My Three WordPress + Coda Tips

1. Install WordPress Syntax mode for Panic Coda

As a WordPress developer, I use lots of WordPress functions. This will allow you to auto-complete WordPress functions. Unfortunately, it doesn’t include function parameter hints, but that’s what tip #3 is for.

2. Replace your WordPress Syntax mode colors

I didn’t like the color set it came with, so I exported my colors:

1. Go to Preferences > Colors
2. Select the color set you like in the “Language” window (I exported PHP-HTML)
3. Click the “Export” tab
4. Edit the .seestyle file in a text editor
5. Find and replace PHP-HTML with PHP-HTML-WP
6. Save the file
7. In Coda, click the Import button and select the .seestyle file
8. Voila: your colors are now what you’re used to.

3. Configure a WordPress Codex book in Coda

Coda comes built-in with six reference “books”; web-based documentation pages for HTML, Javascript, PHP, and CSS.

There was an awesome shortcut in Coda I didn’t know about: Command + Double-click on a function name to open a Coda Book describing that function.

How to configure a WordPress book

1. Press Command-6 (or go to View > Mode > Books)
2. Click the + button in the bottom-left of the window
3. Use the following settings:
   • Book Title: WordPress
   • Book URL: http://codex.wordpress.org/Function_Reference/
   • Cover Image: Optional. DRÄ Studio has an article with tons of more book options and a nice WordPress cover image to use.
   • Use for Mode: PHP-HTML or PHP-HTML-WP, depending on whether you installed the Syntax Mode in Step 1
   • Search URL: http://codex.wordpress.org/Function_Reference/*
4. Click OK

Now, when you have auto-completed functions and you forget what parameters the function takes, you can Command+Double-click the function name and be taken directly to the WordPress Codex page relating to it!

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reveal.js

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Some of the downsides of using link shorteners are:

1. Google Analytics doesn’t always capture the original referrer (and I have no clue how they do the rest of the time!).
2. When generating links using the bookmarklet (or in this case, also the Yourls installation), there’s no easy way to add campaign, source, medium, content, and term tags for Google Analytics to track.
3. Yourls doesn’t allow query strings on URLs by default, making overriding existing campaign tags difficult/impossible. For example: http://katz.si/t?utm_source=2300

I’m not the only one who wanted these things, so I’ve created a plugin that adds Google Analytics tracking to Yourls. It’s very cool.

Google Analytics Yourls plugin

Download Google Analytics for YOURLS from Github

The plugin features include:

Define default tracking tags
You can define a set of default tags that are added to any link that gets shortened.

• utm_source
• utm_medium
• utm_name
• utm_term
• utm_content

Override existing tags - you can choose to have your tags replace tags in the long URL that’s being shortened…or not.

Tagging options added directly to the URL form – the best feature in my opinion, you now have an interface to easily add tracking right from the link shortener.

Add query strings to the shortened URL to override or add any tracking tags. This feature has support for abbreviations, too.

If you want to see this in action, check out the links below.

• http://katz.si/t?src=tw expands to http://www.seodenver.com/yourls-url-shortener/?utm_source=twitter
• http://katz.si/t?med=em expands to http://www.seodenver.com/yourls-url-shortener/?utm_medium=email
• http://katz.si/t?med=blog&src=seodenver&cam=2300 expands to http://www.seodenver.com/yourls-url-shortener/?utm_medium=blog&utm_source=seodenver&utm_campaign=2300

Plugin Installation

To install, follow these steps:

1. Download the file (updated to correct Github link)
2. Upload the google-analytics folder into your users > plugins directory
3. Go to your YOURLS plugins page
4. Hover over Google Analytics, click “Activate”
5. Configure the plugin settings by clicking the Google Analytics link in the menu

Related posts:

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• Good statistics that are visible only to administrators
• Edit the long URLs after generating shortened links

…but not one service has both features:

• http://sn.im has editable URLs, a bookmarklet, but no stats. Oh, and they kept on deleting my links.
• http://bit.ly has great stats, name recognition, but the links aren’t editable and the stats are public.
• http://goo.gl is the fastest service (so they claim), they have good stats (maybe the best, since they include OS & browser information), but they don’t have editable links or private stats.

Other smaller offerings may have had both features, but they also seem unreliable. I wanted control of my links.

Self-hosted Link Shortening with YOURLS

YOURLS has a really nice admin page, including good stats.

Enter YOURLS; a self-hosted link shortening service that is created by two amazing WordPress plugin developers: Lester Chan and Ozh Richard.

They created YOURLS in a WordPress-like fashion, with developer goodies such as hooks (actions and filters) and plugin capabilities, so you can easily modify how the application works.

You can set up YOURLS however you want, including making it a public service, public stats, etc. or making it private.  I set up a YOURLS installation on my new katz.si domain, which was a snap, except for one minor snag caused by HostGator’s security rules.

You do need to be able to set up a database and edit one configuration file, but other than that, super-simple.

They also have a WordPress plugin that links your WP installation with YOURLS, aut0-generates links, and works like a charm.

