Category Archives: wordpress

Selectively deprecating WordPress plugins from Dashboard > Plugins

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On large WordPress MS installations where site admins are allowed to manage their own plugins, the list of plugins tends to get crowded over time. Sometimes you introduce a plugin to the network and admins start using it, but some time down the road – a year or two later, even – you decide that you want to deprecate that plugin (maybe to replace it with another one, etc). However, migrating users of one plugin to another plugin is a logistical and technical tangle, and sometimes the best medium-term strategy is to allow existing users of the plugin to keep using it, but to prevent admins from activating it in the future.

Here’s how we’re doing it on the CUNY Academic Commons. In the gist below, $disabled_plugins are the plugins that we don’t want people to activate in the future. In most cases, however, we do want people to be able to deactivate the plugins, so by default, we don’t filter plugins if they’re active. However, we also have an array of $undeactivatable_plugins, which cannot be activated or deactivated.

Props to dev team member Dominic Giglio for writing part of this.

BuddyPress Docs 1.3, featuring theme compatibility on BP 1.7

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I’ve just released version 1.3 of BuddyPress Docs, my WordPress plugin that powers collaborative document editing on a BuddyPress site. The main feature of Docs 1.3 is theme compatibility, which means that top-level Docs templates (archives, single docs, and the Create screen) are no longer necessarily top-level. Using the theme compat feature of BuddyPress 1.7 (currently in beta), this top-level content is put directly into the content area of your theme’s page.php template, ensuring that Docs pages will keep your header, footer, sidebar, and other global elements.

The theme compatibility feature only kicks in if you’re running BP 1.7. Existing installations of Docs on BP < 1.7 will continue to work as before.

Are you a BP Docs user? Are you already testing BuddyPress 1.7? I'd be glad to get your feedback on Docs 1.3. Report any problems on the issue tracker.

Dynamically add items to a wp_nav_menu() list

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WordPress’s wp_nav_menu() fetches a custom menu, as built using the Menus GUI, for display in a theme. I had a project where I needed to add some items to this menu dynamically – the links would be different for each user, and wouldn’t appear for logged-out users, so they couldn’t really be added using the GUI. After a bit of futzing, I was able to insert my menu items, tricking WP into thinking that they were native.

Details: For logged-in users, I needed to add three subnav items underneath the top-level ‘Activity’ item, if it was present. So at the beginning of the function, you’ll see that I’m doing some BuddyPress-specific stuff, to find the Activity menu. If you need to use a menu_item_parent like I did, you’ll have to supply your own method for finding it (or just hardcode it). The heavy lifting is done in the second foreach loop, where I build stdClass objects just robust enough that WordPress will interpret them as true nav menu items.

 

Safely delete spam comments across a large WP network

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I’m currently working on a university WordPress network that’s been running for four or five years (an MU veteran!) and has almost 5000 blogs, most of which are defunct (because they’re from previous semesters). Akismet is activated across the network, so there’s not much of a public spam problem. However, even spam comments are stored in the database, and some of the blogs have tens of thousands of spam comments sitting in their tables. I’m going to implement a couple of tricks to keep this from happening in the future (a lightweight honeypot for non-logged-in users, tell Akismet to auto-delete spam comments on old posts). But for now, I’ve got to clean up this mess, because the very large comment and commentmeta tables are causing resource issues.

I wrote a simple script that gradually cycles through all the blogs on the network and deletes comments that have been marked as spam by Akismet. Here it is, with some comments afterward:

Notes:

  • The number of blogs is hardcoded (4980)
  • The ‘qw_delete_in_progress’ key is a throttle, ensuring that only one of these routines is running at a time. You might call this the poor man’s poor man’s cron.
  • I’ve limited it to 10 comments per pageload, but you could change that if you wanted
  • Put it in an mu-plugins file. When it’s finished running (check the ‘qw_delete_next_blog’ flag in the wp_sitemeta table – it’s done if it’s greater than the total number of blogs on the system), be sure to remove it, or at least comment out the register_shutdown_function line.

Use at your own risk – I’m posting here primarily for my own records 🙂

Anthologize 0.7

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Anthologize 0.7 is here. Get it while the gettin’s good!

Version 0.7 includes a number of important, under-the-hood improvements. Some highlights:

  • The way Anthologize loads itself has been largely rewritten, which means that it fires up more reliably – and using fewer resources – than ever before.
  • Some validation issues with epub exportsr have been cleared up
  • In previous version of Anthologize, PDF exports sometimes failed because Anthologize could not copy inline images to the necessary temporary directory. This process has been rewritten so that our PDF library uses WordPress’s standard upload locations, avoiding permissions errors
  • A Spanish translation is now available
  • Full compatibility with PHP 5.4 and WordPress 3.5

In addition, a Credits page has been added to the Anthologize menu. This new page includes shout-outs to all those supporters of my fundraising campaign. If you donated (and opted not to remain anonymous), check out the Credits page to see your name in lights! And if I’ve made a spelling error, or linked to the wrong URL, please let me know.

