Ajax WordPress Login

We are  happy to release “Ajax WordPress Login” a new WordPress This plugin allow you to display login widget in your WordPress. It’s useful for sites that would like to avoid the normal WordPress login pages. Login uses AJAX and jQuery effects.

http://wordpress.org/plugins/wp-ajax-login/

Features:

1. Login Form.
2. Register Form.
3. Forgot Password Form.
4. Error handling without refreshing your screen.
5. Optional ReCaptcha verification for login and register forms.
6. Control forgotten password request.
7. Work with forced SSL logins.
8. Specific option to show link to profile page and dashboard.
9. Customizable redirect URL after log in or log out.
10. Option to show or hide avatar and change it size.
11. It’s responsive!

My Team Plugin for WordPress

We are  happy to release “My Team” a new WordPress to display team/staff members. You can also display a set of pictures and information in different layouts.

Nowadays, WordPress is more than just a blog. And behind such website is a team. The plugin acknowledges those guys, by creating a template which anyone can copy in his theme directory and have a page ready for the people behind it. The plugin provides the administrator with a nice interface to add/edit/delete the team members. The plugin is under active development so keep checking the page. The plugin uses the short-code given at

http://wordpress.org/plugins/wp-my-team/

Features:

You can display the entries in 4 different main ways

1. Grid view.
2. Grid view with Information on hover.
3. Table list view.
4. Number of Columns.
5. Image Shapes and effects.
6. Text Align.
7. Special Settings.
8. Image Sizes.
9. Email Settings.
10. Single Page Settings.
11. Auto Generation Shortcode & PHP Function.

Step-by-Step guide to Facebook Conversion Tracking

Step 1: Once you log in to your ‘Ads Manager’ tab, click on the Conversion Tracking button on the left side bar.

Step 2: Then click on the ‘Create Conversion Pixel’ tab to begin the process.

Step 3: You will be directed to this pop-up, which will ask you for a:

1. Name: An appropriate name will help you remember what you are tracking. (Example: Lead Generation – GATE Ad)

2. Category: This will help you decide the type of action that you want to track on your site. You can choose from the following:

1. Checkouts

2. Registrations

3. Leads

4. Key Page Views

5. Adds to Cart

6. Other Website Conversions

(For the purpose of this example, we have selected ‘Leads’).

Step 4: You will be able to see a pop-up window with a JavaScript code. This is the code that you will have to add to the page where the conversion will happen. This will let you track the conversions back to ads which you are running on Facebook.

The code should be placed on the page that a user will finally see when the transaction is complete.

Here is the tricky part. The code should not go on all pages. For that matter, it should not even go to the landing page of your product. The code should be placed on the page that a user will finally see when the transaction is complete.

For Example: If you want to track when students register for your GATE coaching, paste the code on the registration confirmation page/thank you page and not on the form that they need to submit.

How do you confirm that your conversion is working properly?

1. Check that the javascript snippet has been placed on the correct conversion page. Visit the page where the pixel has been embedded, right click and go to ‘View Page Source’ to find the pixel. The code should have the tag of the HTML. See image below.

2. Check that Facebook is receiving the conversion events from your website. Go to the conversion tracking tab in your Ads Manager account. There you will see a list of the conversion tracking pixels that you have created. If the conversion tracking pixel has been successfully implemented and a conversion event has been recorded, it will be reflected in the Pixel Status column. If the status shows active, it means that the page which contains the pixel has been viewed by users. If it shows inactive, it means that over the last 24 hours, the page with the pixel has not been viewed.

3.Later, when you  create your Facebook ad , you need to check the track conversions box under the campaign, pricing and schedule tab to enable tracking.

Important security bulletin for WordPress users

A large distributed brute force attack against WordPress websites is understood to be occurring recently across the internet. A large botnet with thousands of attacking servers is attempting to log in by cycling through different usernames and passwords to get into the WordPress Admin dashboard. This is a global attack which is affecting thousands of servers globally.

To ensure that your websites are secure and safeguarded from this attack, we recommend the following steps to be implemented immediately if you are using WordPress:

1) Update your WordPress installation to the latest available version. If you have any plugins and themes installed under WordPress, please make sure that you update them to the latest version as well.

2) Use a strong alphanumeric password for your WordPress Admin login. You can use a password generator like http://www.strongpasswordgenerator.com

3) Password protect the WordPress admin directory (wp-admin) so that it will have an additional protection. You can do that through cPanel > Security > Password Protect Directories

Note: If it breaks the Ajax functionality or shows 404 errors in the dashboard, you may have to add the following in .htaccess file:
Order allow,deny
Allow from all
Satisfy any

4) If you have a static IP address, you can lock down the WordPress Admin access using .htaccess file with the following rules:
RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} ^/wp-login\.php(.*)$ [OR]
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} ^/wp-admin$
RewriteCond %{REMOTE_ADDR} !^72\.72\.72\.72$ [OR]
RewriteCond %{REMOTE_ADDR} !^72\.72\.72\.73$ [OR]
RewriteCond %{REMOTE_ADDR} !^72\.72\.72\.74$
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ – [R=403,L]

(Replace 72.72.72.72, 72.72.72.73, 72.72.72.74 with your actual PC IPs)

5) Install security plugins like:
http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/limit-login-attempts/
http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/better-wp-security/

 

