest fires (because it’s been activated network wide). Our modifications in steps 4 and 5 make sure that the plugin knows to record the activity to the tags blog index, and step 6 make sure that the plugin know which post the activity belongs to.
  8. You’ll need another modification to get the data out, since you’ll want to display it on your site somewhere. The default function for this is called show_top_ranked(). We need to modify so that it gets the requested data from the right place. Replace the stock function with this one:[code language=”php”]
    function show_top_ranked($limit, $before, $after) {
    switch_to_blog( 1 );
    if ($posts=$this->get_top_ranked_posts($limit)) {
    foreach ($posts as $post) {
    $ud = get_userdata( $post->post_author );
    print(
    $before. get_thumbnail( $post->post_author, 36 ) .’ID).'”>’
    .$post->post_title.’

    ‘. $ud->display_name . ‘‘ . $after
    );
    }
    }
    else {
    print($before.'(none)’.$after);
    }
    restore_current_blog();
    }
    [/code]
    Make sure you change the number in the switch_to_blog() call to the id of your tags blog.

I think I’ve remembered everything. Good luck!

Bonus!

For my project, I was moving from a single WordPress site to a multisite situation. The popularity plugin had been running on both setups for a while, so the data was totally messed up and needed to be combined (which meant finding the corresponding post data and adding it together – yeesh!). Here’s the script I used – be careful with it, and keep in mind that it was designed for a *very* specific use. Do not use this code if you don’t understand exactly what every line does!

[code language=”php”]
global $wpdb;

$query = “SELECT * FROM {$wpdb->blogs} WHERE site_id = ‘{$wpdb->siteid}’ “;
$blog_list = $wpdb->get_results( $query, ARRAY_A );

foreach( $blog_list as $blog ) {
//print_r($blog); continue;
if ( $blog[‘blog_id’] == 1 ) continue;
//if ( $blog[‘blog_id’] != 83 ) continue;

$tn = ‘wp_’ . $blog[‘blog_id’] . ‘_posts’;
$tnmeta = ‘wp_’ . $blog[‘blog_id’] . ‘_postmeta’;

$query = “SELECT ID FROM {$tn} WHERE post_type = ‘post’ AND post_status = ‘publish’ “;
$posts = $wpdb->get_results( $query, ARRAY_A );

foreach( $posts as $post ) {
$id = $post[‘ID’];

$query = “SELECT meta_value FROM {$tnmeta} WHERE post_id = ‘{$id}’ AND meta_key = ‘tags_post_id’ “;
$tags_post_id = $wpdb->get_results( $query, ARRAY_A );
$tpid = $tags_post_id[0][‘meta_value’];

$query = “SELECT * FROM wp_ak_popularity WHERE post_id = ‘{$id}'”;
$old_data = $wpdb->get_results( $query, ARRAY_A );
$old_data = $old_data[0];

$query = “SELECT * FROM wp_ak_popularity WHERE post_id = ‘{$tpid}'”;
$new_data = $wpdb->get_results( $query, ARRAY_A );
$new_data = $new_data[0];

if ( $old_data && $new_data ) {
$combined_data = array();

$combined_data[‘post_id’] = $new_data[‘post_id’];
$combined_data[‘last_modified’] = $new_data[‘last_modified’];

foreach( $old_data as $key => $d ) {
if ( $key == ‘post_id’ || $key == ‘last_modified’ )
continue;

$combined_data[$key] = (int)$d + (int)$new_data[$key];
}
}

$query = ‘UPDATE wp_ak_popularity SET ‘;
foreach( $combined_data as $key => $cd ) {
if ( $key == ‘post_id’ )
continue;
$query .= “{$key} = ‘{$cd}’, “;
}

$query = substr_replace( $query, ”, -2 );
$query .= ‘ ‘;

$query .= “WHERE post_id = ‘{$combined_data[‘post_id’]}'”;
$wpdb->query( $query );
print_r( $old_data ); echo “
“; print_r($new_data); echo “
“; print_r($combined_data); echo “
“; echo $query; echo “

“;

}

echo “

";
//		print_r($posts);
echo "

“;
}
[/code]

Anthologize 0.4-alpha is released

The Anthologize team has been hard at work over the last week, fixing bugs behind some of the most commonly reported problems, and adding features to make Anthologizing easier and more fun. We’ve just tagged version 0.4-alpha in the WordPress repository. Visit your WordPress Dashboard’s Plugins page to upgrade.

Read more about the changes in 0.4-alpha.

Questions or thoughts about Anthologize? Visit the Anthologize home page or the Anthologize users group.

Hiding WordPress custom post type menu items without disabling edit access

WordPress 3.0’s custom post types are really cool, opening up a whole new world of use cases for WordPress. We used custom post types extensively when developing Anthologize. But there are still some rough spots.

For instance, the ‘show_ui’ parameter of register_post_type() is a little bit too coarse-grained for our purposes. For Anthologize, we wanted to allow the user to edit custom post types with the standard Edit page, but we didn’t want users to be able to access most of these post types through the menu items automatically created by register_post_types (all links to the edit pages would appear on our custom Dashboard panel, in order to reduce redundancy and confusion). With ‘show_ui’ set to true, users could access the edit screens, but they could also access the unwanted menu items; with ‘show_ui’ set to false, the menu items were hidden, but navigating to the Edit pages (directly, via URL) threw a “You don’t have permission to access this page” error.