Don’t Track Logged-In Users in YOURLS

Once it was installed, I became a link-generating fool. I was clicking the links to see how well the redirections work (they work well!), but the test clicks were logged — this pissed me off with bit.ly and other URL shorteners: don’t offer a way to not track logged in users! I have long thought that this is ridiculous.

To make it so that YOURLS doesn’t track logged-in users, it’s a simple two-line update. Find the following lines in yourls-go.php:

// Update click count in main table
$update_clicks = yourls_update_clicks( $keyword );
// Update detailed log for stats
$log_redirect = yourls_log_redirect( $keyword );

and update them to be:

if(yourls_is_valid_user() !== true) { // Begin: Don't log logged-in users
// Update click count in main table
$update_clicks = yourls_update_clicks( $keyword );
// Update detailed log for stats
$log_redirect = yourls_log_redirect( $keyword );
} // End: Don't log logged-in users


Do yourself a favor and check out YOURLS

In all, my experience was rewarding: it was very easy to set up the YOURLS installation, once up I have a very configurable and fun URL shortener. I get to build links to a domain I control, which is nice for SEO.

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1. Make the uploaded file type valid.

• Go to [your site]/admin/includes/rte/editor/filemanager/connectors/php/config.php
• Near the bottom of the file (around line 191), you should see this:

  $Config['AllowedExtensions']['uploads'] = array('jpg','gif','jpeg','png','swf','fla','jpg','gif','jpeg','png','avi','mpg','mpeg') ;

• Add additional file formats you want to include, or you can replace the code with this (which adds a ton of file extensions):

  $Config['AllowedExtensions']['uploads'] = array('7z', 'aiff', 'asf', 'avi', 'bmp', 'csv', 'doc', 'docx', 'fla', 'flv', 'gif', 'gz', 'gzip', 'jpeg', 'jpg', 'mid', 'mov', 'mp3', 'mp4', 'mpc', 'mpeg', 'mpg', 'ods', 'odt', 'pdf', 'pdfx', 'png', 'ppt', 'pxd', 'qt', 'ram', 'rar', 'rm', 'rmi', 'rmvb', 'rtf', 'sdc', 'sitd', 'swf', 'sxc', 'sxw', 'tar', 'tgz', 'tif', 'tiff', 'txt', 'vsd', 'wav', 'wma', 'wmv', 'xls', 'xml', 'zip')

• Save the file

2. Make the files visible in the file browser

Now that you can upload files, you want to be able to see them in the file browser.

• Go to [your site]/admin/includes/rte/editor/filemanager/connectors/php/commands.php
• Around line 71, find the following code:

  elseif(preg_match('/\.(jpg|jpeg|png|gif|swf)$/i',$sFile))

• and replace it with this:

  elseif(preg_match('/\.([a-zA-Z]{2,4})$/i',$sFile))

• Now, every normal file extension should be visible

3. Enjoy uploading non-image files to CubeCart

It’s pretty silly that CubeCart limited this in the first place, but at least the fix is relatively painless. Remember – if you upgrade CubeCart in the future, these changes will be lost.

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What the WordPress.org plugin page used to look like.

A couple of weeks ago, WordPress.org changed the layout of their plugins directory plugin pages. The update was likely to improve usability for users trying to determine whether a plugin is trustworthy and what it does. I believe the re-arranging of the page has achieved those goals.

The update removes author links

The layout redesign removes links to the official plugin page. I believe this makes it more difficult for users trying to get support on plugins.

Removing links also affects plugin authors. One of the ways that plugin authors are “rewarded” for creating plugins used to be a link from the WordPress.org website. This resulted in two things: increased traffic to the author’s website and some passed SEO value from the WordPress website to the author’s website.

I recommend all authors to go back through their readme.txt files and add a link to their support pages.

Changes that were made to the layout:

1. Added plugin summary below plugin title and above tabs
2. Added version number to the download button text
3. Moved plugin requirements above the “FYI” box and made it more prominent
4. Moved star ratings above the FYI box
5. Removed the “Author Homepage” and “Plugin Homepage” links
6. Moved the Author to the bottom of the content

In the future, I would like WordPress to send a notice to developers of these types of changes. What do you think of the changes?

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This has been done many times by others, but just a quick tip on how to add or remove www. from your website’s address. This is helpful for URL canonicalization and user experience consistency. You can also achieve SEO-friendly canonicalization using rel="canonical". Oh boy, I’m getting too technical

Here’s the juicy part:

Add the following to the .htaccess file in your website’s root folder (often named public_html or www). If there’s not a file named .htaccess, you may create it. If you are creating the .htaccess file, set the permissions to 644. For security reasons, you don’t want others to be able to write to this file.

Note: These snippets are for http:// only, not secure https:// URLs.

Add www.

Options +FollowSymlinks
RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^example.com/?(.+)?$
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ "http\:\/\/www\.example\.com/$1" [R=301,L]

Remove www.

Options +FollowSymlinks
RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^www\.(.*) [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://%1/$1 [R=301,NC,L]

This will work with the majority of web hosts in my experience, but not all.

Additional resources

For more .htaccess information, and great follow-up reading on .htaccess, check out corz.org’s tutorial and second tutorial on some of the most-used .htaccess tricks.

