Category Archives: Wordpress

WordPress-related stuff. There’s a lot of it.

CTTS Upgraded, Jetpacked, and Roboted

Posted on 23.03.2011 by Stephanie Booth

[fr]

Mise à jour de WordPress. Installation de Jetpack et de Robots Meta. Comme toujours, faites signe en cas de comportement inhabituel du site!

[en]

Sorry for the neologisms in the title. I’ve upgraded CTTS to WordPress 3.1 (you should do it too if you haven’t done it yet, lest you fall prey to hackers as I did earlier this year). While I was at it, I also installed Jetpack, the plugin that brings to WordPress.org blogs goodness from WordPress.com.

I use WordPress.com for almost all my projects, and all my clients. For most of the people I work with, it’s just not worth the hassle to have to deal with upgrades, technical issues, and potential hackings. For CTTS, however, I do depend on plugins like Basic Bilingual which are not (yet?!) a part of the WordPress.com offering. Also, I admit the geek in me likes having her own installation and code to tinker with.

Finally, I installed the Robots Meta plugin. You know me, I’m always a bit wary of the fancy SEO stuff (specially as many people who write about it seem completely obsessed with it, rather than obsessing on doing and saying interesting things). I’m really unimpressed with all the panic over duplicate content for example, especially as it didn’t seem to sound like a huge issue in blogs when I heard Matt Cutts giving us SEO tips in 2007 — I happily cross-post a lot of my writing “elsewhere” back here and I don’t think I’ve suffered unreasonably from it.

Anyway: lately, I’ve read a few analytics/SEO articles that seemed sensible to me and I’m starting to take a tiny (tiny!) bit of interest in the subject.

I’ve been using the Google Sitemap Generator plugin for some time now, and hanging out in my Google Webmaster Central — particularly since my hacking incident.

Also, it was brought to my attention today that there are old articles lying around on CTTS which are ranked very highly for certain searches even though they are really not that relevant anymore. Though I’m loathe to remove them altogether, I could very well remove them from search engine listings — and the Robots Meta plugin allows me to do just that.

So, I’ve taken the plunge and am now only allowing search engines to index my home page (of course) and single article pages, blocking them from date, category and tag archives as well as comment feeds.

We’ll see what happens — I’m a bit worried I may have gone overboard and I wonder what the consequences of those settings can be to other crawlers like BackType and IceRocket. If you have any intel to give me on that topic, I’m happy to take it. I feel a bit like I’ve been giving orders to my robot blocker without really understanding all the consequences.

On Being Hacked

Posted on 06.02.2011 by Stephanie Booth

[fr]

Hackée, et voilà, moi qui savais justement pas quoi faire de mon beau dimanche après-midi ensoleillé...

[en]

I’m currently battling with a hacked WordPress installation. You won’t see anything if you view source, but Google unfortunately sees a whole lot of spam right at the top of each of my pages.

Here’s some information in the hope somebody may have a bright idea to help me root out the hack.

I’m running 3.0.3 and would like to find the source of the problem before upgrading to 3.04 (bad idea?)
I’ve tried disabling all plugins, and the problem is still there when I do that.
I’m using the vanilla default Twenty-Ten theme
I’ve looked in the theme header (header.php) for anything obvious, and also in wp-content, wp-plugins, etc. for anything that looked out of place to my eyes
I’ve run greps for base64 (anything here look suspicious?), spammy keywords, and other things I could think of
It does not seem to be this pharma hack (have failed at finding any signs of it following the instructions there — wp_option keys, backdoor files…)
I have searched my database for spammy keywords (also backwards) and haven’t found any aside in spam comments caught in Akismet

I will update this post as I find out more. Thanks for your suggestions.

Update: at least a partial solution… running find . -iname *.php -print0 |xargs -0 grep base64 allowed us to identify a problem in l10n.php, which was promptly replaced by a new version (evil version available on request). One of my pages as viewed by Googlebot now looks like this. So, the site is cleaner, but are there any backdoors left?

Google Webmaster Central is definitely a place to visit regularly — I would have spotted this way sooner if I had, rather than wondering what was wrong with my robots.txt file when I stopped being able to “direct Google” my posts. View more scary screenshots.

Searching For a New Theme For Climb to the Stars

Posted on 19.07.2010 by Stephanie Booth

[fr]

Version courte: je cherche un nouveau thème pour Climb to the Stars.

[en]

These last few days I noticed things were going sour between Matt Mullenweg (WordPress) and Chris Pearson (Thesis) over licensing issues. I don’t write much code, and licensing looks like a big jungle to me, but things heating up did made me recall a few things I’d vaguely seen fly by over the last years about WordPress themes having to be GPL and Thesis not being GPL.

Anyway, I read Twitter streams from both Matt and Chris the other day and decided I was going to stay away from the topic.

I’ve used WordPress for years and know (and appreciate) Matt personally, and I’ve been happy so far with Thesis, which I paid a developper license for way back when during the launch.