Here’s how we resolved the dilemma. Note that it’s a bit hackish at the moment. In the future, I hope the WordPress team will split ‘show_ui’ gets into multiple, separate arguments.

  1. In your register_post_type() call, set ‘show_ui’ to true. Here’s an example from Anthologize:
    [code language=”php”]
    register_post_type( ‘library_items’, array(
    ‘label’ => __(‘Library Items’, ‘anthologize’ ),
    ‘public’ => true,
    ‘_builtin’ => false,
    ‘show_ui’ => true,
    ‘capability_type’ => ‘page’,
    ‘hierarchical’ => true,
    ‘supports’ => array(‘title’, ‘editor’, ‘revisions’),
    ‘rewrite’ => array(“slug” => “library_item”)
    ));
    [/code]
  2. To remove the unwanted menu items, we’ll take advantage of the fact that WordPress has built-in support for custom menu order. First, we have to tell WordPress to expect a custom menu order. (The following two functions are modified from Anthologize, where they’re methods on a loader class.)
    [code language=”php”]
    function toggle_custom_menu_order(){
    return true;
    }
    add_filter( ‘custom_menu_order’, ‘toggle_custom_menu_order’ );
    [/code]
  3. Once custom_menu_order has been set to true (step 2), WordPress makes a new filter hook available, menu_order. As the name says, it’s really meant to reorder menu items, but we’ll use it to erase menu items altogether.
    [code language=”php”]
    function remove_those_menu_items( $menu_order ){
    global $menu;

    foreach ( $menu as $mkey => $m ) {
    $key = array_search( ‘edit.php?post_type=library_items’, $m );

    if ( $key )
    unset( $menu[$mkey] );
    }

    return $menu_order;
    }
    add_filter( ‘menu_order’, ‘remove_those_menu_items’ ) );
    [/code]

    Here’s what’s happening. The filter hook is meant to modify $menu_order. That’s why remove_those_menu_item() takes $menu_order as an argument, and returns it back to WordPress untouched on the last line of the function. On the first line of the function, we’re taking advantage of the fact that the $menu variable – where menu items are stored for construction into markup later on – is in the global scope. Once we’ve declared that we’ll be using $menu on the first line, we loop through each of the menu items, and when we find one that matches our custom post type (ie, when we find one that contains the string ‘edit.php?post_type=library_items’ – you’ll have to replace the post_type with your own, obviously), it gets removed from the $menu global.

You can iterate this for as many different custom post types as you’d like – just add more potential keys to the foreach loop in remove_those_menu_items(), eg
[code language=”php”]
$key = array_search( ‘edit.php?post_type=library_items’, $m );
$keyb = array_search( ‘edit.php?post_type=some_other_post_type’, $m );

if ( $key || $keyb )
unset( $menu[$mkey] );
[/code]

Introducing Anthologize, a new WordPress plugin

The moment has arrived!

Anthologize

Anthologize

The product of One Week | One Tool, a one week digital humanities tool barn raising hosted by CHNM and sponsored by the NEH Office of Digital Humanities, is Anthologize. Anthologize is a WordPress plugin that lets you collect and curate content, organize and edit it into a form that works for you, and publish it in one of a number of ebook formats.

As I said in my last post, I was the lead developer for Anthologize. This stemmed from the fact that, for reasons of market penetration and ease of use, we’d chosen WordPress as a platform, and I was “the WordPress guy”. As such, I was the natural person to oversee the various parts of the development process, and to make sure that they fit together in a neat WordPress plugin package. It was an incredible and humbling experience to work with a group of developers who were, to a person, more talented and experienced than I am.

Anthologize PDF output

Anthologize PDF output

Today, the plugin is shipping with four different formats for exporting: PDF, ePub, RTF, and a modified version of TEI that leaves most content in HTML form. None of these export processes are perfect. Some require that certain libraries be installed on your server; some do not offer the kind of layout flexibility that we like; some are not great at text encoding; etc. This release is truly an alpha, a proof-of-concept. The goal is to show not only what a group of devoted individuals can conceive and develop in six short days, but also to provide the framework for further development in the world of independent authorship, publishing, and distribution.

As such, the plugin is designed, and will continue to be developed, with an eye toward maximum flexibility and modularity. Content can be created in WordPress or pulled in by RSS feeds, providing for greater choice of authoring platform. Export formats are generated by translators that work not with native WordPress data, but with an intermediary layer structured with TEI metadata markup. That means that you don’t have to know anything about WordPress to build a new export translator for yourself – you only have to know some PHP and XSLT. And we’re working on expanding Anthologize’s action and filter hooks to allow for true pluggability in the manner of WordPress itself.

I’m hoping that Anthologize will be a useful tool that draws development interest from folks who might not otherwise be interested in WordPress or web development, especially those who are working in the academic, cultural heritage, and digital humanities worlds. Get involved by checking out our Github repository at http://github.com/chnm/anthologize, our development list at http://groups.google.com/group/anthologize-dev, or stop in and chat with the dev team at #oneweek or #anthologize-dev on freenode.