WordPress Tips and Tricks

I have some Wp tips and tricks

• When you do a return in a post or page, you always get a double space. If you want it single, simply press on your keyboard.
• Creating a powerful password for your admin login is the first step in making your site more secure. The second is to change that password monthly.
• To get your readers to click through to your full post, stop it at exactly the spot where they will be most curious to read the next sentence. Every post has such a spot (or it should). To take advantage, stop the post there and insert the “read more” tag.
• If you have unused plugins or themes installed, and have not activated, delete them. This greatly beefs up site security.
• If you are looking for a WordPress developer to create your site, your first question should be: “Do you know php?” If they claim to be a developer (not a designer), but their answer is no,  run!
• Don’t use a widget because it’s cool and shiny. Use it because it is useful to your reader.
• Whether it’s your WordPress blog or website, make sure that people are able to contact you. Don’t hide your contact info in size two font in the footer of the page. Make a separate, highly visible contact page.
• Remember, it’s WordPress. Capital W, capital P, no space between. If you land on a site and they call themselves a WordPress expert, but spell the name wrong, beware.
• When inserting a photo into your post or page, don’t forget the alt (alternate) tag. This is what Google looks for when it’s indexing images on the web and the big G doesn’t like a site with alt tags missing.
• If you have chosen to block search engines in your privacy setting during the construction of your blog or website, remember to turn it back on when you go live. Because that little sucker blocks them good.
• Keeping your plugins up-to-date is just as important as keeping your WordPress version up-to-date.
• Do you want to change your homepage to a static page rather than your blog? Can’t figure out what to do? Create a page for your homepage and one for your blog. Then go to settings >reading and change the settings on the “front page displays.”
• If you are self-hosted, back up your database and all your files regularly. Hear that? Back up, back up!
• Think about the theme you choose for your blog or website. Does it meet all your needs? Does it allow your site to grow as your business grows? Because if you decide to switch themes down the road, chances are it’s not a simple one-click process.
• If you fly off the handle or rant in a blog post, remember, the moment you hit that publish button, it appears on the web and to your RSS subscribers. If you are angry when you write a post, it’s always best to save it as a draft and revisit it later for one last look.
• Use a photo to provoke emotions in your blog post. Not only will you attract more readers, but they will remember your content longer.
• If you have only one row of tools when you are creating a page or post, simply click on the far right button, “show kitchen sink,” and you will get a whole second row of tools.
• If you are still using the default “admin” for your user name, it’s time to get rid of it. Create a new one, then delete the old one, assigning all posts and pages to your new user name. Otherwise you are giving hackers 50% of your login info.
• If you cannot find an option on your edit post or page window, check the tab “screen options” in the upper right corner. That feature may be hidden.
• To expand your editor window, grab the lower right, ridged corner and drag it.
• Be careful when you underline text. Readers still have a habit of thinking any underlined text is a link.
• Remember to turn off your comments on static pages. No one wants to comment on your about or contact page.
• Remove or replace the default blog tagline under your general settings. Otherwise, people will see that generic message that says, “Just Another WordPress Site.”
• And lastly, don’t be taken in by over-promises.  Like most worthwhile things, WordPress has a learning curve.

WP Google Drive Plugin

We are Released New wp google drive plugin to make back of your wordpress site files to google drive.

http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/wp-google-drive/

Exclusive tutorial on How to Backup your WordPress blog to Google Drive. It is always recommended to backup your WordPress blog, which includes files (themes, plugins etc) and SQL tables (all your blog posts, comments, drafts etc are stored as tables in database).

Whenever your blog is gone (due to unsecured activities or some other reasons), these backups will help to get back your blog. In some cases, using 3rd party plugins and themes can also lead to malfunction of your blog, here also these backups helps to retain back your blog.

Reasons to Backup WordPress Blog to Google Drive

• Its a Google Product and is free to use up-to 5GB.
• Can get access to backups on any of the devices like Smartphones, Tablet PC’s, Laptops etc.
• Backups will be uploaded in quite less time (sometimes based on internet connection also).
• Highly Secure and reliable service, so there wont be any loss of data in the process.
• Backups can be shared with your blog partners (if have any) with a single click of mouse

How to Backup WordPress blog to Google Drive

Download and Install Google Drive for WordPress plugin from official WordPress plugin repository.

Google Drive for WordPress Plugin »

Here is the step-by-step guide that helps to backup your WordPress blog to Google Drive. Brief list of things you have to do in this tutorial:

1. Login to Google API and create a Client ID in it.
2. Authorizing the Plugin by using Client ID and Client Secret.
3. Setting up the plugin frequency to take backups.

• Follow this link Google APIs Console and login to your Google Account.

• Go to “API Access” tab and click on “Create an OAuth 2.0 client ID”

• Follow this link Google APIs Console and login to your Google Account.

• Go to “API Access” tab and click on “Create an OAuth 2.0 client ID”

• In the pop-up window, give a product name and upload logo before clicking on “Next” button.

• By default “Web Application” will be selected and don’t change it.

• In “Your site or hostname” section, click on “More Options” to expand link sections.

• Now, paste the link in the “Backup Settings” page here. Enter domain name in “JavaScripts” origin field.

• Click on “Create Client ID” and you have successfully created a Client ID using Google API Console.

• Copy the Client ID and Client Secret from API dashboard and paste them in “Backup Settings” page.

• You have to authorize the plugin by clicking on “Allow Access” button.

• Allow Access to the Plugin and the entire setup has been successfully installed.

Check Out : WordPress Plugin

How to automatically Backup WordPress blog to Google Drive

• Now, you can configure this plugin further by entering the custom folder ID of your Google Drive.
• Also define the maximum number of backups (use any positive integer in that field).
• Set the frequency of backup and everything will be automatically stored in your Google Drive.

