Tech Projects

Great wordpress plugin resource

webmaster — Sat, 16 Aug 2008 17:37:03 +0000

I have a great appreciation for wordpress plugin developers. Having released a few simple plugins myself, I understand the time it takes to develop and test a quality plugin. On top of that, devoting time to support the plugin and keep it up-to-date as wordpress rapidly evolves is another effort in itself.

That’s why I appreciate the plugins Joost de Valk has been churning out.

Just recently I setup his Search Suggest plugin on our cake blog. This plugin offers a clever way to mimic some of the useful spelling suggest features offered by major search engines.

This is especially important on our cake blog. Using search meter, we’ve found that many people are searching for cakes using common misspellings. And while we’ve developed a plugin to correct common mispellings, this tactic doesn’t scale well as it requires us to hardcode common misspellings.

Joost’s plugin allows us to cover a wider array of mispellings. A good addition to this plugin would be a feature to allow wordpress admins the ability to add overrides for commonly misspelled words. This would be useful because the Yahoo API doesn’t work as well for word combinations. For example, the API will catch the misspelling for Haloween, but does not catch misspelling for “Haloween Cake“.

I suggest wordpress admins check out Joost’s complete lists of plugins.

Upgrade to Wordpress 2.6.1

webmaster — Sat, 16 Aug 2008 17:04:19 +0000

I’ve been delaying the upgrade of our wedding cake blog to 2.6 because I wasn’t thrilled with the post revision option. However, there is an easy way to turn it off without having to edit any configuration files.

With this plugin, I can also turn off the autosave feature which often leads to multiple drafts of posts which I end up having to spend time deleting.

Once I had the plugin installed, the upgrade to WP 2.6.1 was smooth. I tested the upgrade first on our test blog and found no issues and then deployed it on our main site without any hitches.

Kudos the the wordpress team for another smooth upgrade.

Wordpress 2.6 is out

webmaster — Wed, 16 Jul 2008 02:31:26 +0000

Wordpress Plugin Bloat

webmaster — Fri, 11 Jul 2008 12:06:22 +0000

Trent brought to light the unintended performance impact of just activating plugins without even using them in your theme. Highslide was one of the plugins he profiled.

As our wedding cake blog has grown in traffic we’ve been working to optimize our plugins to reduce overhead.

Using Charles Proxy Tool we took a look at the entire footprint of our site and started identifying optimization opportunity areas. One area were we made gains was modifying our plugins to only load javascript libraries when absolutely needed. For example if you are only using a plugin in your category section, is it really necessary to load that library for other sections of your blog?

This approach helped reduce our overall load time and hopefully should help keep our users happy…

PHPList Wordpress Plugin now with Multiple List Support

webmaster — Sun, 16 Mar 2008 16:39:00 +0000

After many requests, I’ve finally added new functionality to the PHPList Wordpress Integration plugin. The plugin now supports the ability to display multiple lists on the form. So if you manage multiple lists through PHPList and want to give the user the option of choosing which one to subscribe to, this is now supported the PHPList Wordpress options panel.

To enable this feature go into the PHPList Wordpress Options panel and click on the ‘Add Another List’ button. This will add a new row which allows you to enter another list ID and list name:

Once you add the list id and list name click on Save Options. Your form will automatically be updated:

Note: In the future I plan on adding a capability to create multiple instances of the Phplist form with the ability to associate each instance with a different mailing list.

