Category: WordPress

[sc:wordpress-category ]This is the latest in an ongoing series of posts here at JumbleCat about the plugins I find useful for WordPress.

The first three were:

1. Happy 1st Birthday JumbleCat! AKA WordPress Plugins!
2. Total Backup for WordPress
3. Some More WordPress Plugins

Since then I’ve added quite a few more to JumbleCat.

After The Deadline for Comments

This plugin allows your users to use After the Deadline when writing comments, a nice touch that hopefully improves the quality of the writing!

Automatic Updates/WP Updates Notifier

I’m combining these two as I’ll probably disable WP Updates Notifier soon but I think it’s worth a mention if you don’t want to use Automatic Updates.

First off Automatic Updates does pretty much what it says, when an update to either the WP Core, plugin or theme is available, it automatically installs it.  You can select which of the three you want to do and it sends you a nice little e-mail when it runs so you know something has changed on your site.

Of course for many premium sites that have lots of visitors this may not be the best thing to do as updates can sometimes break things.  In this case I highly recommend WP Updates Notifier as it will send you an e-mail when an update is available, letting you test it before you go ahead and update your production site 🙂

Highlight Search Terms

Another plugin that is aptly named.  If a user searches your site, this plugin highlights the search terms that were found on the page.

PHP Server Info

Anyone who’s run a web server with PHP or done any kind of PHP development knows that php_info() is pretty much a required part debugging.  This plugin adds a menu item to the WordPress admin interface that show’s you the output and nice and clean fashion.

Rich Text Editor For Comments

Much like After the Deadline for Comments, this plugin enhances your users commenting life with the same kind of rich editor found when creating posts etc.   This plugin seems to have disappeared from WordPress.org and the author’s site doesn’t seem to be available right now either.

Always Remember Me

This is a new plugin by Ozh who created the awesome “Ozh’ Admin Drop Down Menu“.  It auto checks the “Remember Me” during login and extends the remembered timeframe from 2 weeks to 1 year.

Delete Me

This plugin allows a user to delete themselves.  Simple and to the point.

Inactive User Deleter

Finally this plugin allows you to search for users based on various criteria and then delete them in bulk.  Useful if you have a lot of spam users that register.

 

[sc:wordpress-category ]So WordPress 3.5 was finally released after a few delays and while it doesn’t bring anything new that I need, it does have all the various fixes in it so upgrading is always a high priority on my list.

First things first, WordPress has an amazing update process that’s been rock solid in the past but I’m still paranoid (as everyone should be 😉 and execute a full backup of my site using Total Backup.  I’ve used Total Backup for a while and it’s good, however the lack of scheduling is starting to make me think of looking for another solution (or more likely just adding the functionality myself).

Once the backup was done, the standard update process executed without issue and 3.5 installed.  Everything looked good.

The next day I was editing a post and when to change the scheduled publish time and instead of the time/date selector appearing, nothing happened when I clicked on the “Edit” link.

I have a local installation of WordPress I use to test out new plugins and themes and it wasn’t an issue on that install.

I disabled pretty much all my plugins and that didn’t help.

I pulled down the backup and did a binary file comparison (using Beyond Compare, an awesome app!) between my test site, the production site and the WordPress 3.5 core files, nothing of note.

After some more poking around I finally had a flash of inspiration and realized my test site doesn’t use the same theme as I use on JumbleCat (Arjuna X) so I enabled it.  Eureka!  The test site was broken in the same way.

I went to the theme authors site but the support area they used to have is gone.  Doing a quick search brought me here, which explains that theme uses an old version of the jQuery UI library that conflicts with WordPress 3.5.

The thread suggests replacing the 1.8.10 version of the file with the 1.9.2 version but keeping the original file name.  I don’t like that solution as it could cause other issues with other plugins so instead I did the following:

• Download version 1.9.2 of jQuery-UI from http://jqueryui.com/
• Place the new jQuery-UI file in arjuna-x/lib
• Edited arjuna-x/functions.php, update the reference for jquery-ui-1.8.10 to 1.9.2 version

This makes it all nice and clean and most importantly, functional.

 

[sc:wordpress-category ]Finding WordPress  plugins can be a daunting task for site admins, the plugin repository just has too many plugins to realistically browse through to find what you want and searching can be hit and miss as naming and functionality only sometimes go together.

I’ve used WordPress for over a year here and I still find new plugins that are useful, two new ones I’ve started using are:

• Duplicate Post
• Subscribe2

Duplicate Post is a nice little add-on to the posts/pages list that let you clone or duplicate a post, which is handy if you are making the same kind of post each week.  I’m actually using this primarily on another site where I do a weekly update to several projects I’m working on.  Duplicate Post makes it easy to copy last weeks update and make whatever changes are required and post it again.

Subscribe2 is an e-mail subscription plugin, allowing people to follow JumbleCat through e-mail instead of RSS.  I’ve been looking for this kind of plugin for a while and I’m not all that happy with Subscribe2, but it does work.  This biggest nit-pick I have is that it only send plain text e-mail unless you “upgrade” for $40 to the “HTML” version plus support and upgrade “packages”.  I’m sure for a site that makes money that’s no problem, but this blog is just for my own personal gratification.

I’m thinking I might have to build an e-mail subscription plugin myself, but I’m not that annoyed with Subscribe2 yet ;).

 

[sc:wordpress-category ]In the JumbleCat birthday article on WordPress plug-ins, I missed one new plug-in I’ve found lately.

An important part of the administrative tasks of running a website of any kind is backing up your data.  WordPress has two components, the WordPress files (the core distro, plug-ins, themes, etc.) and the database.  Manually backing up these files is pretty straight forward, but if your hosting provider doesn’t support shell access (like mine), then you have to pull down each file individually with an SFTP client and use the web front end to the database to extract the data.

This process is relatively long because JumbleCat is currently has several thousand small files in its directory structure which takes quite a while to download one at a time through SFTP.

I’ve been looking for a good backup plug-in for WordPress for a while, there are several available that backup to online stores or are commercial software but those didn’t fit my requirements.

Instead I found Total Backup, not to be confused with the other Total Backup available.

Total Backup is a nice, simple app that will grab all your files and databases and zip them up for you.  You can then download the zip through the web interface.

Installation is through the standard WordPress plug-in feature and once installed you have just a couple of options to configure:

• Where to store the archive files generated by Total Backup
• Directories to exclude from the backup

After that your ready to go!

The backup page lists any backups you have made so far (and the option to delete them) and a single button to execute a backup.  And that’s it.

It works quite well, it does however put your site in to maintenance mode while it executes the backup.

I did find a single “bug”, after executing a new backup a new entry in the backup list is created but the delete button is not added to the line.  Simply re-loaded the page solves the problem.

It’s a great plugin which greatly simplifies the backup process in WordPress.