Related articles

• 6 Tips For Hosting WordPress On Rackspace Cloud Sites (rackspace.com)
• 7 WP Plugins For My Content Curation Blog (contentcurationdesktop.com)
• How to Move WordPress Site to New Host: Zero Downtime (shoutmeloud.com)
• WordPress Plugins: The Best of the Best (boldlygoing.com)

Engagio: Recognize & Build Relationships On Social Network Easily

Engagio helps you to track your online conversations and allows you to develop meaningful relationships from them. In short, it is your tool to find quality relationships.

Pitched as ‘Your inbox for online conversations and relationships’, it is a tool much like Gmail, but is for managing your conversations in social networking sites and commenting systems. Engagio gives you visibility about the people behind these conversations and reveals their social identities profile. It saves you much time and allows you to connect with others in a much better and deeper way.

Although social media has many advantages, sometimes we fall short of managing our many relationships on social networking sites. With so many friends, family members, colleagues, classmates and relatives in our contacts list, we miss out on building quality relationships with people who matter. Engagio helps you to do that and more.

Engagio believes that commenting and conversations are strong social signals. They are stronger than likes, shares and links. Comments are implicit linkages about people. After all, you only care to comment on somebody’s post and take time to do it when you like that person or what s/he has to say. Like is easy, commenting takes time and thought. Engagio studies all that and more, and give you full visibility into the potential relationships behind your comments and conversations.

The service is frictionless and derives implicit data from your normal, everyday interactions. It does not matter whether your conversations are on social networks or inside your Engagio inbox, Engagio tracks them all. You connect to your social networks and Engagio starts to track, record, analyze and report on your interaction activity.

All you need to do is to signup from the entry page or jump to your inbox. You can easily track your conversations on Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Google+, Disqus-enabled sites, Hacker news comments, Foursquare and more. This is a wonderful service for everybody who wishes to build up on great relationships without putting in much time and effort.

How to analyze your Blog Traffic using WordPress Stats API

Analyzing my blog traffic is one of my favorite past times. Seeing traffic surge and strangers using my posts gives me gratification. Initially, my analysis was fairly low tech – checking WordPress stats page periodically. After doing it a few times, I realized I could do more methodically – and I can use the statistics to do some rudimentary data mining.

As you know, I have a WordPress.com blog. WordPress exposes the statistics in two ways : As a flash chart in the dashboard and as API service.
Viewing Blog Stats – Low Tech Way

If you want to take a look at your blog’s stats today , then you can do it in the dashboard. Assuming you are logged into your WordPress login, go to your blog. You will see WordPress toolbar at the top of the page. Click “My Dashboard“. It will show a chart of total daily visits for the past 15 days. If you want more details, hover your mouse over “My Account” and select “Stats”.

This page shows a wealth of information about your blog but it is limited to 2 days – today and yesterday. There are atleast 6 important statistics in that page.
WordPress Stats Sections

a) Views Per Day
This is probably the statistic you are most interested in. This plots the total number of visits each day for the last 30 days. This also has multiple tabs which allows you to aggregate the statistics information. For example you can view the total weekly and monthly visits . This gives a basic view about how your blog is faring.

b) Referrers
Referrers are basically web pages from which visitors reached your blog. There are different types of referrers : pingbacks, related posts, explicit linking etc. If a certain website is driving lot of visitors to your blog , it is time to notice ! Referrers allows you to get that insight. This panel shows the top 10 referrers. You can click on the “Referrers” link to get the full listing.

c) Top Posts and Pages
This shows the top 10 posts for the given day. One interesting thing is that they track home page separately. Also if you have different pages (eg About), then visits to these pages are also tracked. Again, if you want to see the number of visits to each page, you can click on the title link.

One interesting thing is that each of the posts/pages in this section also has an addition chart icon near them. Clicking on them gives the stats for that particular post alone. The new page shows a chart detailing how many visits occurred to that page in the last few weeks. Most interestingly , they also show the average visits per day for the last few weeks and months. This gives a glimpse into the lasting popularity of your post.

d) Search Engine Terms
I am not very clear what this exactly means – The instruction says “These are terms people used to find your blog.” . I am not sure if this corresponds to search terms typed in search engines or in WordPress search boxes etc . Anyway, this panel gives information about the search terms that fetch visits to your blog.

e) Clicks
Clicks panel shows the list of links in your blog that your visitors clicked. In a way , you can consider it as an inverse of referrers. In this case, you act as a referrer for some other blog. This post gives some hints about the type of visitors to your blog.

f) Aggregate Statistics
There is also another panel that shows some aggregate stats. This shows the total number of views to your blog so far , number of blogs and posts , email subscribers etc.
A Better Way

Using WordPress Stats page to get your data is fairly low tech. This gives some data which can only give you an instinct of how things go. But it will not give you any deeper insights. For doing more data mining, you need data – lots of data. Fortunately, WordPress makes available a stats API which you can query to get regular data. In the rest of the post , we will talk about the API and how to use the data that you get out of it.
Using WordPress Stats API

The primary url which provides the stats is http://stats.wordpress.com/csv.php . You can click on it to see the required parameters. There are 4 important parameters to this API.

a) api_key : api_key is a mandatory parameter and ensures that only owner queries the website. There are three ways to get this information. This key is emailed to you at the time you created your blog. Or you can access it at My Dashboard -> Users -> Personal Settings. This will show your api key. For the truly lazy click this url .

b) blog_id : This is a number which uniquely identifies your blog. Either blog_id or blog_uri is mandatory. I generally prefer blog_id. Finding blog_id is a bit tricky. Go to the blog stats page (My Account -> Stats). Click on the title link of “Top Posts and Pages”. This will open a new page which shows the statistics for last 7 days. If you look at the page’s url, it will have a parameter called blog. The value of this parameter is the blog_id . Atleast for my blog , it is a 8 digit number.

c) blog_uri : If you do not want to take all the trouble of getting blog_id , use blog_uri. This is nothing but the url of your blog (http://blah.wordpress.com).

d) table : This field identifies the exact statistic you want. One of views, postviews, referrers, searchterms, clicks. Each of these correspond to the sections of WordPress stats discussed above. If table is not specified , views is selected as the default table.

