Its a simple idea that makes this administrative task so much easier for an active site. This little WordPress plugin is great!

About the plugin from the Binary Moon page:

BM Custom Login is a plugin I developed to give people an easy way to add a custom WordPress login screen to their WordPress powered blogs. The idea of the plugin is to ease WP upgrading since you will not need to repeatedly make the same changes; this is particularly useful when working with clients. The download contains the plugin and a handy little login screen Photoshop kit to speed up development of your own screens.

Custom login screen that I made in about 10 minutes...

All you have to do is use the Photoshop template to create your custom image.  Then you upload the new image to the appropriate plugin sub-directory.  That’s it!  Presto-change-o, your new login page is now active and upgrade proof.  Simple, elegant, easy.  What more can you ask for?

While I don’t use the plugin for this blog (I’m the only one that logs in here!), I do use it for other WordPress installs that are interactive with clients.  Its a very nice, easy to use addition to make your WP site look that much more refined.

Fantastic job Ben!

It allows for the threading of comments – meaning that you can reply to a SPECIFIC comment, so it keeps the any discussion more organized.  This is using a new standard feature of WordPress 2.7 that utilizes embedded Javascript handling of comment handling.  It does require certain changes to your theme though.  Once you’ve followed the theme change directions, you need to add style handlers to your CSS file to get the most out of the new enhanced display.  It can be overwhelming at first, but it is pretty simple over all.

Check out these two great places to start for examples of the comment styling: Performancing and CDHarrison.   Props to CDHarrison for my wholesale rip of his stylesheet for the comments section here.  I’ll undoubtably play with it to make it my own, but his example is so good it may be a while. 

Leave a comment below to see it in action!

But, largely it all tells you how to do the same 4 or 5 things.  What if I needed something different?  SOL, baby.

Recently I worked on migrating an old ASP based website to a new WordPress installation.  Everything went pretty well, except that the old site was pretty darn popular and there are literally thousands of links to it all over the net.  We didn’t want to lose those links and dump them all into an ugly 404 not-found error page, but yet given the fairly sweeping changes that were made, there was no real way to do a one-to-one mapping from the old pages to the new.

As a result, we wanted to take any ASP page call and simply redirect it to the root of the site.  There is an added challenge in that the site actually has multiple domains pointing to it, which added a bit of complexity.  I had tried modrewrite changes, but they didn’t seem to be working very well.  It also seemed a bit heavy handed, when what I really wanted to do was a “simple” redirect.

As you may know, there is a mechanism to do that, and it is simply called Redirect, and it works as follows:

Redirect 301 oldfile newfile


Unfortunately, the syntax only works for explicit matches, meaning that you have to specify EVERY .asp page and explicitly point it to another location. UGH. Not good for a site with well over a hundred pages of content. Even if I was willing to type them all in, since we wanted to redirect everything to the root anyway, adding all of these redirects would be huge waste of processing overhead.

What to do? After reading way too much information online and slogging through the Apache docs for a few hours, I stumbled across RedirectMatch, a great way to add a little regular expression logic to your redirect calls.

Using this simple tool, I was easily able to redirect ANY .asp file to the root.

RedirectMatch 301 (.*).asp /

Simple. Elegant. No modrewrite.

Of course, now that I know what I’m looking for, finding it again would be pretty easy.    Googling 301 redirect regex match gives me the right answer on the second hit.  Go figure!

Unfortunately, that’s actually NOT where I found the info.  That was a much more convoluted process.  A shout out to WebWeaver for introducing me to RedirectMatch!

I previously had used Adobe Contribute, but that was horrible. Maybe Word will be better. My feeling though is that it will create a ton of stylistic crapware in each post.

Here’s hoping not.

For those of you that just want the info, here you go.  This is a quick and easy way to directly replace one string with another for all rows in a column/field.  DISCLAIMER: If you don’t know what you are doing, you can really screw up your database.  Please take care to do a backup and by all means, if you can’t fix what you break, don’t attempt this.

