Tag Archives: WordPress

Bulk Delete Plugin now supports deleting by permalink

Published Apr 10, 2012 | In Plugin Releases

I have recently released lot of updates to my Bulk Delete (which is a WordPress Plugin that allows you delete posts in bulk). The new updates allows the user to delete posts based on permalink in addition to deleting by tags or categories.

Like the previous updates, this feature was also requested by the users of the Plugin. So if you have any feedback or feature request, don’t hesitate to contact me, I will try to add them to the Plugin.

New features

The following are the new features that are supported by the Plugin

  • Ability to delete posts by permalink. This features was written by Martin Capodici
  • Major UI revamp. Let me know if you have any feedback about the new UI.
  • Added debug information, which should help you to debug issues related to your server.
  • Added roles and capabilities for menu.

Bug Fixes

The following are some of the bug fixes which have gone into the releases

  • Fixed issues with translations
  • Fixed a major issue in the way how dates were handled
  • Fixed CSS issues in IE

Translations

The following are the different languages for which translations have been added. If you are willing to translate the Plugin in your language, then you can find the pot file inside the language’s folder.

  • Turkish
  • Spanish
  • Italian
  • Bulgarian
  • Russian
  • Lithuanian

Dev Time

All these releases combinedly took me about 11 hours of development time. From this release on I have started tracking the amount of time I am spending on each release of my WordPress Plugins. There is a separate blog post, which explains the reasons why I track my development time.

Download

You can download the latest version of the Plugin from the Plugin’s home page.

Feedback

Try out the Plugin and if you have any comments or if you want to report any bugs, please leave a comment below.

Stay updated

I would be posting updates about this Plugin in my blog and in Twitter . If you want to be informed when new version of this Plugin is released, then you can either subscribe to this blog’s RSS feed or follow me in Twitter .

 

Posted in Plugin Releases | Tagged , , | 2 Comments

Adopted Cron debug log WordPress Plugin

Published Mar 27, 2012 | In Plugin Releases

Recently, I saw a post by Ron (of wpmututorials.com fame) that he is making a couple of his WordPress Plugins available for adoption, since he wanted to concentrate on other stuff in life.

I offered to adopt the Cron Debug Log Plugin because a couple of my own Plugins depend on cron and at times I need to debug if there are any issues with cron and this Plugin could be immensely helpful.

For those who don’t know, Cron Debug Log Plugin can used to debug remote calls made using Cron jobs in WordPress. It basically logs all unsuccessful wp_remote_post calls from Cron.

Ron was kind enough to accept my offer and gave me check-in access to the repo. Over the next few weeks, I am planning to make some modifications to the Plugin and add some features. If you want any specific feature in the Plugin, then do let me know and I will try my best to get it implemented.

Update

In addition to the above Plugin, I have also adopted the following Plugins.

Posted in Plugin Releases | Tagged , , | 3 Comments

Phishing attempts to get your wordpress.org password

Published Mar 27, 2012 | In WordPress

Recently, I received an email, claiming to be from WordPress.org, notifying that one of my Plugins have been taken down. It also provided a link where I was supposed to check the status of my Plugin. Clicking on this link took me to a website which looked like wordpress.org and was asking for my username and password.

Even though it looked like a WordPress.org website, the url was different. I posted about it the wp-hackers mailing list and got the confirmation that is a phishing attempt to get your WordPress.org username and password.

If you get an email like below, be careful and don’t click the link or enter your username and password.

wordpress.org-phishing-attempt-email

In addition follow the following steps to make sure you don’t compromise your account.

  • Check the sending email address. It will always have a wordpress.org email address
  • Check if the link text and the actual link are different.
  • Make sure that the url of the page where you enter your password is always wordpress.org

You can also find more information about it from this forum thread.

WordPress.org has also sent the following email to all the Plugin developers regarding this issue.

wordpress.org-email-png

Be vigilant and stay safe.

