WordPress "Must-Use" Tutorials» Where can I find…?

Firefox search engine plugins for WordPress

andrea — Fri, 25 Mar 2011 14:00:00 +0000

Contrary to popular belief, I do not have the entire codex and support forum contents in my head. There are a couple of tools that make searching for WordPress specific information a whole lot faster, and my job as tech support a whole lot easier.

Even if you’re not looking up plugins and codex references for clients, customers or users, if you’re a dev these may make your job (or hobby) just a little bit faster & easier.

WPLookup and WPseek both look up functions and their usage, both also have their own extensions for the Firefox search box.

WP Codex searches the codex. One less click.

WordPress Plugins is a handy way to search the plugin repo for that one you were trying to remember. (oops, link now busted, great. Alternate is here.)

Both of those are a *lot* faster than simply bookmarking the search page.

Check out WPeBooks.com for multisite plugins & ebooks.

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Anatomy of a home page: WordPress.com

andrea — Sat, 06 Dec 2008 17:32:11 +0000

Many people have big dreams when planning their WPMU-based site, and want to be the next WordPress.com. I see a lot of requests for how to make a home page like theirs, but I don’t think you should copy anyone’s site outright. You can, however, be inspired by them. A lot of successful wordpressmu-based sites have common features on their homepage, and today I hope to go over the one we all know best.

Let’s look at a recent screenshot of WordPress.com’s home page and see the elements included. I’ll follow-up with an explanation of where the find the various plugins and tools to achieve the same functionality (where possible).
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Read the rest of Anatomy of a home page: WordPress.com (748 words)

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WordPress to WordPressMU importing

andrea — Tue, 04 Mar 2008 18:59:37 +0000

I love it when someone gets to me to-do list before me. It’s like an early birthday present. That being said, Jim over at BatavaTuesdays has written up a pretty thorough step-by-step process. I haven’t tested it myself, but it looks right so far.

The quick overview is to make a SQL backup of the WP blog, change the table prefixes and import it directly into the MU database. Yep, that’s pretty much it.

(Oh look, there’s another idea for a plugin if anyone wants to write one. )

Check out WPeBooks.com for multisite plugins & ebooks.

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Missing plugins folder and mu-plugins folder

andrea — Tue, 05 Feb 2008 15:14:15 +0000

If you’ve recently downloaded a newer version of MU, you may have noticed on a fresh install that the plugins folder and the mu-plugins folder are not there. Or, maybe you’ve seen them referenced, and finding them not where they are supposed to be, got horribly confused. No worries.

There are not there because in the latest system they are empty, and thus not created in the zip. There are no default files included in either folder anymore, leaving that up to the site admins.

Just create them on the server, and you’ll be good to go.

Check out WPeBooks.com for multisite plugins & ebooks.

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How to get a zip from trac of recently changes files

andrea — Thu, 25 Oct 2007 16:27:36 +0000

Now that we are familiar with the trac system, how can one get a small zip containing just the needed files that have been recently changed?

First, you need to know what you already have installed. As of this writing, if you have the latest from the download page, you have installed 1.2.5a. This is also listed in the admin footer of your install. In the trac system, you can find tagged version of the code in the “tag” section. (Browse to the source, choose the tag folder instead of trunk.) Scan along that line and you will see a cloumn with the revision number. In the case of 1.2.5a, it is revision 1054.

Remember that number.

Browse back up to the root, choose trunk this time. Near the top right along the menus, choose “Revision Log“. Scrolling down, you will note that revision 1054 is not there, but 1053 and 1055 are. That’s because 1053 was the last file change before it was tagged as that official release. Making that change (tagging an official version) was the 1,054th change and it was assigned to the tag folder. The next change was a file change in the trunk folder, and thus was 1055.

On the left of the columns are radio buttons. Select the left-most radio button next to number 1055. At the top, the right-hand radio buttons already have the latest change selected. If you don’t want to go quite that fare, that’s fine. You may only want to go as far as before the most recent WordPress merge*, in this case 1124. So now that we have two radio buttons selected, press the “view changes” button near the top left.