UPDATE MyDB.MyTable
SET MyDB.MyTable
= REPLACE(MyDB.MyTable.MyField,'OldString','NewString')
WHERE MyDB.MyTable.MyField like '%OldString%';


Real World Usage:

I just ran into this issue when implementing our new Milowerx Media website.  My brother and I have been setting up the site on a development server that was hosted as a sub domain of the milowerx.com root.  Doing so allowed us to keep up the old site as www.milowerx.com while we created the new site.  When we were finished with the new site, all I needed to do was change the DNS value for the www entry and tell the new server that it was www and not the development subdomain wpdev.

As I’ve probably mentioned before, I use WordPress to do just about any web related task these days, and the new Milowerx site is no exception.  There are several nice things about using WordPress as a Content Management System.  It is extremely flexible, has a great user community that contributes tons of useful plugins and finally it is extremely stable.

But, this post is about SQL, not WordPress.  I bring up WordPress however because it is a completely dynamic Web Content Publishing platform that is driven entirely by PHP files reading values in a database.  One of the plugins that we used was WordTube, which we chose to help manage the oodles and oodles of media that we have generated over the years.  Its a great plugin, but unfortunately it uses explicit URLs that are stored in the database to generate it playlist values.  When migrating the server from the dev environment to production, all of the references were calling the wrong URL.

Essentially, I needed to find every instance of the development server name wpdev and replace it with www for all of the WordTube tables.  To do so, I ran two MySQL queries that did the trick.

UPDATE MyWPDB.wp_wordtube
SET MyWPDB.wp_wordtube.image
= REPLACE(MyWPDB.wp_wordtube.image,'http://wpdev.','http://www.')
WHERE MyWPDB.wp_wordtube.image like '%http://wpdev.%';


and

UPDATE MyWPDB.wp_wordtube
SET MyWPDB.wp_wordtube.file
= REPLACE(MyWPDB.wp_wordtube.file,'http://wpdev.','http://www.')
WHERE MyWPDB.wp_wordtube.file like '%http://wpdev.%';


The first query updates the thumbnail images; the second updates the actual movie files.  Presto, change-o, it all works. 

Now, for those of you who know DNS and WordPress, you may be thinking “Why didn’t you just mirror wpdev to www so that any call to wpdev would end up pointing in the new, right location?”  Well, good question.  The answer is that WordTube seems to handle local files one way and remote files another.  Leaving the wpdev reference changed the way thumbnails and movie files were handled in the playlist.  So, technically it would have worked, but the outcome wasn’t optimal.  And, two easy SQL statements was much easier than slogging through the code of WordTube. 

Why have my insane ramblings been banned?  I know not why.

I first noticed something was up when I logged in to Technorati to update a few items in my profile.  For some reason my blog claim was gone!?  I looked around to see if I could spot a reason why, but there was nothing there indicating the reason why my little patch of cyberspace had disappeared.

Oh well, no problem, I figured I’d just reclaim my blog, as I’m not one of those evil “Authority” wranglers who does things to specifically increase their ranking, and frankly didn’t care if I had to start afresh with my ranking.  Truly, I don’t care much about my ranking on Technorati, but I do like being listed.

You can imagine my surprise when I was greeted by the above message!   I’VE been flagged!?  Good heavens, why?

Surfing on over the the Blog Quality Guidelines yields a fairly benign list of DO’s and DON’Ts that I believe I am absolutely in compliance with.  My use of WordPress covers most of the technical requirements, so the easily drawn conclusion is that they somehow dislike my content, style or topics?

I don’t over-tag, post spam or over-link.   I don’t post with commercial intent.  I don’t belong to even a single affiliate system.  In short, I don’t do ANYTHING to try to game their damn system.   Yet, I’m banned.

So, I figured it was a simple case of misunderstanding.  As their “Troubleshooting” section advises, I filled out their support contact form and have waited for a response.  A month has gone by and I haven’t heard a thing.  Google can respond within a day to issues, despite being used by 10 bazillion times the number of people.  In fact, they sometimes respond within minutes.  Technorati?  Not within a month.

Well Technorati, you can take your haughty attitude and stick it up your ass, right next to your head.

Consider yourselves BANNED TOO!  Never will a Technorati tag be used on this site again.  HA!  Take that you arrogant bastards!

And, if YOU have a complaint, you can use MY complaint form below.

