Plugins - Orangescale.NET / Thomas Arie Setiawan

Automatic WordPress Backup (to Amazon S3)

Today, I tried another WordPress plugin called “Automatic WordPress Backup”. This plugin will help blog owners to create backup remotely to Amazon S3 service. Since I’m using it and pretty satisfied with the billing usage, I installed it at some WordPress-powered blogs I maintain.

I use one of the available buckets under my account. For this bucket, I set its ACL (Access Control List) to private, of course. After this plugin installed and activated, I only needed to put my Access Key ID and Secret Access Key.

I decided not to include all files for my backup. I only need the database and uploaded contents. After the settings were saved, I simply hit the backup button. The process depends on the disk and database usage. I found that it was pretty fast. One of my backup files was around 300 MB, and it only took less than 5 minutes to complete the process. Also, the backup file was compressed. This should be useful to cut the usage process as you only need to store a single file for each backup.

The backup files will be automatically delivered to my Amazon S3 bucket and when the process completed, I can see the backup history. To download the backup, I only need to click on the backup links.

The backup links are built using pre-signed URLs so that only the account holder (or someone who knows the URLs) can download them.

WordPress Troubleshooting: WordPress Admin Area (Dashboard) Redirect Loop

Yesterday, I helped one of my clients with her WordPress-powered blogs. When I tried to find the solution — using search engines — I could not find any exact solution.

Problem overview

Okey, here’s the problem: When I tried to login to WordPress dashboard — not WordPress.com, but self-hosted — I always got these errors:

Redirect Loop
The browser has stopped trying to retrieve the requested item. The site is redirecting the request in a way that will never complete.

The browser has stopped trying to retrieve the requested item. The site is redirecting the request in a way that will never complete.

Have you disabled or blocked cookies required by this site?

NOTE: If accepting the site’s cookies does not resolve the problem, it is likely a server configuration issue and not your computer.

I’m not sure what caused this problem. I thought it was my browser (Firefox), but I got the same problem on other browsers.

WordPress 2.7

After upgrading to WordPress 2.6, I found no big problems. Everything looks fine. There are already many features offered, but do I use them all or try to get benefits from them? I don’t think so. I only use some some basic blog features. Do you? Well, no matter how many features, I do not think that most of us — at least me — do not use them all, only the basic things. The point is: I can do blogging in ease.

When I visit WordPress Codex page about WordPress 2.7, there are some (again!) features that might be available for the coming release. It’s still a proposal, anyway. What features that interests me? I think I like some of them, and will use it if they’re available.

Sitemaps by default — Right now, we can have a sitemap using Google XML Sitemaps Generator. I hope I understand it right. If this kind of sitemaps can be available by default, this should be great.
Batch editing of posts — Is it something like what Movable Type already has for long time? Assigning multiple entries into categories, adding tags into multiple entries. Like this? Okey, [this is good]. :)
Comment threading — Currently, I do not use this feature. This can be done using a plugin. But if it’s available in the core, this should good because this kind of capabilities can be useful in a conversation (in comments).

‘cannot yet handle MBCS in html_entity_decode’ error on WP-DownloadManager

I am currently working on a WordPress-powered site. One of its features is a download section. After comparing some WordPress plugins, I decided to use Lester ‘GaMerZ’ Chan‘s WP-DownloadManager.

When I use that plugin on WordPress 2.5.1, I got an error. It’s something like this:

Warning: cannot yet handle MBCS in html_entity_decode()! in /home/.../wp-downloadmanager.php on line 308

Is it a bug? It seems that I got this error message because this plugin needs PHP 5 (I still use PHP 4). Since many hosts having PHP 5-enabled (even it does not always installed as the default version), it should not be that difficult to solve this issue. All I need to do is making all .php files are treated as PHP 5 files. Okey, this is a straight forward solution: add a new line in your .htaccess file. You should find it in your WordPress directory, if not, just add this line:

AddType application/x-httpd-php5 .php

And, the problem solved.

