Tag: WordPress

I was excited to try out the new auto-update feature in WordPress 3.7.1. But the first attempt failed, since I had an old .svn directory sitting around. Deleted that, then waited… days. Communicated with one of the core devs on Twitter, who said that this first rollout was intentionally slow, to get things up to speed.

Finally got tired of waiting and decided to take matters into my own hands. Didn’t want to click the Update button – that would be cheating. Discovered there’s a new function call: wp_maybe_auto_update() that triggers the process that’s supposed to run via wp-cron.

So to trigger it from the command line, all you have to do is to create a small script in your WP root directory that bootstraps WP core and calls the function:

<?php
  // request-update.php
  require( dirname(__FILE__) . '/wp-load.php' );
  wp_maybe_auto_update();
?>

With that in place, run:

php ./request-update.php

Wait a few seconds, and your site should be updated. Check the Updates page in your Dashboard and confirm that you received the update email, and Bob’s your uncle.

There are a number of plugins out there designed to scan a WordPress site on a periodic basis (e.g. nightly), grab all the recent posts, and tidy them up into an email digest. Heck, I even wrote one of my own a few years ago. Some work as WP plugins, others scrape RSS feeds.

But none of them let you hand-pick the posts you want to send by email, none of them let you “send now” and few of them provide good controls for managing the HTML/CSS of the email template. So I decided to write my own. SoloMail uses the excellent PHPMailer class, which is now included in WordPress core, and provides a simple checkbox on post views that lets you “Send now.” The current post is wrapped in a completely customizable HTML email template, and sent either to all registered users of the current site or to an external mailing list (preferred).

SoloMail is now available in the official WordPress plugin directory – get it here or see the post at Scot Hacker’s Scripts and Utilities.

To see it in action, subscribe to Birdhouse Updates.

Also: I’ve been hearing from developers who want to extend or improve the WordPress Mass Management Tools collection, so I’ve made it an open source project and posted it on github. Go for it.

My WP-Mass-Upgrade script has saved me countless hours over the past year. Making sure all Birdhouse and J-School WordPress installations are managed via subversion has meant I’ve been able to wrap them all in a single shell script. When new releases emerge, I’m able to upgrade 50+ installs in a few minutes. The most time consuming part remaining was creating new installations when customers needed them. I had the process down to around five minutes, but knew the repetitive steps could be distilled into a script, so recently wrote WP-Create:

Super fast (~30 second) way to install WordPress for clients, via subversion. Yes, users can often self-install via Fantastico or similar programs, but what guarantee do you have that they’ll upgrade as soon as new releases become available? Letting users run old versions of web software is a great way to get hacked. Take control of users’ installations by checking them out via svn (with this script) and managing them with wp-mass-upgrade.

This script performs the following tasks:

• Gather installation info
• Create install dir and check out a copy of WordPress
• Create database, db user, set db privs via external .sql file
• Create WP config file
• Create upload dir and set filesystem permissions
• Generate array line for wp-mass-upgrade.sh

Final setup is done via browser.

Added these tools to the WordPress codex section on managing WordPress via subversion.

Over time, I’ve built up a handful of shell and PHP scripts, written to satisfy various itches with WordPress, Movable Type, QuickTime Streaming Server, hosting performance, etc. I’ve been tossing them into a dorky static site in case they prove useful to anyone else.

I’ve been meaning for a while to drop them into a WordPress installation – a little software library, open for discussion. Finally got around to doing that: scot hacker’s scripts and utils. Not much different from the old site, but now includes commenting, categories, search, RSS, etc. Using the badly named but very clean WP-Candy theme.

One of these days I’ll have to dig up all my old BeOS scripts and utils and give them a permanent home.

At the UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism, we use WordPress heavily as a content management system for student and organization publications, knowledge bases, student handbooks, podcast publishing systems, online magazines, etc. Over the past couple of years, I’ve found again and again that WP is not only up to the task of serving as far more than a blogging platform, it’s a great content management system for many types of sites, once you learn a few tricks.

Just wrapped up a marathon coding session, converting one of the J-School’s most popular sites, China Digital Times (CDT), from Movable Type to WordPress. We launched the new site (with a new design by Devigal) a few days ago. This was by far the most complex WordPress installation I’ve worked on, involving around 16,000 posts and 6,000 tags. As with every site launch, I learned a few things in the process. Thought I’d post some notes here for the sake of others going through a similar process.

Nutshell version: Though SixApart (who make Movable Type) claim that their static page generation approach is great for high-performance sites, we’ve reduced the time it takes to publish a new article from almost 15 minutes to a few seconds by moving from Movable Type to WordPress.
Continue reading “Notes on a Massive WordPress Migration”

Birdhouse Hosting welcomes crestmontschool.org – the web site for Miles’ K-5 cooperative in Richmond, CA. I inherited the site a few months ago, and bid for the opportunity to host it at Birdhouse. Converted the site from Joomla to WordPress a month ago, then got started on a new design. The new look is based on the excellent Mimbo theme (though the end result barely looks related). Even had the opportunity to contribute a few tidbits to the WordPress Codex in the process.