* Typically a WordPress merge means quite a few file changes, so you may want to leave that revision for another seperate time to deal with it.

Depending on how many changes are between your selections, it may take a bit to bring back results. What you will see next is a list of every file that has been changed. The small box in front of each filename is a color status. Yellow means changed, red means deleted and green means added new.

Scrolling a bit further, you will see line-by-line results of recent changes. In our example there’s a lot, so feel free to scroll on by. And finally we’ve reached the bottom of the page, where once again we’re greeted with a download link to a zip. This will contain just the changed files between revisions. The directory structure is maintained, so once you’ve downloaded it and extracted it somewhere, you can easily replace the files in your test bed with a quick drag and overwrite all.

This is a good option if you do not have a local copy to sync with through svn, or you do not want to download the whole entire recent package.

Check out WPeBooks.com for multisite plugins & ebooks.

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What is trac and how do I use it?

andrea — Wed, 24 Oct 2007 14:34:00 +0000

Ah, the trac system. Trac is a program on the server that keeps a record of every single code change made by the devs. It also serves as a bug reporting and archiving tool. Every time a change is made to the codebase, it is submitted to trac. When you read about “development version” or “bleeding edge code” this is the repository that people are referring to.

Initially, it can be quite confusing to move around and find things. The main area that you will probably use is located in the link along the top right of this screen. Choose “Browse Source”, then the “trunk” folder, and you’ll see what looks like a directory structure of the whole program. Next to each file name is a line with the most recent reason for the last change to that file. There is also a column to show the last time that particular file was updated.

Before you click anywhere, scroll down to the very bottom of the page. See where it says “download in other formats”? The zip archive link below is indeed a zip of the latest development version. It’s handy if you need or want the absolute latest version that hasn’t appeard on the official download page yet.

The same is true for individual files. You can always browse to your needed file and get a copy from the links at the bottom. Then you can integrate this into your install. Take care to read the comments next to the files, as sometimes there are warnings that it is still untested and should not be moved into a production site without a through test by you.

Coming up:
- how to file a bug ticket and follow the latest issues
- how to sync a local install with the latest version
- how to find line-by-line code changes
- how to get a zip of recently changes files

I’ll link to these as they are written.

Check out WPeBooks.com for multisite plugins & ebooks.

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Where to find error logs

andrea — Sun, 30 Sep 2007 13:50:43 +0000

Error logs play an important part in determining what is going on with your setup. Sometimes errors are surpressed from screen viewing, so the results are stored in a file. The system itself will write to an error log in the root folder. That is the first file you should check. The file is named error_log and has no extension. There may be other erro_log files created within subdirectories, so check there too. (wp-admin, wp-content and wp-includes)

Within these files you will find very specific incidences of errors generated across the system, including which files tripped the error. This is helpful in narrowing down what to fix.

Sometimes they can get quite large, especially if left unattended, so once you’ve taken care of the generated errors (or found out they are some variation of “normal”) you can delete or shorten the file.

If you are running MU on a cPanel server, you can also find an error log there. Usually it is at http://yourdomain.tld:2082/frontend/x/stats/errlog.html or similar.

Often I find repeated request for non-exisiting files from one IP address. This is almost always a spammer of some kind, so feel free to add their IP to your deny list. Do this by editing your htaccess file manually, not by using an htaccess manager within cPanel, because it will overwrite it.

Check out WPeBooks.com for multisite plugins & ebooks.

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Got questions? We’ll try and answer

andrea — Thu, 13 Sep 2007 14:34:23 +0000

If you’ve stumbled your way here, I’m looking for reader feedback. If you’ve got questions about wordpressmu and can’t seem to find the answer, I’ll try and help.

The only caveat is, I’ll stick to the distributed codebase. I can point out, however, if you need a plugin or not and where to find it – if it exists.

Check out WPeBooks.com for multisite plugins & ebooks.

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