Its a Plugin Generator that will generate a customized code skeleton for your newest plugin idea – pretty neat!

The little web app asks you a bunch of questions, like what the plug in should be named, does it require saved settings, etc. and then it spits out a tidy zip file that contains a new plugin.php file along with any other files that are required based upon your answers.   It supports a number of neat options, like making a new DB table, Shortcodes, Filters, Admin Menu Integration, etc.

Of course, the resulting code doesn’t DO very much – its just the structure that you need to make a plugin.  You have to add the actual functionality with your coding wizardry.  Still, this is a nice way to make sure that you’ve covered all your bases when writing a new plugin.  It simply shortcuts the process of Idea -> Reality, which is always welcome in my book.

Check it out!

UPDATE:  Check out the new URL:  http://www.funwithwizards.com/ for the latest version and some other cool tools!

Of course, you can always access the latest information on my local Postcasa Page but you can also visit its official Plugin Page hosted at the WordPress Codex. Now that it is officially hosted there, you’ll also be able to automatically update the plugin from within WordPress as new versions are released. Pretty cool stuff!

Dang, how I love WordPress!

As a result, I’ve written a new WordPress plugin called Postcasa to help people add a simple Picasa Slideshows inline to their posts.

It is extremely simple to use. All you have to do is put the Picasa RSS link between this simple shortcode, and the plugin does the rest.

Example:

[postcasa]http://MyRSSurl[/postcasa]

easily becomes:

Head on over to the Postcasa homepage to get the code and peruse the options! Adding Picasa slideshows to your posts has never been easier!

Examples of what’s possible:

[postcasa size=small]http://MyRSSurl[/postcasa]

[postcasa width=100 height=100 align=center]http://MyRSSurl[/postcasa]

[postcasa size=small align=right bgcolor=0fb2c3 showcaptions=yes]http://MyRSSurl[/postcasa]

My blog as seen through WPtouch

The iPhone and iPod Touch web browsing feature is pretty neat (from what I’ve seen), yet a full sized blog site is still a bit hard to see even in horizontal mode.

Enter WPtouch.

WPtouch formats your WordPress blog with an iPhone specific (and reminiscent) theme, complete with Ajax loading articles and effects. The theme only appears to users who are viewing your online masterpiece from an iPhone or iPod touch.

Of course, it can only go so far – Flash, etc still won’t work on the iPhone.  Shame on you two, Adobe and Apple.  Can’t you work your crap out and stop screwing up the world this way?

Anyway, I digress.  Installation of WPtouch is a snap: simply upload the plugin folder to your webhost and enable it from Admin’s plugin screen.  After it is enabled, you can cruise on over to the Admin Settings -> WPtouch screen to set the various options that the theme supports.  Settings include the icons you want the theme to use verification of certain compatibility issues with the plugin’s capabilities.  Once you are satisfied, simply save your options to fully enable the new theme.

Easy-peasy.

Taking your new look and feel for a spin however is a different matter completely.  While there are some iPhone emulators out there, only one that I know of semi-accurately mimics the actual web browser by making an iPhone User Agent setting available.  This is essential to actually see the changes that WPtouch makes to your blog.

The problem is that to use the accurate emulator requires using a Mac.  If you happen to be one of the enlightened few (haha, cool your jets, I’m writing this on a PC!) cruise on over and download iPhoney, a nifty little Mac app that allows you to emulate the iPhone right from your desktop.  You can even “rotate” the phone to see what landscape view looks like.  Pretty neat!

Sorry – PC users need not apply.   If you have nary a measly hunk of Cupertino Lovin’ readily available for use, try iPhoneTester instead.  Not as cool (no user agent switching, etc.), but it gives you an idea of what your regular theme will look like on the iPhone.  Even with this, for the full experience, you’ll need Safari on your PC.  Yes, I did just say that.

Of course, if you are an Apple Fanboy who ISN’T locked into a long term relationship for RIM Blackberry devices and therefore addicted to free-basing their direct push MS-Exchange crack, you can just fork over yer cash and get a darn iPhone.  Lucky buggers.  Last option is to bug one of your cooler friends to let you borrow their iPhone.  Who knows, you may even get a subscriber out of the deal!