Update: Put AddType application/x-httpd-php5 .php in the first line in .htaccess file. Here is mine:

AddHandler application/x-httpd-php5 .php
# BEGIN WordPress
<IfModule mod_rewrite.c>
RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule . /index.php [L]
</IfModule>
# END WordPress

After that, create a new php file e.g. myphpinfo.php and include this line:

<?php phpinfo(); ?>

This will display about PHP version (affected by .htaccess).

TypePad AntiSpam is here

typepad-antispam

Right, I have enabled TypePad AntiSpam plugin in this blog. It’s another antispam plugin created by Six Apart — a company behind blogging applications like Movable Type, TypePad, and VOX. I heard about this plugin few days ago, and it seemed promising, at least TechCrunch found it useful. :) Actually, I’m happy with my antispam plugin installed in my blog. Currently only have Akismet and WP-SpamFree (read my post about this). It works great, and I’m happy. WP-SpamFree has caught more than 2,100+ spams, and it seems Akismet does not need to do its job at all. Okey, it does but only a little — I only had less than 5 comments in moderation because WP-SpamFree thought that they’re not spam.

I’m curious about this new spam plugin. This plugin works for WordPress 2.3.x, 2.5.x, Movable Type, and Typepad (of course!); and it’s built based on WordPress Akismet plugin by Matt Mullenweg. The installation process is very straight forward. After having the API Key. Using WordPress, we can have API Key for our Akismet plugin by creating an account at WordPress.com. For TypePad AntiSpam plugin, we can get an API key by registering at TypeKey. The registration is free. Since I already had a Typekey account, it tooks few seconds to get my API key.

WP-SpamFree, a great plugin to deal with blog spams

When I jumped to WordPress from Movable Type, my first must-have plugin was Akismet. Those who use WordPress must be familiar with this plugin. Besides Akismet, there are many plugins and methods available like Spam Karma, Defensio, Bad Behavior, and many more.

Then, I found another plugin besides Akismet. It’s WP-SpamFree (official site) And, it seems that it works much better than Akismet. When using Akismet, the spam comments (and trackbacks) are moderated, so they are there in our dashboard. WP-SpamFree has a different methods. It blocks the spammers before sending any information through comment post form (and trackback). And, I have to say that I almost have a zero spams in my dashboard. No more “x comments in moderation”.
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WordPress 2.5.1 some nice plugins, Identicons and more

WordPress 2.5.1 is available. It’s recommended to upgrade to this version. More than 70 bug fixes and performance improvements.
If you want to manage your blog categories (in WordPress), there is a plugin called Batch Categories. It will help us batch edit our posts, assign multiple posts to a category or delete multiple posts from a category in one fell swoop. (via)
Tag Uncomplete. We can add tags easily in WordPress 2.5. And, it will be easier to insert tags (hey, it has tag autocomplete feature). BUT, some people experience slowdowns because they have many tags in database.
We can have not only Gravatar when displaying comments, there are also Identicons, MonsterID and Wavatars. And, we can have them from Gravatar.

Pimp your WordPress 2.5 Dashboard

One of the gret improvements offered by WordPress 2.5 is on the dashboard interface. Collaborating with Happy Cog studio, WordPress offers some great improvements. One of them is about managable widgets for dashboard. It means, we can manage what kind of ‘widgets’ should be presented on the dashboard.

Also, we can create a new admin interface theme. There are already some admin themes available like WP Tiger, Spotmilk, or Fluency. If we want to customize or creating our own admin theme, we can do it too. WordPress 2.5 introduces another option to have per user admin color scheme. The idea is “call another stylesheet into the dashboard”. And, it’s per user basis. So, every person in the system can have their own theme. Nice, eh? Read more about this if you want to create one. Anyway, by default we will have two color schemes. It’s Classic and Fresh.
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Orangescale.NET

Automatic WordPress Backup (to Amazon S3)

WordPress 2.7

‘cannot yet handle MBCS in html_entity_decode’ error on WP-DownloadManager

TypePad AntiSpam is here

WP-SpamFree, a great plugin to deal with blog spams

WordPress 2.5.1 some nice plugins, Identicons and more

Pimp your WordPress 2.5 Dashboard

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