Excluding tags from Posts in Wordpress

webmaster — Mon, 18 Feb 2008 17:30:35 +0000

If you are using the wordpress the_tags function and you want to exclude certain tags from showing up with associated posts you can use the following function in place of the_tags:

function pk_the_tags($before = ‘Tags: ‘, $sep = ‘, ‘, $after = ”, $exclude = ”){
$tags = get_the_tags();
        if ( empty( $tags ) )
                return false;
        $tag_list = $before;
           
        foreach ( $tags as $tag ) {
                 if (!empty($exclude))  
                        $pos = stripos( $exclude, $tag->name);
                 else
                        $pos = false;
                 if ($pos=== false) 
                        $tag_links[] = ‘($tag->term_id) . ‘">’ . $tag->name . ‘’;  
        }
        if (empty($tag_links))
           return false;
        $tag_links = join( $sep, $tag_links );
        $tag_links = apply_filters( ‘the_tags’, $tag_links );
        $tag_list .= $tag_links;
        $tag_list .= $after;
        echo $tag_list;
}
 

So if you want to exclude all tags with the word featured in the tag name you could call it as follows:

 if (get_the_tags()) pk_the_tags(‘, ‘, ‘, ‘, ”, ‘featured’); ?>
 

Stolen Cake Photos - Candelle

webmaster — Sun, 17 Feb 2008 14:09:28 +0000

Where’s Arnold Diaz from Shame on You when you need him?

We have a fairly liberal photo use policy at Pink Cake Box. We allow most non-commercial sites to use our photos as long as they add a link back to our site. The majority of people respect this license and for the most part we haven’t had any major issues.

But invariably some people violate this policy, and one of our blog readers recently notified of a really shameful violation:

Hey Anne, I write to your because of course, I love your cakes! And 2, because a couple weeks ago I was at a red light, and I saw a small truck from a cake company here in Santiago, Chile, with one of your cakes pictures printed on the back! I don’t know if you have the rights or if they have a permission from you (iI don’t think they’d do), so I thought I should let you know someone is using your cake in their company image. I took some pics of it with my cell hone, they’re not good, but here they are :

The company’s name is Candelle and their website is www.candelle.cl Note: Other cake designers will notice they have also used stolen photos in their gallery.

Pink Cake Box on CNN!

webmaster — Mon, 11 Feb 2008 02:25:07 +0000

Our wedding cake shop was featured on CNN this week! You can see the video here.

In the video Anne talks about how the company started, how we’ve used the Internet to grow and how we’ve relied on family members like her mom to help launch the business.

Secure Wordpress

webmaster — Fri, 18 Jan 2008 12:34:30 +0000

Secure your wordpress blog.

Upgrade to 2.3

webmaster — Sat, 27 Oct 2007 21:54:28 +0000

Here are my notes related to my upgrade of our wedding cake blog to Wordpress 2.3:

1. Custom Query String refers to the old wp_categories table. Had to edit line 252 to reflect the new terms table:

return (int) $wpdb->get_var("SELECT term_id FROM $wpdb->terms WHERE slug = ‘". $wpdb->escape($category_nicename) ."’");

Note: Looks like Moshu made this change and added tagging support. Download it here. This means I can now throttle the number of cakes that appear in a tag archive page.

2. Ran importer for UTW and updated theme to use new native tag commands. Everything worked fine, although I did have to run the following query in the backend to remove the dashes from the old UTW tags:

update wp_terms set name=replace(name, ‘-’, ‘ ‘);

3. Dropped old wp_tags and wp_tag_synonyms tables

4. Upgraded Headspace2. I noticed headspace 2 doesn’t expose the ability to use tag names in your meta tag descriptions (someone please correct me if i’m wrong) So I hacked inline_tags.php and added the following on line 54:

 else if (is_tag ()) 
                        $replace_with = array (”, single_tag_title(”, false), ”,”,”,”,”);
 

Update: John has already updated his headspace2 plugin to include a %%tag%%. I highly recommend checking this plugin out. John does a tremendous job supporting the tag - please help support his efforts by donating.

5. Tags associated with a post are not searched by default, so I created a plugin to do that. I also use this plugin to correct user search miss-spellings. For example, try searching for brithday cakes on our wedding cake blog.

Note: An even better alternative to my plugin is John’s Search Unleashed plugin.

6. Updated my linking structure so that I don’t use trailing slashes for categories or tag pages