Either way, remember that your normal theme will still be the go-to look for all other browsers, so if you surf back to your blog from your normal Firefox, IE or Chrome, it should all look as it did sans-WPtouch.  Only the iPhone and iPod Touch users will see the new theme.  WPtouch even gives them the option to switch back to your normal theme if for some reason that is preferable.

Overall, this is a great idea for a WordPress plugin and I’m fairly impressed with the apparent quality of the software.  It seems very professional, is easy to use and did what it was supposed to do on the first try.  In my book, that goes a long way, and always will!

I’ll post again with any other info as it become apparent.

In the meantime – a big shout out to Dale and Duane for their great work!

Not a big deal, but hey, that’s what I did last weekend.

Also, I’m in the process of adding MovieWidget to the WordPress Plugin database for easy automatic update capabilities.  Then I’ll also be able to tell if anyone actually uses this thing!  :)

If you are even remotely handy with PHP, there is a very simple fix:  Using CURL.

First, open the PHP file that is giving you the problem (make a backup of the original, just in case!).

Second, add this function to the file (make sure you do it outside of any other function definitions, and preferebly before you use it in the rest of the file…):


// function to replace file_get_contents()
function new_get_file_contents($url) {
$ch = curl_init();
$timeout = 10; // set to zero for no timeout
curl_setopt ($ch, CURLOPT_URL, $url);
curl_setopt ($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, 1);
curl_setopt ($ch, CURLOPT_CONNECTTIMEOUT, $timeout);
$file_contents = curl_ e x e c($ch); // take out the spaces of curl statement!!
curl_close($ch);
return $file_contents;
}


Then, search through your file for “file_get_contents” and then replace those words with “new_get_file_contents”. In a nutshell, you are replacing the original function that doesn’t work on your webhost (file_get_contents() ) with one that WILL work on your host (new_get_file_contents() ).

I usually leave a commented out copy the original line in the source, so that I can easily go back to the original if necessary.

So, for example:


$myVar = file_get_contents($url);

becomes:


// $myVar = file_get_contents($url);
$myVar = new_file_get_contents($url);

Pretty easy! I’m not sure that this will work in all situations, but I have yet to find a place where it doesn’t work. I was easily able to replace file_get_contents() with CURL in about 5 minutes in altPWA, an excellent WordPress Plugin for adding Picasa photos and albums to your blog.

Nice and easy!

First of all, I should mention that while the original method still works, as of WP 2.6.2, the “normal” method of embedding Picasa slide shows into a web page seems to work just fine.  This involves getting the embed URL directly from Picasa and adding to the post.  A word to the wise though – you have to add the embed code in HTML mode in the editor.  If you do it in Visual mode, it doesn’t seem to work too well.  Oh well, its a small price to pay, and much easier than my original posted method.

For example if you copy this code from Picasa:

< embed type="application/x-shockwave-flash"
src="http://picasaweb.google.com/s/c/bin/slideshow.swf"
width="288" height="192" flashvars="host=picasaweb.google.com
&RGB=0x000000&feed=http%3A%2F%2F
picasaweb.google.com%2Fdata%2Ffeed%2Fapi
%2Fuser%2Fmilowerx%2Falbumid
%2F5053811777489218721%3Fkind%3Dphoto
%26alt%3Drss" pluginspage="http://www.macromedia.com
/go/getflashplayer">< / embed >

it becomes:

when it is in your post.  Nice!

Alternative Methods for a simple Slideshow

I’ve written a plugin to help folks with this task. Welcome Postcasa, a simple WordPress plugin to add the slideshow directly from the album RSS feed. Its easy to use and works regardless of if you are in visual or HTML mode.

Other Fancy Picasa Plugins

That said, there are many WordPress plugins that have been created that work well in their own right.  Most of them put album thumbnails directly into the post (instead of having one picture location that cycles through all the pictures).

