Question mark graffiti by bilal-kamoon

I knocked myself around trying to figure out why my plugin was not coping with ‘foreign’, multi byte, Greek, Japanese, Chinese characters.  Those damn questions marks ‘????’ – I had it all sorted before in another plugin – what was going on here ?   I had all the multi-byte functions happening.    Then I remembered – the database tables – of course!

Default Mysql

MySQL’s default database charset is usually latin1 and  thecollation is latin1_swedish_ci.  This can vary based on server configuration.  This is usually set before wordpress is installed.

Default wordpress

WordPress usually creates it’s table with charset utf8 and collation utf8_general_ci.    You can overwrite this in the config file.

See http://codex.wordpress.org/Editing_wp-config.php#Database_character_set.

Fix your wordpress database

You can Alter the database after the fact.  This will help the plugins who haven’t figured out that many of us (you?) haven’t set up our databases as well as they could be.

ALTER DATABASE yourdb CHARACTER SET utf8 COLLATE utf8_general_ci;

Plugin authors

Make life easy on your self and others when creating custom tables.  Have a look at the wordpress db schema.  Note that there is a global $charset_collate.  Use it!

 global $wpdb, $charset_collate;

if ($wpdb->get_var("show tables like '$table_name'") != $table_name) {
 $sql = "CREATE TABLE " . $table_name . " (
 id bigint NOT NULL AUTO_INCREMENT,
 field1 text NOT NULL,
 field2 text NOT NULL,
 PRIMARY KEY (id) )
 ".$charset_collate. ";";

require_once(ABSPATH . 'wp-admin/includes/upgrade.php');

dbDelta($sql);

if($wpdb->get_var("show tables like '$table_name'") != $table_name) {
 error_log($table_name.' not created');
 return false;
 }
 else return true;

Resources:

• http://codex.wordpress.org/Editing_wp-config.php#Database_character_set
• http://hakre.wordpress.com/2010/12/26/wordpress-database-charset-and-collation-configuration/
• http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.5/en/charset.html

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Please use contact form http://webdesign.anmari.com/about/contact/ to request access until later.

I dislike captcha’s even google’s ‘digitise the old books’ one and they don’t work that well.

Have looked at various other methods over the years – decided I’d rather put up with a few spamster users. Today just got a bit much!

Seems it is not just me. Scritch and Scratch having some fun (not) too.

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Update as at: Feb 2012

amr-ical-events-list

• free at wordpress (4 star rating, 2012 updates)
• input via  ics file subscription
• most customisable calendars, agendas, schedules etc, variety of views
• date navigation and pagination
• widgets

amr-events

• paid addon to the above ($40)
• full event creation, custom post types, taxonomies, locations
• filtering
• filters, pluggable functions
• variety of map plugin integrations
• multi lingual integration
• produce ics feeds
• uses wordpress as intended so you get benefits of being able to integrate other plugins

event espresso ($$$!)

• lite version at wordpress (3 star rating)
• paid version not cheap (lots of addons – top price $500, base at $90)
• registration, ticketing, payment gateways
• recurring events an addon

all in one event calendar

• free version at wordpress (5 star rating, 2012 update)
• is it error prone? (7 brokens for last version, but 13 works)
• paid support at $120 hour
• recurring, ics import/export, variety of views, widgets

events manager

• free version at wordpress (4 star rating, last update 2010/10)
• paid version $75
• bookings, paypal

• free at wordpress (4 star, but last update 2010)

events calendar

• free version at wordpress (3 star)
• create and present calendar for events

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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

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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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