I had a small issue early 2009 around the change of terms in the developper license (which went from allowing unlimited use to unlimited use on one’s own sites) but a quick e-mail with Chris cleared things up and he assured me that I could stick with the terms of the license as they were when I signed up. So, no beef. I’ve also regularly recommended Thesis around me.

A bit by chance this morning, I saw Philip Oakley‘s tweet about an interview he’d done with Matt on this topic. In the introduction text, he recommended that we first listen to this debate between Matt and Chris, moderated by Andrew Warner. I loaded it onto my iPhone, turned up the sound, and hopped on my exercise bike for my daily half-hour of sweaty indoor pedaling (TMI? ).

I’d like to state that I started listening to the interview with no preconceived idea of who may be “right” or “wrong” over the issue (knowing, too, that I have in the past disagreed with a stand or two of Matt’s). I was hoping to learn a bit more about the rational arguments on both sides.

Ten minutes in, I felt like leaving the room (I couldn’t, remember, I was stuck pedaling on my indoor bike). At least, if I had been the one talking with Chris, I would have stopped trying to reason with him. Twenty minutes later, I got off my bike, turned off the podcast, and decided I’d had enough.

I like to think I have a pretty good grasp of conversation mechanics, and if this one was going nowhere, it’s pretty clear to me that it was largely Chris’s doing. I was appalled at how emotional (vs. rational) his responses were. At how he systematically didn’t respond to questions asked, falling back on “they’re out to get me” and “it’s my creation so I have a right to control it” arguments. This honestly didn’t give me the impression that Chris fully understood the licensing issue at hand, and that this was mainly about “me, me, me, my stuff, my work, me” (a vibe I had already got and didn’t like from his sites and marketing communication, the hyperbolic “I’m the best“, but I didn’t think it would translate that strongly into actual conversation.)

So, as you can guess — and whether the licensing issue actually stands or not — I’m looking for a new theme for Climb to the Stars. I think the one thing I really like about the Thesis layout is the multimedia box upper right, where I can randomly showcase my photos. I’m sure there are other themes out there doing that, or plugins.

WordPress.com Still Messes Up Tags and Categories

Posted on 23.06.2010 by Stephanie Booth

[fr]

WordPress.com se mélange toujours un peu les pinceaux entre tags et catégories, après tout ce temps.

les catégories sont de gros tiroirs prédéfinis dans lesquels on range ses articles; elles sont locales
les tags sont des étiquettes souvent ad hoc qu'on attribue après-coup à l'article qu'on a écrit; ils sont globaux

Malheureusement, les liens sur les catégories d'articles semblent pointer assez systématiquement vers les pages des tags. J'espère vraiment qu'Automattic, l'entreprise derrière WordPress.com, va réparer ça. Sinon, quel est l'intérêt de faire la distinction (importante!) entre tags et catégories? Le widget catégories se comporte correctement, preuve qu'il y a quelque chose d'incohérent dans la situation actuelle.

[en]

It pains me to say it, but much as I love them, they still don’t quite get the difference between tags and categories. Yes, WordPress.com now makes a difference between tags and categories (and have been doing so for quite some time), but they are still missing part of the equation.

Categories are big pre-defined drawers to sort your posts in. They’re local.
Tags are labels you stick on posts after you have written them. There are tons of them and they’re messy and they’re global.

Logically, links on tags should point to the general WordPress.com tagspace (they do) — and links on categories should point to the local category pages of that particular blog. Only they don’t always.

The “Categories” widget works the way it should. But the rest is a mess. Examples.

Look at the Coworking Léman site, which uses the Mistylook theme that I personally love. This article‘s category links to the general WordPress.com tagspace (wrong), whereas this one‘s category links to the local category page (right).
The La Muse site, which uses Ocean Mist, makes article categories link to the general tagspace (wrong) but at the bottom of the page, lists categories with the correct links to category pages.

I could find more.

In general, the problem seems to be that article category links are made to link to the tagspace just as tags do. I mean, what’s the point of having a difference between tags and categories (an important one, if you ask me) if you make them behave the same way in the templates? This is a major problem for me. I hope Automattic are listening and will do something about it. (I contacted support but was told, basically, that it was a feature.)

So, please, Automattic: make the links on category names link to local category pages, and the links on tag names take us to the global tagspace.

Thanks!

Traduction suisse romande de WordPress.com

Posted on 01.06.2010 by Stephanie Booth

[en]

Swiss-French translation of WordPress.com: I got it! (Thanks, Zé)

You may or may not know that French (like any other language) varies between linguistic regions. There is now a Swiss-French translation of WordPress.com, which I'm proud to manage.

[fr]

Il y a quelque temps déjà, on m’a très gentiment donné les clés (merci, Zé!) de la traduction suisse romande de WordPress.com. Chacun peut contribuer à la traduction grâce au système GlotPress — il suffit d’être connecté à votre compte WordPress.com.

