I thought I had done such a great job tightening up things and then seemed to get hit with some repetitive trackback spam notifications.  Since the notifications are coming from one of MY websites, they don’t get marked easily as spam.

A few minutes of googling and a timely post at question-defence.com, published a few days ago pin pointed the problem (Many thanks to google for thier quick search index updating!.. remember the old days?)

Ping status =  ‘open’

Many existing posts still had their ping status set to open.  So to stop trackback spam in it’s tracks (ha! lqtm), take action as follows:

Future posts:

1. Go to WordPress settings > Discussions >
2. untick “Allow Link Notifications From Other Blogs”

Past Posts:

1. Hop into your phpmyadmin
2. Find your posts table, note the name with your sites prefix
3. Goto the SQL view, type in

update  prefix-posts set ping_status = 'closed';

and you are done.  All posts and custom post types now set to NOT accept trackbacks.

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Looking to set up a website using WordPress, one of the world most popular content management systems?

Assess your skills (ftp, html, css, php) and what you are prepared to do yourself, and how good you are at educatng yourself using the web.  Then consider your options.

WordPress.com PROS

• easy to get going even if no skills
• free, or can add premium feaures (they add up)
• videopress ($60/year)
• custom css for own styling or tweaks ($30/year)
• post or moderate using your phone (usa only)
• can map your existing  domain there ($12/year), or register a domain through them($17/year)
• they’ll keep you up to date with wordpress at least.
• language aspects are pre-loaded
• if you want to allow comments, wordpress.com has good antispam built in, althoiugh you can also add that feature (akismet) in to a self hosted site.
• you’re hosted by wordpress.com – so you are on a server where all the sites are running wordpress

WordPress.com CONS

What to do:

Consider

• your skill levels
• website requirements and it’s implications (eg:membership, comments – you need anti-spam)
• how much you are prepared to pay for someone to assist you if you need assistance.

It is free to open a wordpress.com site, so give it a go – you’ll need it anyway if you want to use their anti-spam service askimet, or the wordpress.com stats via the jetpack plugin.

If you are comfortable with doing many things yourself or are prepared to hire the skills you need, and know how to test your website and any plugins you add, consider going with a self hosted solution.  You can either do it yourself – there are heaps of guides out there.

If you want to get going quickly, I can have you up and running within a day if you use icdsoft as your host

No related posts.

What potential customers will see if they have an adblocker installed

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• amr-events plugin registration is now at icalevents.com
• amr-user-templates plugin registration is soon at wpusersplugin.com

Your details have cloned and moved too

•  so you can access curremt and older versions here. New versions of the plugins will only be available at the new sites:
• Use the same usernames and passwords on all sites.

On;y forum or email subscription registrations here

• Any problems, please log it at the support forum or contact me asap.

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• a link to the add new page
• preferably with suggested title and content

I wondered???, I googled, I browsed some of the WordPress code and found naught, nought, null, or at least nothing obvious…

and then I just tried it.

‘Content’ was easy I had a few attempts at ‘title’, the found ‘post_title’ worked.

Hooray! A small thing but quite satisfying and of course I felt a need to share….

The Result

Seeing is believing

The php code:

echo '<a title="'
.__('Create a calendar page','amr-ical-events-list')
.'" href="'.admin_url('post-new.php?post_type=page&amp;content=[iCal http://youricsurl.ics]&amp;post_title='
.__('Calendar','amr-ical-events-list')).'">'
__('Add new') // use wp translation
.'</a>';

Link from settings or plugin page

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Faster Phidus, FASTER! - original photo by mauropm

There’s a good post over at webmasterworld with advice on how to speed up WordPress when using it as a cms, plus a few other tips.  Also if you are using a theme that came packaged with timthumb, read this and take action to avoid being hacked.

There was no way to  boomark the individual useful comment  that I could find, so I ‘ve taken the liberty of summarising here, with a link to the original complete conversation – print version here.
1 – Get a dedicated server. The slowdown on a shared or VPS is at the database. {They} used to run the W3 cache plugin, but now only use the “Force GZip” plugin.

1A – Keep your database clean with an optimizer type plugin (or do it yourself) that weekly, backs it up than cleans up scuttle from the database.

2 – Security – Never load more plugins that you need to run the site, and always limit access to your wp-admin directory within the htaccess. We {They} deny all but 3-4 IP addresses from accessing the admin sections.

2A – Delete all unused themes and plugins… Even if they aren’t active!

3 – Using the wp-config.php file, turn off post revision tracking.

4 – If you are using WP as a CMS, use it as a CMS! We {They} use pages for 75-80% of our landing page content, and only use the post features to compliment our pages. Use .html as a file extension on pages and posts… and take GREAT care to make sure the index taxonomy is correct from page to category of post when used.

5 – Tags and Categories are always noindexed for us. The PAGES are our primary landing areas, and the tags and categories ultimately support them.

6 – Clean up your themes to the N’th degree. We use a speed tool that waterfalls the http requests so you can really clean it at the file level.

7 – Always use sitemaps, both xml and reader sitemaps.

8 – Favorite admin plugin, Ozh Horizontal Admin Menu plugin by Ozh. It relocates the admin menu to the top of the site and frees up much needed horizontal space for writing.