Posted in WordPress | Tagged , , , | 4 Comments

Generating dynamic files for download from PHP

Published Jan 16, 2012 | In Web Programming

If you have used my WordPress readme generator you would have noticed that I have a “Save As” button, which when pressed allows you to download the file which was just generated by the PHP code. (In most browsers this opens the save file as dialog box)

Recently one of the readers of my blog asked me how to do this in PHP and I was about to send him the code snippet. But then I thought of writing a blog article so that it will be useful for others as well.

So here we go.

The code is mostly self explanatory. The important part in the above code snippet is the “content Disposition” header.

Also since we are sending headers to the browser, we should not have started the output before this code executes. Otherwise we might get a “header already sent” error.

Posted in Web Programming | Tagged , , | 3 Comments

Updates to my WordPress Plugins

Published Sep 12, 2011 | In Plugin Releases

Over the past week, I have updated nearly half of my Plugins. I thought of consolidating all them in a single post instead of writing separate post for each of them.

If I have fixed a bug or added a new feature, I call them as mandatory updates. If I have just added new translations, the those updates are optional. But it is recommend that you always update irrespective of whether they are mandatory or optional updates.

You can update all these Plugins from your WordPress dashboard or by manually downloading them from their homepage.

Try these updates and let me know if you face any issues.

Mandatory Updates

Easy Retweet

Easy ReTweet is a WordPress Plugin, which lets you add retweet or Tweet this buttons for your WordPress posts, together with the retweet count.

I updated this Plugin to v2.7. I fixed a bug and added new feature, so it is a mandatory update

The following are the major changes

  • Enabled custom bit.ly pro domains (Thanks to Michelle McGinnis for the patches)
  • Added Bulgarian translations
  • Added Lithuanian translations

Github Ribbon

Github Ribbon is a WordPress Plugin, which can be used to add Github ribbons to your website. The github ribbons can be configured either for the entire site or on a post by post basic.

I updated this Plugin to v0.4

The following are the major changes

  • Added CSS style to hide ribbon on printed pages

Posts by tag

Posts by Tag WordPress Plugin, provides sidebar widgets which can be used to display posts from a specific set of tags in the sidebar.

I have updated this Plugin to v1.8.

The following are the major changes

  • Added support for displaying content (Thanks to rjune for the patch)

Twitter Avatar Reloaded

Twitter avatar reloaded Plugin adds a new field to the comment form to get the user’s Twitter username and stores it together with comments and using it replaces gravatar with twitter avatar when the comment is displayed.

I have updated the Plugin to to v1.0

The following are the major changes

  • Using transient api for storing cache
  • Also improve performance

Optional Updates

Geo mark

Geo Mark is a WordPress Plugin which will automatically locate Geo information in your WordPress posts using Yahoo Placemaker and YQL API’s.

I have updated this Plugin to v0.7

The following are the major changes

  • Added Bulgarian translations
  • Added Lithuanian translations

Post to Friendfeed

Post to FriendFeed is a WordPress Plugin which will allow you to post excerpts from your blog posts as a message in FriendFeed with images. By default FriendFeed posts them without images and this Plugin overcomes this issue.

I have updated this Plugin to v1.0.2

The following are the major changes

  • Added Bulgarian translations

Tweetback Helper

Tweetbacks Helper is a helper Plugin for Tweetbacks Plugin to help it detect more tweets.

I have updated this Plugin to v0.4

The following are the major changes

  • Added Bulgarian translations
  • Added Lithuanian translations
  • Added German translations

Posted in Plugin Releases | Tagged , , , , , , , , | 7 Comments

Embedding Github files in your WordPress posts

Published Aug 25, 2011 | In Plugin Releases

Recently while debugging the issue with my WordPress feed, I found out that the Plugin which I was using to display files from my Github Gist was highly unoptimized. As promised, I created a Plugin to do it properly.

While working on this new Plugin, I felt that it would be really nice to embed Github files as well in addition to embedding gist.

Gist-it

My search lead to a Google app engine based solution called Gist-it. I really liked it, but one problem with it was that it was not supporting embedding particular regions of the file. So during the Yahoo HackU last week, I hacked on it and added support for specifying line numbers.