You can get more details from the stats API page given above.
Sample Python Scripts to fetch WordPress Stats

I have written a few scripts which fetch each of the WordPress stats. One of them run every hour and gets the total number of views so far for the whole blog. The other scripts runs once a day and fetch the total clicks, search terms, referrer and top posts for that day. All of these store the data as a csv file which lends itself to analysis.

If you are interested in the scripts , the links to them are :

1. getBlogDaysStats.py : Fetches the total views for the whole blog at the current time. For best results run every hour.
2. getBlogReferrers.py : Fetches all the referrers to your blog.
3. getBlogPostViews.py : Fetches the number of views for individual blog posts and pages.
4. getBlogSearchTerms.py : Fetches all the search terms used to find your blog today.
5. getBlogClicks.py : Fetches the urls that people who visited your blog clicked.
How to Collect WordPress Statistics

The first step is of course to collect data periodically. I use cron to run the scripts. My crontab file looks like this :

11 * * * * /usr/bin/python scriptpath/getBlogDaysStats.py
12 0 * * * /usr/bin/python scriptpath/getBlogClicks.py
14 0 * * * /usr/bin/python scriptpath/getBlogPostViews.py
15 0 * * * /usr/bin/python scriptpath/getBlogReferrers.py
16 0 * * * /usr/bin/python scriptpath/getBlogSearchTerms.py

Basically, I run the getBlogDaysStats every hour and other scripts every day. I also run the rest of scripts at early morning so that it fetches the previous day’s data.
How to Use WordPress Statistics

If you run the scripts for few days, you will have lot of data. The amount of analysis you can make is limited only by your creativity. In this section, I will tell some of the ways I use the stats instead of giving an explicit how-to.

1. Views per day : It is collected by getBlogDaysStats.py. The most basic stuff is to chart them. This will give a glimpse of your trend – If it is static or climbing, then good news. If it is falling down it is something to worry about. I must also mention that have a more or less a plateau in your chart happens often. For eg in my blog, the charts follow a pattern – It increases for quite some time , then stays at the same level for a long time and then increases again. Also , worrying about individual day’s statistics is not a good idea. Try to aggregate them into weekly and monthly values as they give a less noisy view of your blog traffic.

Another common thing to do is to analyze per hour traffic. This can be easily derived from the output of the script. Basically, if m is the number of views at time a and n is the number of views at time b , then you received n-m views in b-a hours. I usually calculate it for every hour. This gives a *basic* idea of peak time for your blog – You can also infer your primary audience , although the interpretation is ambiguous. As an example , I get most of my traffic at night – especially between 1 AM – 9 AM. Morning time traffic is pretty weak and it picks up again in the evening. Interpreting this is hard as my blog covers a lot of topics – but if your blog is more focused you learn a lot about your visitors.

2. Referrers : This is a very useful statistic if you do some marketing for your blog. For best results, you may want to use just the domain of the url instead of the whole url for analysis. Using it you can figure out which sites drive traffic to your blog. If it is another blog, then it is a good idea to cultivate some friendship with that blog’s owner. For eg, for my blog , I found that digg drives more traffic that reddit. Also facebook drives some traffic to my blog – so I use WordPress’s facebook publicize feature. I also find that I get some traffic due to WordPress’s related posts feature which means that I must use good use of categories and tags. Your mileage may vary but I hope the basic idea is clear.

3. Individual Post Views : This is probably the most useful set of statistics. Basically , it allows you to analyze the traffic of individual posts over a period of time. I have a file which associates a blog post with extra information : For eg it stores the categories, tags, original creation date, all modification dates etc. (If you are curious , I store the information in JSON format). Once you have this information lot of analysis is possible.

a. You can figure out your audience type. If for a post, you have lot of audience in the first week and almost no audience from then on – then most likely your audience is driven by subscription. If it keeps having a regular traffic, then probably it has some useful stuff and traffic is constantly driven to it by search engines. For eg, my Biweekly links belong to the first scenario : When I publish one, lot of people visit it and then after a few days it gets practically no visits. In the other case, my post of Mean Shift gets a steady stream of views every week. If you want to sustain a good viewership, you may want to write more posts which can attract long term views.

b. If you use categories and tags wisely, you can tally the number of views per each category. This will give you an idea of the blog posts which users prefer. I noticed that my audience seems to like my Linux / Data Mining posts than other categories. So it is a good idea to write more of those posts.

c. You can kind of see a pareto effect in your blog posts. For eg, my top 10 blogs account for atleast 70% of my blog traffic. So if I could identify them correctly, I can write lesser posts but still maintain my blog traffic 😉

You can do lot more than these simple analysis but this is just a start.