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The amazing pluggable machine - photo by lukasWP

Pluggable functions are functions that can be overridden by others.  The key is which is defined first.  So to make one your plugin’s functions pluggable one should define it  as late as possible.  So others can get in first of course, but not so late that your plugin tries to use it before it is defined.

Understanding the sequence of wordpress actions is important.

To make your plugin function pluggable by a theme or another plugin it needs to be defined AFTER the themes and the other plugins. So if your functions are mainly to do with output, you could move them as far back as the ‘wp’ action say.

In your main plugin file:

add_action ('wp','amr_load_pluggables', 10);    //move it later and a low priority

function amr_load_pluggables() {
    require_once('amr-pluggable.php');
}

The Pluggable Functions

Each pluggable function must test that it has not already been defined

if (!function_exists( 'the_pluggable_function')) {
    the_pluggable_function($parameters) {
    // the code
    }
}

The Override Function

The coder doing the overwriting  (ie plugging the pluggable function ) then just defines the function normally in their own plugin, or in their themes functions.php.  All they have to do is not bury it inside an action that executes AFTER the ‘wp’ action (or the action that loads the pluggable files).

Oh and it would be a good idea to fully understand where / when that pluggable function gets called and what it is supposed to do, what values to return etc.  You do not want to cause nasty side effects.  Looking at the code of the pluggable function is a good place to start.

Conditional Override

If they wanted to only override under certain circumstances, EG:  If you want to override ONLY on certain post types and only if certain conditions are met on the single view, then one could do

add_action('wp', 'define_my_override_function', 1) {

// using wp action as well as we need the post query et to have been done already, but a higher priority so will execute before the pluggable function load.

}

function define_my_override_function() {
global $post;

    if (is_single() and ($post->post_type === 'event') and (whatever other criterai)) {
 // then overwrite the pluggable, requires the pluggable loading to be later in the wp action sequence, say on action 'wp' late priority

        function the_pluggable_function($parameters) {

        // your code here

        }
     }
}

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Lower case love... by gazeronly

If you have been banging your head against the proverbial brickwall trying to debug a intermittment post_meta bug then this may help.

I googled all aspects, but did not find any post to shed light.  Eventually figured it out….

Put simply:

• get_post_meta() is case sensitive on the meta-key

BUT

• update_post_meta is NOT case sensitive

Thus If there is a pre-existing meta record with a key in UPPERCASE, then one can

1. issue an update for a lowercase key that will
2. update the UPPERCASE key, and not create a lower case record. (Usually update will ‘add’ if no record exists).

Delete_post_meta() has the same behaviour – you can try to delete a lowercase key, but the uppercase version will get deleted (too?)

Then of course when you try to fetch with your same lwoercase key that you did the update with, the fetch will fail as it does not exist – only the uppercase key exists.

That was fun trying to debug……

See trac ticket raised for details or progress.

Mysql db collation

It seems it has a lot to do with the mysql db collation being used.  The default in many db setups is a _ci (case insensitive one) – they are faster and give more ‘natural’ sort orders, although that very much depends on the language you are using.

The get_post_meta behaves differently apparently because wordpress caches the data so one is not necessarily querying the database.

If you are keen to know more, see

• Mysql collation issues, and
• Hakre’s notes on wordpress-database-charset-and-collation-configuration

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A green for go amongst the red - photo by my buffo

If you want to get rid of the rel attributes that cause the html5 validation to fail.  There is some difference of opinion around this.

• the w3 group dropped some of the  rel attributes
• html5 not final? so why drop what might be good to have in?
• just because the validitor does not have them doesn’t mean your code is bad

BUT,

• your client may not understand – the site must be html5 AND valid!
• I miss that green 100% valid reassurance when I am testing although I like to test with default wordpress and default theme… what to do?

If you want that green 100% valid response back, regardless, then……

Remove the rel attributes to get the green back

A bunch of actions and filters and yes,  you have to use a child theme with own header and footer unfortunately as some is hardcoded in the header.php

Add to child theme  functions.php or a temporary plugin:

remove_action( 'wp_head', 'index_rel_link' );
remove_action( 'wp_head', 'wp_generator' );
remove_action('wp_head', 'rsd_link');
remove_action('wp_head', 'wlwmanifest_link');
remove_action('wp_head','adjacent_posts_rel_link_wp_head');
remove_action('wp_head','start_post_rel_link');

Theme edits

Footer.php

copy to child theme and edit footer.php

• line 26 remove rel=”generator”

Header.php

copy to child theme and edit header.php

• line 48 remove the rel=profile link (not used in html5?)

<link rel="profile" href="http://gmpg.org/xfn/11" />

• line 74 remove rel=”home”

Another option: Replace rel attributes with accepted ones:

The links need a rel attribute, so choose a valid one and replace the invalid ones:

add_filter('parent_post_rel_link', 'amr_remove_rel_up');
 function amr_remove_rel_up($link) {
 return (str_replace ("rel='up'","rel='xxxxx'", $link));
 }
 add_filter('next_post_rel_link', 'amr_remove_rel_next');
 add_filter('prev_post_rel_link', 'amr_remove_rel_prev');
 add_filter('start_post_rel_link', 'amr_remove_rel_start');
 add_filter('end_post_rel_link', 'amr_remove_rel_end');
 add_filter('index_rel_link', 'amr_remove_rel_index');

etc.....

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How to be a good host - photo by Kevin Dooley

See http://icalevents.com/3636-events-plugin-users-hosting-discount/ for details.

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