This round of development was brought to you by Cyri Jones. Cyri is an educator and technologist doing amazing things with WordPress and BuddyPress in lovely British Columbia, including his ZEN Portfolios platform for student portfolios, and private social networks for a number of local school districts. I’ve had the good fortune to do some work for Cyri’s projects, and I think that the work he’s doing with these free software platforms points toward a very interesting model for putting social learning technologies in the hands of those who can use them. Cyri was also the brains (and brawn) behind the very first BuddyCamp, held last October in Vancouver. Rock on, Cyri!

Make Github issue numbers appear in browser tabs

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#70. Yippee!

#70. Yippee!

I use Github Issues as a bugtracker for a number of my projects. My workflow usually includes having the ticket open in one browser tab, and a local WordPress installation open in another browser tab (to test the bugfixes themselves). When I write commit messages, I want to reference the issue number, but by default, it’s buried deep in the <title> element, and thus not visible on a smallish browser tab.

So I wrote a short userscript that reproduces the issue number at the beginning of the <title>, so I can see it at a glance. It’s structured as a userscript for Greasemonkey/Firefox, though I imagine you could easily repackage it for Chrome or whatever.

[code language=javascript]
// ==UserScript==
// @name github issue number in tab
// @namespace https://boone.gorg.es
// @description github issue number in tab
// @include https://github.com/*/*/issues/*
// @version 1
// @grant none
// ==/UserScript==

var t, ttext, issueno;

t = document.getElementsByTagName( ‘title’ );
ttext = t[0].innerHTML;
ino = ttext.match(/Issue #([0-9]+)/);
console.log(“#” + ino[1] + ” ” + ttext);
t[0].innerHTML = “#” + ino[1] + ” ” + ttext;
[/code]

Circle back to those who refer work to you

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I get a lot of requests to do BuddyPress and WordPress dev work, and I can only take a fraction of that work myself. So I end up referring a lot of work to other developers. Sometimes I hear back from the client that one of the referrals worked out (or didn’t). Unfortunately, it’s very rare that I hear from the developer himself about it.

It’s unfortunate not because I need the gratification (although it’s nice to hear “thanks for the referrals” sometimes). It’s unfortunate because I want to be a good referer. I read every job inquiry carefully, and I try to make good matches between inquiries and what I know about the developers on my list. I look at how big the job will be, what kind of work it is (plugin dev, theme work, troubleshooting, etc), what field the client comes from (education, journalism, retail, etc), and other stuff like that, and match it up with the devs I think would be best for (and would most enjoy) that particular referral. When I never hear back from these friends, I don’t have the data I need. Stuff like: If you refused the job, why? Too busy? Not the kind of work you generally like to do? Did the referral make your lousy-client-sense tingle? If you took the job, how did it go? Was the client good to work with? Should I continue to send work like this?

So please: if you know that one of your client inquiries came from a friend’s referral, ping that friend at some point down the road. The more info you share, the better the referrals you’ll get from me.

As a side note, I’ve been chatting privately with David Bisset about coming up with systematic solutions to the kinds of problems I’ve described here (among others). But in the meantime, an occasional email will do the trick 🙂

‘Tis the season to support good things on the web

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Today I’m going to spend down some of my PayPal slush fund by making donations to online causes that are important to me. I do this every year, usually on a day in December (Christmas! Last chance for tax breaks! etc). Doing it in a single day makes it fun, like an event. Here’s a partial list of where I’ll be sending moolah today:

You don’t have to give to these specific causes (though you should – they are awesome!), but you should get out there and support some of the causes that you believe in. Even a couple bucks can be meaningful. ‘Tis the season!

Commons In A Box, ready to unbox

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It’s been a long time coming, but it’s here: Commons In A Box. Today we’re releasing version 1.0-beta1, the first public release. For some background on Commons In A Box, here’s today’s press release, my Commons Dev Blog post explaining some of the features of Commons In A Box, and the 2011 press release announcing the project.

The primary goal of Commons In A Box, in my view, is to reduce the barrier of entry to setting up BuddyPress community sites. BuddyPress is an extremely powerful and flexible platform for developing social WordPress sites, but getting a BP site right takes knowledge (which plugins are worth installing, which ones work best together, etc) and elbow-grease (customizing your theme, keeping a complex system up to date). These practical requirements have made BuddyPress seem imposing to many users – including, and perhaps especially, the users that need free community software the most, such as educational institutions. Commons In A Box lowers these barriers in a serious way, by helping with plugin selection and installation, and by providing a beautiful and flexible default theme. My hope is that Commons In A Box will serve as a gateway for a swath of potential users into the world of BuddyPress, WordPress, and free software more generally.

The process of pitching, planning, and producing Commons In A Box has been interesting, frustrating, and rewarding. In the upcoming weeks and months, I may write more about this process, and what I’ll personally take away from it. In the meantime, I’ll say that I’m very pleased to be ending this first stage of development, and pushing it into the wild, since software – even imperfect software – is infinitely more valuable when it’s out there, being used, than when it’s mouldering on a developer’s machine. Shipping FTW!

Learn more about Commons In A Box.