I also updated my WordPress Plugin to support gist-it urls as well.

Download & Usage

You can download the latest version of the Plugin from the Plugin’s home page. The Plugin’s home page also has detailed examples of different ways by which you can embed gist or Github files in your WordPress blog posts or pages.

Feedback

If you have any comments or if you want to report any bugs, please leave a comment below.

Stay updated

I would be posting updates about this Plugin in my blog and in Twitter. If you want to be informed when new version of this Plugin is released, then you can either subscribe to this blog’s RSS feed or follow me in Twitter.

Posted in Plugin Releases | Tagged , , , , | 4 Comments

Fixing WordPress Feed timeout issues

Published Jul 12, 2011 | In WordPress

Recently I got an email from my friend Sudheer, saying that the feedburner feed of my blog is not working. I thought it might be some small issue, but it took me more than a couple of hours to fix it. As usual, I thought of documenting it since it was an interesting problem and also someone who has the same problem might also find it useful.

WordPress feed timeout

I started the debug process by logging into Feedburner dashboard. Feedburner reported that it is not able to fetch my blog’s feed url. When I tried to open the feed url directly in browser it was loading, but it took a couple of minutes for WordPress to generate it. But both feedvalidator and feedburner said that the feed times out.

My website was loading properly and my error log was empty. I tried lot of different things but was not able to figure out why the feed was timing out.

Increasing memory used by WordPress

After a couple of web searches, I landed on a old forum thread, which stated that we should try to increase the amount of memory used by WordPress. I tried doing that as well, but it didn’t make difference 🙁

Reducing post count in feed

Then I tried to reduce the number of recent items that were shown in my feed to 10 from the default value of 25. The feed was getting generated in some decent time and was able to let feedburner pick up my feed. But it still didn’t solve my original issue.

Unoptimized Plugin

After some more debugging, I found the root cause of the issue. An unoptimized Plugin was the real culprit.

I was using github’s gist to store the code samples that I use in my blog posts and used a Plugin to embed the code directly from github. The advantage of this approach is that, there is one centralized repository for my code samples with versioning and also github provides nice syntax highlighting.

The Plugin was making curl request to github to retrieve the code sample and it so happened that most of my last 25 blog posts had code samples and some blog posts even had around three code embeds.

The problem with the Plugin was that, it was not using WordPress’s built-in HTTP request object and also it was not caching any of the response that it got from the curl request. I quickly rewrote the Plugin and WordPress was immediately able to serve the feed in less than a second. (Will be releasing the Plugin pretty soon) Update: You can find the Plugin in its homepage

Solution

So if you are also facing timeout issues with your WordPress feed, then try the following

  • Try increasing the memory used by WordPress
  • Try reducing the number of blog posts that are disabled in your feed.
  • If nothing works, then it’s mostly because of some unoptimized Plugin.

Posted in WordPress | Tagged , , , , | 4 Comments

Updated 4 WordPress Plugins

Published May 12, 2011 | In Plugin Releases

Over the past week, I have updated 4 of my WordPress Plugins and thought of consolidating all of them in a single post instead of creating multiple posts.

Posts By Tag

Posts by Tag WordPress Plugin, provides sidebar widgets which can be used to display posts from a specific set of tags in the sidebar.

I updated this Plugin to v1.7. It fixed a bug so it’s a mandatory update.

The following are the main changes

  • Added support for displaying post dates
  • Fixed a bug which was corrupting the loop.

Twitter Avatar Reloaded

Twitter avatar reloaded Plugin adds a new field to the comment form to get the user’s Twitter username and stores it together with comments and using it replaces gravatar with twitter avatar when the comment is displayed.

I updated this Plugin to v0.7. It is a mandatory update.

The following are the main changes

  • Added 4 template functions to display the comment authors Twitter id and profile url.

Bulk Delete

Bulk Delete is a WordPress Plugin which can be used to delete posts in bulk from selected categories or tags. This Plugin can also delete all drafts, post revisions or pages.

