Wordpress Plugin - Orangescale.NET / Thomas Arie Setiawan

Missing WordPress’ Jetpack Statistics Data

I have been using WordPress Stats plugin for long time. And when Jetpack was introduced, I had it installed right away. Everything works great. What I like about WordPress statistics data — from this plugin — is that it can give me some useful insight about my blog traffic. It’s not as detailed as Google Analytics, of course. But, it’s useful.

Yesterday, I made some modifications on the blog theme. I was not sure whether this problem has something to do with the issue or not. But, when I logged in to my WordPress dashboard and hit the Stats Page I found an error. Something regarding the invalid token.

I disabled Jetpack plugin, and had it enabled again. I did it using the standard procedure: install, connect to WorPress.com account, and configure.

All works. But, not the statistics. All statistics are gone.

I have some statistic profiles under a single WordPress.com account. I checked the other sites, and they’re all working. I’m still looking for a solution for this. I feel that all the statistics are stored at WordPress’ server. I think I will try to contact them. For now, I think I will use Google Analytics data and server log.

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 Plugins Search and Comment Threading

Finally, WordPress now offers a better search engine for its plugin directory. It is using Sphinx right now. But, it does not search plugins by authors and tags. It only reads all information from readme.txt file which is delivered in every plugins uploaded to directory.

Another improvement — well, I think I should call it “feature” — is that WordPress.com is now supporting comment threading feature. This feature is included in the core if you’re using self-hosted WordPress 2.7.1. Since WordPress.com seems already upgrade to the latest version, we can now use this feature also. Just go to Settings and choose Discussion from your WordPress.com dashboard.

Troubleshooting: Can’t Login After WordPress Upgrade

Today, I was helping my client upgrading her WordPress-powered blog. He was using WordPress 2.6.x series. I upgraded using the standard procedur, and I thought the whole process was painless. But, it was not. I could not access its “Dashboard”. The login screen was there, but when I entered the username and password — I was 1,000% sure that I typed a correct combination — nothing happened.

Few months ago, I had a problem with the “Redirect Loop”. I made a speculation: removing all plugins under wp-content/plugins/ directory. Of course, after I made sure that I had the list of all active plugins. After that, I tried to login again, and voila! I continued re-installing all plugins needed. Problem solved.

About Facebook Connect for WordPress

I installed Facebook Connect as an experiment for this blog last week. With some modifications, it works fine here. If you’re using WordPress and want to try Facebook Connect, here are few things you might need to know. Anyway, I’m using Facebook Connect 0.9.9 plugins for WordPress. It’s recommended to use the latest version. When I write this post, the newest version is 1.0.

When Facebook users are “connected” to your blog, it means:

They will be registered to your blog as “Subscriber” in your WordPress system. Some account information — from Facebook — will be inserted. They are “Full name” and Facebook Profile ID.
The usernames will be a combination of FB_ prefix with profile ID. So, you will have usernames like these: FB_1015647304, FB_1226611178, FB_678048415, etc.
The “Website” field will be their Facebook profile page.
Biographical Info will be derived from Facebook profile based on the data at the time they’re connected.
Email address will not be inserted as user profile data. Connected users can edit their profile (edit display name, email address, website URL, etc) by signing in to your WordPress Dashboard. This will make them supply their email addresses.
Facebook profile images will be used as avatars.

Right now, I have some questions (for myself) about this Facebook Connector plugin.

Can they “disconnect” from my blog? I don’t see an option for this. The only thing I can do to “disconnect” them from my blog is by deleting their account in my WordPress system.
Some Facebook users have been connected. And then, what? What’s the benefit of being “connected”? I know, it’s like creating a small community for a blog. But, what’s the other benefit?

I will leave Facebook Connect here for now. But, I’m thinking of removing it later. Anyway, Facebook Connector is not a bad plugin. It’s great piece of plugin to make connection between your WordPress-powered blog and Facebook.

This Blog is Facebook Connect-enabled Now

Last week, Facebook announced about plugins for Facebook Connect. I saw some sites already using this plugins. Some leading blogging platform like Movable Type and WordPress also have Facebook Connect plugins.

To be more spesific, here is a list of Facebook Connect Plugins available. I’m sure there will be more plugins in the future.

For this blog, I use Sociable, with some modifications — of course. I try to keep it simple. When visitors are not “connected” to this blog, there will be a brief notification. If you’re on a single entry page, and commenting system is enabled, you should see a button to “connect”. In general, the Facebook Connect-related element will be displayed in the sidebar — with the “connection status”. Right now, I’m using it and I hope I can use it for a long period. Because I made some modifications on the Sociable plugin, there might be some minor (I hope!) bugs.

If you only want to test how it works, just sign-in using your Facebook account and get connected to this blog. Anyway, this is my Facebook application page for this blog :)

New design for this blog

I have been very busy in the last few weeks, many things to do. I needed to recharge my energy. And this is the result: a new design for my blog. I created this theme for fun, at least to keep my mood in balance, to bring my mood back to the other design work.

