If your interested in seeing what fuels my creativity, I have started a new blog on Tumblr to collect, process and share the digital bits of inspiration I collect in my daily jogs around the infosphere.
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Category Archives: announcements
WP-Orphanage v1.2
If you’ve implemented the Shared Users Table trick you know that there is a side effect: Users on one blog are not immediately given privileges on the others. To resolve this I wrote a little plugin, WP-Orphanage, that will promote these ‘orphan’users to a role of your choosing.
WP-Orphanage v1.2 has been released. It addresses a nasty bug where only the first 50 users were promoted. I have refactored the code to iterate over the full list of users. This action only takes place when an Admin visits the User page. Users that login to a blog where they have no privileges will continue to be given a role “just-in-time”, when they login, but if you’re looking to upgrade all your users in one go, the plugin will now oblige. This is a recommended upgrade for all users. Thanks to everyone who reported this issue!
WordPress 2.9 Contributors
WordPress 2.9 has just crossed 3 million downloads, and had 140+ contributors to its code base for that release cycle. I have the unique distinction of being the person responsible for removing the word ‘janky’from the UI for this release. Infosec posted an article naming all of the contributors to WordPress 2.9 they could track down.
Nginx Virtual Host Recipe for Drupal
Since more than one person has asked me for my Nginx Virtual Host recipes, I figured I’d post it to my blog. The attached file should be good to go out of the box, but be sure to change domain.tld to your actual domain name. The wildcard record will allow your site to respond to ANY sudomain request, which may not be something you want.
You’ll also need to change the path to your log files, as well as the path to your public webroot folder. Finally, up the client_max_body_size to match your upload_max_filesize and post_max_size settings in php.ini.
Finally, this assumes you are running your PHP fast cgi process on port 9000.
This is the recipe for Drupal. I’ve also posted one for WordPress and WordPress MU / BuddyPress.
Download Nginx vhost for Drupal with imagecache support
Please post ways to improve this in the comments. I use this on a number of production sites, but there is always more one can do. Thanks to all of the blogs and articles that I ripped off helped me understand Nginx and got me started.
WP-Orphanage v1.1
If you’re using the Shared Users Table trick to create an ad-hoc blog network, then you need to be using WP-Orphange. When you set the constants CUSTOM_USER_TABLE and CUSTOM_USER_META_TABLE in your wp-config.php file, your users can log into any blog that defines the same Users table. However, if the blog isn’t the one they registered on they won’t be assigned any Roles or Capabilities on the other blogs, and they will be shown an error. I call these users ‘orphans.
WP-Orphanage is a WordPress plugin that automatically adopts all of your orphans automatically, and will set a Role for them on the blog they are trying to log into. You have control over which Role they are set to in wp-admin.
The v1.1 update fixes a bug introduced in the option screen in v1.0.1 and is recommended for all users of this plugin.
Many thanks to Vince from Alphak.net – Born to Be Wired for reporting this error and helping me debug the solution.
XEN Carousel v0.10 Released
v0.10 of XEN Carousel, the WordPress plugin to allow you to associate images with Posts or Pages, and display those images (linked to the Post) in a Slideshow / Carousel, powered by jCarousel Lite, has been released.
I was able to address a bug pointed out by one of my users (Thanks Connor!), and also minified all of the JavaScripts, so it should also load a bit faster, too. The plugin is still in its early stages, and should be considered alpha software, but I’ve already begun to use it on some of the sites I’ve been working on lately.
K2 Hook Up v1.3 Released
I’ve updated my K2 Hook Up WordPress plugin to include support for two of the latest K2 Hooks: template_primary_begin and template_primary_end. You need to be running the latest version of K2 to take advantage of it, but once you are, K2 Hook Up will help you target over 10 regions in your theme with the content of your choosing – without having to edit any files. Current Users will be able to auto-update from wp-admin. New Users can get started here.
For developers looking to contribute to the plugin, K2 Hook Up is now on GitHub, so fork the project and send me a pull request with your changes.
Using Shopp’s API to create non-standard solutions
Rob Dempsey, a Certified Scrum Practitioner and Agile Development coach, approached us about launching a line of Agile Development training videos. During Phase 1 of the project he requested that we create an e-commerce store capable of doing digital products with instant downloads.
The Shopp plugin for WordPress was a perfect choice and did everything he wanted to do. However, after attending a conference on marketing Video products, the client changed his mind and wanted to switch his offering to video training on a Subscription basis. He wanted to keep the store, since he would have a couple of other products, unrelated to the subscription, to offer now and in the future. The final requirement was that the subscription had to be purchasable in 1 Click. That is, once they click the button to sign up, they had to land on the check out page, and not get the ‘Add to Cart’experience.
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Ignite Orlando
IgniteOrlando is an event that couples rapid-fire talks with a ‘maker’project. This event started in Seattle, but takes place around the globe. The talks last 5 minutes and consist of 20 slides that are automatically rotated every 15 seconds. As you can imagine this places some interesting limits on that kind of presentation you can put together. As you probably know, limits have an uncanny knack of making you more creative.
Tomorrow night is Orlando’s first Ignite event, and once you take a gander at the line-up (yours truly included), and I think you’ll agree that we are in for one hell of a show. If you haven’t RSVP’d for the event, do so now. If you have, then I’ll see you tomorrow night at 6pm!
Location:
Slingapours, Wall Street Plaza (downtown)
27 Wall Street Plaza
Orlando, FL 32801
Free Parking courtesy of CoLab Orlando.
OrlandoPHP: WordPress Plugin Development
OrlandoPHP is the monthly user group meet up for PHP programmers in the greater Central Florida area. February’s meeting is tonight and I have the privledge of sharing my WordPress plugin development knowledge with the group as the first of tonight’s presenters.
Its a 30 minute talk so I plan on covering the basics of plugin development, where to get help, how I organize my plugin’s assets and will round it out by showing you how to add ajax functionality to your plugin (with jQuery of course!)
The fun starts at 7pm (Thursday, February 5th) at Stardust in Winter Park. There are still some spots open, so you should probably head over to the site and RSVP.
If you can’t make it, I will post my slides here afterwards.