4. Search Terms : This is another neat statistic. You can use it to figure out the primary way in which users access your blog. For eg, the ratio of total blog post view for a day and number of search terms for the day is quite interesting. If the ratio is high, then most of the people find your blog using search engines. In a way , this a potential transient audience whom you can convert to regular audience. If the ratio is small , then your blog gets views by referrers and regular viewers. This will assure you a steady audience , but it is slightly hard to get new people “find” your blog.

This statistic also tells you which keywords the viewers use to find my blog. You can gleam lot of interesting things from this. For eg, almost all of my search terms are 3-5 words long and usually very specific. This either means that the user is an expert and has crafted specific query. It may also mean that user rewrote the query and my blog was not found in the general query. I also use the terms to figure out if the user would have been satisfied with my blog. For eg, I know that a user searching “install matlab to 64-bit” will be satisfied while some one who searches “k means determine k” will not be. You can do either of two things : augment your blog post to add information that users are searching , or point users to resources that satisfies their query. For eg, I found lot of people reached my blog searching for how to find k. I found geomblog had couple of good posts on it and updated my blog to link to these posts. Some times, I may add a FAQ if same search query comes multiple times and if my page contains the information but is obscure. Eg : lot of people reached my blog searching for Empathy’s chat log location. My post of Empathy had it but not in a prominent fashion. So I added a FAQ which points the answer immediately.

5. Clicks : This statistic is tangentially useful in finding out which links the user clicks. One way I use it is to gauge the “tech” level of my reader who visits my blog using search engines. I usually link to Wikipedia articles for common terms. If the user clicks on these basic terms often ,then it might mean that I write articles at a level higher that the typical user and I have to explain it better. For eg , in my post of K-Means , this was the reason I explain supervised and unsupervised learning at the start even though most people learning k-means already know it.
Other Resources for Blog Traffic

There are other locations that give some useful information about your traffic. Some of them are :

a. Google Web Master Site : This is arguably one of the most comprehensive information about your blog post’s performance in Google. You can see it a Google Webmaster Page -> Your site on web -> Search queries. It has information like impressions, click throughs, average position etc. You can download all of them in a csv file too ! Literally a gold mine for data lovers.
b. Feedburner : Even though, WordPress has a feed, I switched to FeedBurner. One of the main reason was that it gave me a csv file detailing the number of views by my subscribers.
c. Quantcast : Useful for aggregate information. It has multiple charts that detail the number of views, unique visitors etc. The Quantcast data might not be accurate as it is usually estimated – but it gives a broad gauge of your blog. It also has some statistic which says how many of your visitors are addicts , how many are pass throughs etc. Quite useful !
d. Alexa : Similar to Quantcast . I primarily use my Alexa Rank for motivation to improve my blog ranking.
Pivot Tables

I primarily use Python prompt to play with data. If you are not comfortable with programmatic tweaking, use spreadsheets to do these analysis. If you have Windows, you can do lot of powerful analysis by importing the statistics obtained by the scripts into Microsoft Excel. Excel has a neat feature called Pivot tables. It is also an advanced topic that I will not discuss here. You can do some fantastic analysis using pivots. They also give you the ability to view the same data from multiple perspectives.

In this post, I have barely scratched the surface – You can do lot of amazing analysis using WordPress Stats API . I will talk about more complex analysis in a later post. Have fun with the data !

Related articles

• WordPress Stats and Numbers: Breaking Their Own Records (lorelle.wordpress.com)
• Blog Referrers: DesignSponge vs. WordPress (projectpalermo.com)
• To Use WordPress or Blogger… That is the Question (wisdomofjen.wordpress.com)
• WordPress.com vs. WordPress.org (bradyszabo.com)

XML to Array in php Function

function xml2array($contents, $get_attributes=1, $priority = ‘tag‘) {

if(!$contents) return array();

if(!function_exists(‘xml_parser_create’)) {
//print “‘xml_parser_create()’ function not found!”;
return array();
}

//Get the XML parser of PHP – PHP must have this module for the parser to work
$parser = xml_parser_create(”);
xml_parser_set_option($parser, XML_OPTION_TARGET_ENCODING, “UTF-8“); # http://minutillo.com/steve/weblog/2004/6/17/php-xml-and-character-encodings-a-tale-of-sadness-rage-and-data-loss
xml_parser_set_option($parser, XML_OPTION_CASE_FOLDING, 0);
xml_parser_set_option($parser, XML_OPTION_SKIP_WHITE, 1);
xml_parse_into_struct($parser, trim($contents), $xml_values);
xml_parser_free($parser);

if(!$xml_values) return;//Hmm…

//Initializations
$xml_array = array();
$parents = array();
$opened_tags = array();
$arr = array();

$current = &$xml_array; //Refference

//Go through the tags.
$repeated_tag_index = array();//Multiple tags with same name will be turned into an array
foreach($xml_values as $data) {
unset($attributes,$value);//Remove existing values, or there will be trouble

//This command will extract these variables into the foreach scope
// tag(string), type(string), level(int), attributes(array).
extract($data);//We could use the array by itself, but this cooler.