After upgrading to WordPress 2.7 few days ago, I wanted to have some changes here, especially by taking advantages from new features introduced in the latest WordPress, e.g. built-in threaded comment. Here are some notes on my new blog design.

Template tags

Still related to template tags, I try to take advantage from the way WordPress produces CSS selectors. Here is an example. Open index.php in default theme folder, you should see this for the entry loop:

<div <?php post_class() ?> id="post-<?php the_ID(); ?>">

The code above will produce something like this:

<div class="post hentry category-services category-sites category-www category-webdev tag-htaccess tag-facebook tag-linkedin tag-service tag-twitter tag-url" id="post-1026">

Do you see the pattern? It will produce some post classes on the entry data (categories and tags). This function is called post_class(). By this, we can customize how each entry (inside the loop) should be displayed, just work with the stylesheet.

If you want to make you theme compatible well with WordPress 2.7, just head to Migrating Plugins and Themes to 2.7 article at WordPress Codex. There are some other useful information for theme designers — and also for you as bloggers.

Videoblogging, anyone?

I decided to start a videoblogging now. When I am with my camera digital, sometime I capture videos and photos. So, why not bring the videos online? I know it is probably not popular — especially in Indonesia. But, why not?

After doing comparison steps among some video hosting providers like Vimeo, YouTube, blip.tv, Yahoo! Video, Google Video, etc, I decided to host all my videos to Vimeo and embed to my videoblog. I capture all videos using both camera digital and my mobile phone Nokia. Just in case you find a low-quality videos, you know the reasons. :)

My videoblog is built using WordPress and Viper’s Video Quicktag plugin with template modifications — also some other plugins. Right now, not every video has a story/descrption, but I will add some later. Okey, here is my videoblog URL: http://video.orangescale.net

WordPress 2.7 Admin Color Scheme

WordPress 2.5 already provide two types of color schemes for dashboard. They are “Classic” and “Fresh“. By default, you will have the “Fresh” color scheme. It’s light shades of blue. If you like the darker blue, you can switch to it by choosing the “Classic” style. If you haven’t touch this area, this setting can be found on your profile page. Just click your name on the top right navigation.

wp26-scheme

In WordPress 2.7, we can do the same. The color schemes available to choose are “Blue” and “Gray” (default).

wp27-scheme

Right now, I choose the “Blue” scheme. Look at these picture for color scheme comparison. Continue reading »

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.

Plugin Installation in WordPress 2.7

Currently, it’s easy to upgrade WordPress plugins from the dashboard for WordPress 2.5+ version. Compared to the old method, it’s much easier because we can upgrade the plugin using a single-click. Well, not a single-click, but at least you do not need to run any FTP software.

In the coming WordPress 2.7, it’s not getting easier for users, but also for developers. There will be a page called “Install Plugins” (the name might change). Here, we have a page displaying many related sub-menus about plugins like: Search Plugins, Upload a Plugin, Featured Plugins, Popular Plugins, Newest Plugins, Recently Updated Plugins. You can figure out what they mean, right?

For example, on the “Search Plugins” page, we can search plugins available from official WordPress Plugin Directory. We can narrow our search by “terms” (or keywords), tags, and also plugin author. We can also narrow our search using tag clouds provided. The search feature will give us list of plugins with the following details: plugin name, version, rating, and description. We can directly choose to install from this page. Very easy!

What makes it even better is that we can find out more details just like when we read plugin details from WordPress Plugins Directory. If we click on the plugin table row, there will be an inline popup providing information about the mode detailed description, installation guide, FAQ and also screenshot. The bottom line is that we can have plugin information without leaving the dashboard.

Set the order of WordPress Pages

Using WordPress, we can make non-post content easily. This non-post content is known as “Pages“. It is also easy to display the created pages, using wp_list_pages template tag. We can also manage the order of pages — when displayed in our blog — using sort_column argument inside wp_list_pages. For some people, it should be easy. But, can we do that in easier way? Yes, we can.

There is a plugin called My Page Order. It will help us reorganize our pages, especially when we have many pages. We can do it using drag-and-drop interface.

We can also manage the page order of sub-pages (if any). I use this plugin for my blog (using WordPress 2.5.1), and it looks good.

‘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).

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”.
Continue reading »

FAlbum and Flickr Photo Album plugins for WordPress

When I started to my other blog powered by WordPress, I wanted to have a section to display my Flickr photos. I decided to use FAlbum plugin.

When I found this plugin, I did not search another plugins. I just tried to install and modify it. And it works. At least, this plugin can give me what I wanted. You can see the working demo at my blog photo gallery section.

Of course, this plugin is not the only solution. There is another plugin called Flickr Photo Album for WordPress. Both plugins are similar. I haven’t dug deeper to compare those two plugins, to find which plugin does better job.

Orangescale.NET