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When you would use excluded categories:

When using WordPress as more of a content management system (CMS) than a blogging platform, there are many things that you need control over. One of them is special-case categories.

• Frequently asked questions
• Testimonials
• Case studies
• Press releases

When you have a category of posts that you don’t want to have comments, publishing dates, post author, etc., you can define a list of excluded categories. In most cases, you should use Category Templates to achieve this functionality, but that is not always practical or the best option.

If you use the ACE plugin

I use the Advanced Category Excluder Plugin for nearly every WordPress installation I work with. That being said, there is always custom functionality that needs to find out what categories are being excluded by the plugin. Instead of hard-coding the Excluded categories, you can use this function (in your theme’s functions.php file, or Thesis Theme’s custom_functions.php file) to find out what categories are being excluded:

global $kws_exclude;
$kws_exclude = excluded_categories();
function excluded_categories($type='array') {
	global $wpdb, $wp_query, $ace_targets;
	if (is_array($ace_targets) && get_option("ace_settings_hide"))
	{
		foreach ($ace_targets as $key=>$val)
		{
			if (!empty($wp_query->$key) && $wp_query->$key == 1) $filter = $key;
		}
		$cats_to_exclude = get_option("ace_categories_".$filter);
	}
	if(strtolower($type) == 'array') { $cats_to_exclude = explode(',', $cats_to_exclude); }
	return $cats_to_exclude;
}

If you want to hard-code excluded categories

If you don’t use the Advanced Category Excluder plugin, or simply want to use this functionality in a different way, here’s how to hard-code (manually define) the categories to exclude. Add this code to your functions.php file.

	global $exclude;
	$exclude = array();
	$excludes = get_categories('child_of=10'); // Exclude sub-categories of a specific category (in this case, 10)
	$excludes2 = get_categories('8'); // Exclude a specific category (in this case, 
	$excludeList = array_merge($excludes, $excludes2); // Combine the two excludes
	foreach($excludeList as $e) { $exclude[] = $e->cat_ID; } // Build the master list of excludes

Great, now what?

Then, when you want to find out if the post or category is excluded in another function, you do this:

function any_function_you_are_working_with() {
	global $exclude; // make sure to add this
	if(is_category($exclude) || in_category($exclude)) {
		// If the post or category is, or is in an excluded category, do this
	} else {
		// If not, do this
	}
}

This way, you can customize how content appears based on whether it’s an excluded category (removing comment forms, date/time, etc…).

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I have been working on a ColdFusion website, and I wanted to find a way to require ‘www.’ in the URL (to consolidate all pages on www. for SEO). I normally work with PHP and Apache servers, so I’m used to .htaccess. I knew there had to be a way.

Here’s a simple method of redirecting a whole website in ColdFusion:

<!-- If the site isn't www... -->
<cfif (CGI.SERVER_NAME NEQ "www.example.com")>
<!-- Save the URL (and $_GET variables too) as the string 'strUrl' -->
<cfset strUrl = CGI.script_name & "?" & CGI.query_string />
<!-- Use 301 for SEO-friendly redirects -->
<cfheader statuscode="301" statustext="Moved permanently">
<!-- Redirect to new website (this case, added www.) with strUrl added on -->
<cfheader name="Location" value="http://www.example.com#strUrl#">
</cfif>

Here’s how to redirect a single page in ColdFusion:

This code is real easy to find online, so the post was mostly to deal with the site-wide redirect…but here’s the single page code. Add this code to the top of the page you’d like to redirect from. Learn more about cfheader here.

<cfheader statuscode="301" statustext="Moved permanently">
<cflocation url="http://www.example.com/new-page.cfm">

Redirect with HTTPS sensativity

There are additional methods of checking whether or not HTTPS is active.
<cfif (CGI.SERVER_NAME EQ "www.example.com") AND (HTTPS Is "on")>
<!-- If is HTTPS and not www. -->
<cfelseif (CGI.SERVER_NAME EQ "www.mcstech.net") AND (HTTPS Is "off")>
<!-- If is HTTP and www. -->
<cfelse>
<!-- If is HTTP and not www. -->
</cfif>

Thanks to Ben Nadel’s Blog for the helpful ColdFusion resources.  Let’s hope I stick around PHP in the future

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Ever wonder if your widget or plugin is activated on an external site?

Here’s how to find out.

When you register a sidebar widget, you use code like this:

register_sidebar_widget(array('Name of Widget', 'class-of-widget'), 'widget_function');

If you want to check whether the widget is activated (you may want to for a variety of reasons), you can do it like this (the “class-of-widget” value from above will be used in the code below): if(isset($_REQUEST['check_status'])) {
if(is_active_widget('class-of-widget')) {
echo 'Active';
} else {
echo 'Inactive';
} // End if 'is_active_widget'
} // End if 'check_status'

Now, simply browse to your widget or plugin’s location and add the variable “check_status” at the end: (wp-content/plugins/class-of-widget/widget.php?check_status). You will then see the plugin/widget is “Active” or “Inactive.”

I hope someone finds this useful; if you’re in plugin or widget development for WordPress, try the code out!

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