$result = array();
$attributes_data = array();

if(isset($value)) {
if($priority == ‘tag’) $result = $value;
else $result[‘value’] = $value; //Put the value in a assoc array if we are in the ‘Attribute‘ mode
}

//Set the attributes too.
if(isset($attributes) and $get_attributes) {
foreach($attributes as $attr => $val) {
if($priority == ‘tag’) $attributes_data[$attr] = $val;
else $result[‘attr’][$attr] = $val; //Set all the attributes in a array called ‘attr’
}
}

//See tag status and do the needed.
if($type == “open”) {//The starting of the tag ‘<tag>’
$parent[$level-1] = &$current;
if(!is_array($current) or (!in_array($tag, array_keys($current)))) { //Insert New tag
$current[$tag] = $result;
if($attributes_data) $current[$tag. ‘_attr’] = $attributes_data;
$repeated_tag_index[$tag.’_’.$level] = 1;

$current = &$current[$tag];

} else { //There was another element with the same tag name

if(isset($current[$tag][0])) {//If there is a 0th element it is already an array
$current[$tag][$repeated_tag_index[$tag.’_’.$level]] = $result;
$repeated_tag_index[$tag.’_’.$level]++;
} else {//This section will make the value an array if multiple tags with the same name appear together
$current[$tag] = array($current[$tag],$result);//This will combine the existing item and the new item together to make an array
$repeated_tag_index[$tag.’_’.$level] = 2;

if(isset($current[$tag.’_attr’])) { //The attribute of the last(0th) tag must be moved as well
$current[$tag][‘0_attr’] = $current[$tag.’_attr’];
unset($current[$tag.’_attr’]);
}

}
$last_item_index = $repeated_tag_index[$tag.’_’.$level]-1;
$current = &$current[$tag][$last_item_index];
}

} elseif($type == “complete”) { //Tags that ends in 1 line ”
//See if the key is already taken.
if(!isset($current[$tag])) { //New Key
$current[$tag] = $result;
$repeated_tag_index[$tag.’_’.$level] = 1;
if($priority == ‘tag’ and $attributes_data) $current[$tag. ‘_attr’] = $attributes_data;

} else { //If taken, put all things inside a list(array)
if(isset($current[$tag][0]) and is_array($current[$tag])) {//If it is already an array…

// …push the new element into that array.
$current[$tag][$repeated_tag_index[$tag.’_’.$level]] = $result;

if($priority == ‘tag’ and $get_attributes and $attributes_data) {
$current[$tag][$repeated_tag_index[$tag.’_’.$level] . ‘_attr’] = $attributes_data;
}
$repeated_tag_index[$tag.’_’.$level]++;

} else { //If it is not an array…
$current[$tag] = array($current[$tag],$result); //…Make it an array using using the existing value and the new value
$repeated_tag_index[$tag.’_’.$level] = 1;
if($priority == ‘tag’ and $get_attributes) {
if(isset($current[$tag.’_attr’])) { //The attribute of the last(0th) tag must be moved as well

$current[$tag][‘0_attr’] = $current[$tag.’_attr’];
unset($current[$tag.’_attr’]);
}

if($attributes_data) {
$current[$tag][$repeated_tag_index[$tag.’_’.$level] . ‘_attr’] = $attributes_data;
}
}
$repeated_tag_index[$tag.’_’.$level]++; //0 and 1 index is already taken
}
}

} elseif($type == ‘close’) { //End of tag ”
$current = &$parent[$level-1];
}
}

return($xml_array);
}

2011 in review

The WordPress.com stats helper monkeys prepared a 2011 annual report for this blog.

Here’s an excerpt:

The concert hall at the Sydney Opera House holds 2,700 people. This blog was viewed about 12,000 times in 2011. If it were a concert at Sydney Opera House, it would take about 4 sold-out performances for that many people to see it.

Click here to see the complete report.

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Headers Already Sent

Image via Wikipedia

The most common reasons for seeing this error message in your WordPress site are spaces, new lines, or invisible characters before an opening <!--?php tag or after a closing ?> tag in one of the site’s scripts. But, in order to fix the problem, you have to know which file is causing the problem.

Step 1: Interpreting the Error Message

All of the relevant information is normally given in the first part of the message — the ... output started at... part.

Example 1

Warning: Cannot modify header information - headers already sent by (output started at /path/wp-content/plugins/foobar/foobar.php:8) in /path/wp-comments-post.php on line 55

In this example, the problem is in the foobar.php file of the Foobar plugin.

Example 2

Warning: Cannot modify header information - headers already sent by (output started at /path/wp-content/themes/wibble/functions.php:11) in /path/wp-includes/pluggable.php on line 850

Here, the problem is in functions.php file within the Wibble theme

Example 3

Warning: Cannot modify header information - headers already sent by (output started at /path/blog/wp-config.php:82) in /path/blog/wp-login.php on line 42

The problem is at line 82 of wp-config.php.

Step 2: Fixing the Problem

Example 1: A Plugin

The easiest option here is to simply delete the plugin and look for an alternative one. If you cannot access your WordPress dashboard, reset the plugins folder. Then re-install your plugins — with the exception of the one that caused the problem.

Example 2: The Theme

If you are not comfortable with editing PHP files, then you may want to look at installing another theme. If you cannot access your WordPress dashboard, switch to the default theme by renaming your current theme’s folder in wp-content/themes and adding “-old” to the end of the folder name using FTP or whatever file management application your host provides. This should allow you back into your dashboard where you can download another theme.

If you are comfortable with editing PHP files, then download the file mentioned in the error message (functions.php in the Example 2) and follow the instructions for removing invisible characters in a file.

Example 3: wp-config.php

1. Download wp-config.php from your site’s main WordPress folder.
2. Open the file in a plain text editor.
3. Check that the very first characters are <?php
4. If the very last characters are ?>, remove them.
5. Check that there are no invisible characters in the file.
6. Re-upload the amended file.