I updated this Plugin to v1.3. It is an optional update

The following are the main changes

  • Added German translations

Easy Retweet

Easy ReTweet is a WordPress Plugin, which lets you add retweet or Tweet this buttons for your WordPress posts, together with the retweet count.

I updated this Plugin to v2.4. It is an optional update

The following are the main changes

  • Added German translations

Stay updated

I would be posting updates about this Plugin in my blog and in Twitter. If you want to be informed when new version of this Plugin is released, then you can either subscribe to this blog’s RSS feed or follow me in Twitter.

Posted in Plugin Releases | Tagged , , , , , | 11 Comments

Changed the permalink structure of my blog

Published Feb 20, 2011 | In WordPress

Well, after wanting to do it for many years, I have finally bitten the bullet and have changed the permalink structure of the posts in my blog.

When I moved from blogspot to WordPress, (some 6 years ago) I retained the structure of the blog posts to the usual year/month/date/postname format. But later, I realized that this results in long urls and also these days the date is not adding any additional information to the blog posts.

I have been thinking of changing the permalink structure to the shorter /postname format for quite some time now, but was always worried about setting up the proper 301 redirects.

But at last I did it today, with just one line in my .htaccess file, which looks something like this.

So if you are planning to change your permalink structure then follow these steps.

  • Disable caching. (If you using Plugins like wp-super-cache etc.)
  • Add the above line to your .htaccess file
  • Change the permalink structure
  • Re enable cache

And you are done. 🙂

If you want you can also create a new sitemap.xml file which could speed up the index update by Google.

Posted in WordPress | Tagged | 1 Comment

WordPress Plugin updates

Published Feb 7, 2011 | In Plugin Releases

Over the past two weeks, I have updated a couple of my WordPress Plugins. Most of them are optional updates, so I thought of consolidating all the changes here instead of creating separate posts for each of them.

Bulk Delete

Bulk Delete is a WordPress Plugin which can be used to delete posts in bulk from selected categories or tags.

I updated this Plugin to v1.2. It is a mandatory update.

The following were the major updates

  • Added support for deleting posts by custom taxonomies
  • Optimized the code which prevents the blank screen that you get when you have huge number of posts to delete on an under-powered server.
  • Added Dutch translations
  • Added Brazilian Portuguese translations

Easy Retweet

Easy ReTweet is a WordPress Plugin, which lets you add retweet or Tweet this buttons for your WordPress posts, together with the retweet count.

I updated this Plugin to v2.3. It is a mandatory update.

The following were the major changes

  • Fixed issue with permalink for official Twitter button
  • Added Brazilian Portuguese translations

Twitter Avatar Reloaded

Twitter avatar reloaded Plugin adds a new field to the comment form to get the user’s Twitter username and stores it together with comments and using it replaces gravatar with twitter avatar when the comment is displayed.

I updated this Plugin to v0.6. It is an optional update.

The following were the major changes

  • Added Dutch translations
  • Added Brazilian Portuguese translations

Google Scribe

Google Scribe is a WordPress Plugin, which allows you to enable Google Scribe to WordPress comment input box.

I updated this Plugin to v0.4. It is an optional update

The following were the major changes

  • Added Dutch translations

Github Ribbon

Github Ribbon is a WordPress Plugin, which can be used to add Github ribbons to your website.

I updated this Plugin to v0.3. It is an optional update

The following were the major changes

  • Added Dutch translations

Bulk Move

Bulk Move is a WordPress Plugin which can be used to move posts from one category to another in bulk. This Plugin can also be used to remove assigned categories from posts.

I updated this Plugin to v0.4. It is an optional update

The following were the major changes

  • Generated translation files
  • Added Brazilian Portuguese translations

Stay updated

I would be posting updates about this Plugin in my blog and in Twitter. If you want to be informed when new version of this Plugin is released, then you can either subscribe to this blog’s RSS feed or follow me in Twitter.

Posted in Plugin Releases | Tagged , , , , , , , | 2 Comments