Some of my favorite are:

• kPicasa Gallery – this great plugin is extremely simple to use and has a lot of configuration options.  The one downside to the plugin is (supposedly) that the gallery must be by itself on a page (i.e. it can’t be inline, meaning resident on a page with other information).  A second downside is that the plugin only supports one Picasa username for the entire blog.  You ARE able to specify which albums go on a page, etc. but they must all be from the same Picasa login.   Darn…
• KB Easy Picasa Web – this plugin is exactly as described.  Its easy.  All you have to do is put the hyperlink to an album in a post, and this plugin replaces the link with the album contents.  Very nice for certain situations.  The only problem is that it puts EVERYTHING in that one post, doesn’t paginate at all, and you can’t set the number of columns to use.  There are some formatting options, but they are fairly limited.  This is nice for someone who doesn’t need a lot of sophistication, and simply wants to “get to it” without having to add any shortcode to posts, etc.
• GoldenGate – this plugin doesn’t allow you to add an entire album at a time, but it DOES do something that is very unique.  It adds all of your Picasa photos to the MediaLibrary portion of the WordPress post editor in real time using Google APIs.  This is great for allowing you to store your photos on Picasa, but use them in posts in WordPress.  Very slick.
• Shashin – this is one of the members of the Picasa plugin Royal Family.  Its a great plugin and has a bit different behavior than many of the other plugins listed here.  It displays albums as well as the photos themselves as most do, but it also allows you zoom in on any picture using Highslide, which is free for non-commercial use.  The neat thing is that this zoom is in context of the page, not in a page covering popup viewer.
• altPWA – One of my favorites, this plugin allows using albums from multiple users and also has a bunch of settings to allow you to make the galleries look the way you want them to.  There is one challenge though – it uses the PHP function file_get_contents(), which isn’t allowed by many web hosts.  Since it is made available under GPL, I’ve modified the code to use CURL instead, which is allowed by most hosts.  I’ve sent mail to the original author offering the changed code to him so that his great plugin will be accessible to more people.  Its a very nice piece of work!  A few feature requests: 1) allow a page that displays a number of album roots (i.e. NOT the actual photos, but the actual listing of available albums) to also allow a column display rather than just one after the other and 2) add more CSS around the photo thumbnails so that they can be more easily stylized.  Minor, minor stuff, but desirable in my opinion nonetheless.

As you can see, if you are a Picasa / Google Fanboy like my brother, there are lots of options for integrating your favorite image manager with WordPress.  Life is good again.

I have used the Web Developer plugin for FireFox for quite some time.  It is a lifesaver when you are developing web pages, as you can easily see all of the styles and markup that is being applied to a specific area of your page.  The problem is that it only works in FireFox, leaving IE out in the cold.  Since IE is the real pain in the rear when it comes to Web Dev, the lack of a similar tool has been a major PITA.

Well, a two hour witch hunt for an IE only CSS bug lead me to scour the net for something to make the pain go away!  The fix?

IE HTML Element Spy, an IE7 Add-On.  I LOVE THIS TOOL!!!

It works a little differently than Web Developer, but it really gets the job done.  I litterally spent the last 2 hours trying to debug a DIV that wouldn’t line up with the top of a page.  It was completely impossible to find out why – the thing worked fine in FireFox, but not IE.  Installing IE HTML Element Spy lead me right to the problem – a burried IE only CSS rule that put a 30px padding at the top of the sidebar.

Voila!  Problem solved.

So, 2 hours and not a single clue using my own powers of debugging versus 2 minutes and a fix with IE HTML Element Spy.  Which would you prefer?!  Yeah, me too!

Download that puppy now!

Frackin’ IE.

While many people like to make WordPress themes from scratch, one of the best ways to get the most bang for your buck is to use someone elses hard labor to your own benefit.  There are a ton of talented theme developers out there, and if you are going to use a classic three column design, why would you want to start from scratch.  Lots of great themes exist in the open source realm that make excellent starting blocks for your own work.

There is a bit of a problem though – the theme that you are basing your work off of is likely still changing and getting better.  How can you base your own theme on another, and still be able to seamlessly upgrade the base theme without having to do much work on your own?  Use a Child Theme, thats how!

Simply by adding the following line:

Template: **name of base theme here**

to the header of your style.css file, you can use all of the files of the base theme, and simply have whatever you put in the child theme override the styles, etc. of the base theme.

For more information, check out this article on ThemeShaper.