Removing Invisible Characters in a File

1. Open the file in a plain text editor.
2. Place the cursor before the first character in the file.
3. Press the BACKSPACE key & keep it pressed for a count of 10.
4. Place the cursor after the last character in the file.
5. Now press the DELETE key on your computer & keep it pressed for a count of 10.
6. Save the file without pressing any other key.
7. Check the encoding of the file. Do not encode files as UTF-8 with BOM. The BOM will be seen as a character.

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WordPress SEO: Better Titles

The content of the HTML tag is used to:

• Create a title in the browser toolbar
• Provide a title for the page when it is bookmarked
• Display a title for the page in search-engine results

It make sense, therefore, to take some time to craft a good title in your WordPress site. In the vast majority of WordPress themes, the title is generated in the theme’s header.php template file. So you need to start by editing this file.

Some themes simply use something like:

<?<span class=”hiddenSpellError” pre=””>php</span> wp_title();?>

But that’s not nearly enough to generate a good title. What you want is code that generates informative, page-specific, titles. So try something like:

<title><?php global $page, $paged;

if ( $paged >= 2 || $page >= 2 ) $we_are_on = sprintf( __( ‘ (Page %s) ‘ ), max( $paged, $page ) );

else $we_are_on = ”;

if( is_home () ) : printf(__( ‘%1$s%2$s on %3$s’), wp_title(”, false), $we_are_on, get_bloginfo(‘name’) );

elseif( is_search() ) :

if( trim( get_search_query() ) == ” ) printf(__(‘No search query entered on %1$s’), get_bloginfo(‘name’) );

else printf( __( ‘Search Results for \’%1$s\’ on %2$s%3$s’ ), trim(get_search_query() ), get_bloginfo(‘name’), $we_are_on );

elseif ( is_category() || is_author() ) : printf(__( ‘%1$s%2$s on %3$s’ ), wp_title(”, false), $we_are_on, get_bloginfo(‘name’) );

elseif( is_tag() ) : printf( __(‘Entries tagged with \’%1$s\’%2$s on %3$s’) , wp_title(”, false), $we_are_on, get_bloginfo(‘name’) );

elseif( is_archive() ) :

printf( __(‘Archives for %1$s%2$s on %3$s’), wp_title(”, false), $we_are_on, get_bloginfo(‘name’) );

elseif( is_404() ) : printf(__( ‘Page not found on %1$s’ ), get_bloginfo(‘name’) );

else : printf( __(‘%1$s%2$s’), wp_title(‘:’,true, ‘right’), get_bloginfo(‘name’) );

endif;

?>

</title>

2010 in review

The stats helper monkeys at WordPress.com mulled over how this blog did in 2010, and here’s a high level summary of its overall blog health:

The Blog-Health-o-Meter™ reads Wow.

Crunchy numbers

The average container ship can carry about 4,500 containers. This blog was viewed about 15,000 times in 2010. If each view were a shipping container, your blog would have filled about 3 fully loaded ships.

 

In 2010, there were 126 new posts, growing the total archive of this blog to 285 posts. There were 110 pictures uploaded, taking up a total of 13mb. That’s about 2 pictures per week.

The busiest day of the year was September 10th with 244 views. The most popular post that day was Boss Engira Baskaran Movie Review.

Where did they come from?

The top referring sites in 2010 were en.search.wordpress.com, en.wordpress.com, google.co.in, search.conduit.com, and ifreestores.com.

Some visitors came searching, mostly for raavan video songs, robo release, rajini robo stills, mukesh ambani house, and robo rajini stills.

Attractions in 2010

These are the posts and pages that got the most views in 2010.

1

Boss Engira Baskaran Movie Review September 2010

2

Raavan Behne De Video Song April 2010
1 comment

3

Rajini’s Robo release Date!!! October 2008
4 comments

4

Vijay Sura Mp3 Songs Free download March 2010
4 comments

5

Vinnaithandi Varuvaya Movie Review March 2010

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Seven new features you can expect from WordPress 3.1

 

Image via CrunchBase

 

There have been a number of recent developments at WordPress which have proven that the company is as dynamic and fluid as it has ever been. Firstly, Matt Mullenweg, the co-founder of WordPress, announced the formal handing over of the WordPress trademark from Automattic (a for-profit company) to the WordPress Foundation, a non-profit organisation “dedicated to promoting and ensuring access to WordPress and related open source projects in perpetuity”.

This is in line with the ethos behind the WordPress brand of being an open and expressive community. The official WordPress blog announced that, “moving forward, the Foundation will be responsible for safeguarding the trademarked name and logo from misuse toward the end of protecting WordPress and preventing confusion among people trying to figure out if a resource is ‘official’ or not”.

In addition to the trademark handover, discussions have begun around the development of the next WordPress release, version 3.1, scheduled for December 2010.

Following the packed and impressive feature list released in version 3.0, WordPress die-hards have been eagerly waiting to see what’s coming next.

Judging from the discussions on the WordPress Development P2 blog, these are some of the features that are likely to appear in WordPress 3.1.

Internal Linking
When linking to a page or a post within WordPress, you are able to simply type “/pagename” and, internally, the system will be able to find your page. This feature will, as I understand it, enable easy linking between internal content (eg: from one page to another, or a page to a blog post) without the need for a full URL to be inserted as the link. Talk amongst developers indicates that this is a favourite new feature for release in WordPress 3.1.

Improved integration between custom post types and taxonomies will take WordPress a step further towards becoming a fully-fledged content management system.

AJAX-ified Admin Screens
Perhaps no longer a buzz term, “AJAX” has become an almost de-facto standard in many Rich Internet Applications used today. So it makes sense to include it in the WordPress administration screens. While there are subtle areas where this has been done (comment moderation, for example), having all the screens functioning via AJAX would greatly speed up working within the system and could make for an overall richer user experience, as the screen would, essentially, not refresh.

Admin Bar
The WordPress admin bar creates easy access links to areas of the administration (for example, the “New Post” screen) from within the website’s frontend, via a neat bar at the top of the window. While this could fall into the “plugin territory” category, it will most likely end up being an optional feature than can be enabled if desired.

Custom Post Type enhancements
The initial release of a new feature usually sparks off ideas for improvements. Now that the custom post types feature has been released, a list of possible enhancements is being compiled on the Development blog, to make the feature even better than it currently is. Ideas include opt-in archives for the post types as well as custom status values per post type. This has the potential to greatly expand the way data is stored and handled with these post types.

Advanced taxonomy queries
Advanced taxonomy querying is an area that has many developers in an excited frenzy. These queries could involve, for example, gathering all entries that are tied to a particular category and that aren’t tied to a specific post tag. While this is a relatively simple example, the possibilities become greatly increased as to the kinds of content relationships which can be created within WordPress (instead of posts which are simply tied to categories and tags, for example).

Post templates / Post styles
In the Twenty Ten theme, custom styles and layouts were introduced for blog posts listed in categories called “gallery” and “aside”. As I understand it, this was an attempt at creating different post styles and catering specifically for those types. Like Tumblr does it, custom post styles would eliminate the need for the “aside” and “gallery” categories, allowing posts to be treated according to style, rather than what category they are in.

QuickPress template tag
The QuickPress widget has become especially popular for posting short and quick posts directly from your blog’s dashboard. Why not move this form wherever you want it? The QuickPress template tag will allow developers to include the QuickPress form anywhere in WordPress, with a simple call of a function. Pretty self-explanatory, but very exciting for regular users of QuickPress, as well as users who are looking into themes that post from the front-end, like the popular P2 theme.

The above features have, as mentioned above, been pitched on the official WordPress Development Blog and are by no means set in stone. Which means there could be many other features and enhancements added to this release. As with every release, we can expect loads of careful attention being paid to the user interface, the user experience and the code maintenance. Then keep your eyes pealed for version 3.2, folks. That’s when the big additions will arrive.

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Quick tip: paths and URLs in WordPress

Image via CrunchBase

The direct reason for this was one of their code examples and the authors apparent incomplete knowledge of the WordPress API‘s most basic functions and constants. In that example, he does the following:

define(

‘MY_WORDPRESS_FOLDER’,

$_SERVER[‘DOCUMENT_ROOT’]

);

define(

‘MY_THEME_FOLDER’,

str_replace(“”,’/’,dirname(__FILE__))

);

define(

‘MY_THEME_PATH’,

‘/’ . substr(

MY_THEME_FOLDER,

stripos(MY_THEME_FOLDER,’wp-content’)

That annoyed me, quite a bit. Why? Well because if people write articles about stuff like custom write panels, I expect them to know a bit about the basics of the WordPress API. And well, the WordPress API has constants and functions for these things. So let me introduce you to them in the same order as the author of the articles did his defines above:

ABSPATH constant

Not only is their method inconvenient, it’s wrong for a lot of installs. You see, some people install WordPress in a subdirectory, and depending on what you need, there are two different paths you might need. ABSPATH is a constant that always returns the home of WordPress. So if WordPress is in the wp/ subdirectory, it would give you something like: /home/username/public_html/wp/. If WordPress were installed in the root, it would just return /home/username/public_html/. Now I don’t know how they’re using it, as it’s not used in this particular article, but they’d have to be very cautious with that.

TEMPLATEPATH constant

The second two things they’re doing are possibly even weirder. First they define a constant MY_THEME_FOLDER, which is basically the path to the current theme. WordPress has a very convenient constant for that: TEMPLATEPATH. Since they’re using it in an include, that’s probably what they need. Would save about 4 lines of code. Note that what they call a “folder” is actually a path.

get_template_directory_uri()

This is were they really go wrong. You see, they define a constant MY_THEME_PATH, and then use it as a URL in a call to wp_enqueue_style(), in other words: to enqueue a style sheet. Now paths and URLs are different animals altogether, and they don’t mix well. Take this example:

1 My blog is installed in a subdirectory /wp/

2 Because of that MY_THEME_FOLDER has been defined as follows:

/home/user/public_html/wp/wp-content/themes/example-theme

3 The code that sets MY_THEME_PATH turns that into:

/wp-content/themes/example-theme

4 The stylesheet is now included with the following path:

/wp-content/themes/example-theme/custom/book_panel.css

5 This causes a 404 (file not found error) because that directory simply doesn’t exist! It should have been:

/wp/wp-content/themes/example-theme/custom/book_panel.css

The proper way of doing the enqueue would thus have been the following:

wp_enqueue_style(

‘my_meta_css’,

get_template_directory_uri(). ‘/custom/book_panel.css’

);

Conclusion

I hope you understand why this annoys me. This is exactly the kind of coding that gives WordPress coders out there a bad name, as 5 – 10% of people out there trying this will not get it to work. If you want to prevent from making such mistakes, there’s plenty of resources to learn about these things, or look them up. Two starting points would be the codex and my own cross reference of the WordPress source along with its very convenient WordPress source search function.

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