Pourquoi une version romande? Comme vous le savez, le français d’ici et le français d’outre-Atlantique (et même d’outre-Léman) ne sont pas tout à fait les mêmes. Plutôt que de lutter contre “blogues”, “courriels” et autres “plans du domaine” qui apparaissent quand on mélange des francophones trop divers, je vous propose donc de mettre sur pied une petite coalition romande pour qu’on ait à disposition une jolie traduction helvético-compatible.

Si ça se passe bien, il pourrait même être question de procéder de même pour WordPress.org… Donc lancez-vous, même si vous êtes plutôt .org que .com! (On peut — enfin je peux — exporter/importer des traductions…)

Pour vous y mettre:

allez hop, une petite traduction ou deux le matin avant de démarrer
partez à la chasse au courriel ou au blogue grâce au filtre
dans votre blog WordPress.com, allez sous Réglages > Général et choisissez comme langue “Français de Suisse” (fr-ch)
quand vous remarquez une erreur de traduction, allez vite proposer une meilleure traduction en la retrouvant grâce au filtre

Qui s’y lance avec moi?

Plans for Basic Bilingual

Posted on 09.04.2010 by Stephanie Booth

[fr]

Projets de développement pour le plugin WordPress Basic Bilingual, qui rend ce blog bilingue.

[en]

Here are the next improvements I want to make to the WordPress plugin Basic Bilingual. Considering my coding skills, they will happen slowly, so feel free to lend a hand if you think you can.

Move the language definition to the admin screen. There’s already a screen and an option there, so it’s a simple case of copying and modifying code around to create options for language 1 and language 2, and create a simple function to retrieve the values at the beginning of the plugin.
Allow WordPress search to access the other-excerpt field. The Keyword Search in Plugin Table example in Codex is close enough to what I’d like, only it would need to search in the postmeta table instead of a custom plugin table.
Here’s the big one. Append a language code to any WordPress URL (except permalinks) to filter out posts from the other language. Ideally, would display posts in the language and also the other-excerpts of posts in the other language, with different formatting (smaller title font to distinguish them from full posts written in the desired language). Am reading up on wp-rewrite, permalinks for custom archives, WordPress queries and custom queries. I feel I’m onto something, but I also feel just a little bit out of my depth.

Four Lazy WordPress Plugin Desires

Posted on 04.04.2010 by Stephanie Booth

[fr]

Quatre idées de plugins WordPress que j'utiliserais s'ils existaient.

[en]

Dear Lazyweb,

Here are a few WordPress plugins I’d love to use, if they existed.

hreflang: I’ve come to love the visual editor in WordPress (after years of hating it with a passion). The only thing I regret is that if I want to add hreflang attributes to my links, I have to go over and edit them in HTML. So I don’t do it. The little pop-up to add a URL has fields for title, target (blergh!) and class, so it shouldn’t be too hard to write a plugin that adds an hreflang field, should it?
unpaginate: I’ve always had mixed feelings about pagination. On the blog home page, it’s great, as it allows you to simply “read more”. On very long pages, it’s also good, because it allows you to not have to wait a whole year for the page to load. But often, if I’m on a monthly or category archive page, I’d like to be able to load all the posts belonging to that month or category so I can do a quick text search on it for something I’m looking for. What would be lovely would be a plugin that adds an “unpaginate” link at the bottom of the page (near “previous”). Upon clicking that link, the reader would be taken to an “all the posts” page with no pagination. This could be an option of the next plugin I’m going to describe.
post lists: I like it when blogs display full posts on their pages, but I know that in some cases it’s more practical to see a list of titles with excerpts, or even just a list of titles. This plugin would make WordPress generate list and excerpt pages for any existing URL in the system: 2009/12/list/ or tags/twitter/excerpt or category/writing/partial. These pages should not be paginated, I think (so the unpaginate plugin described above could be an option for this plugin, as the code to do it should already be included). Maybe a little admin panel to set the URL schemes and activate various options would be cool.
Tagul tag cloud: simple one! Give all the tags of the blog to Tagul to eat, and display the pretty tag cloud on the tags/ page. Bonus for tag clouds by month, category, and… tag.

That should keep you busy if you were looking for a little WordPress plugin coding project! Am happy to give more precise information if some kind soul is willing to give one of these a try. Fame and fortune (well, maybe not fortune) await you!

WPtouch iPhone Plugin Now on CTTS

Posted on 12.01.2010 by Stephanie Booth

[fr]

Le plugin WPtouch iPhone permet maintenant aux lecteurs de CTTS munis d'un iPhone de voir une mise en page adaptée à leur petit écran. Profitez!

[en]

Some time back I noticed that sites on WordPress.com were sporting a fancy iPhone-compatible theme, like this one:

Xavier put me on the scent of the WPtouch iPhone plugin, which I have just installed on CTTS — should make getting your daily (hrmm… almost) dose on your favorite phone a more pleasant experience!

WordPress Mobile Edition is another plugin which lets you customize your mobile theme more finely.

WPML to Make Your WordPress Site Multilingual

Posted on 20.12.2009 by Stephanie Booth

[fr]

A tester absolument si vous devez mettre en place un site multilingue: le plugin WPML pour WordPress.

[en]

I’ve been wanting to play with the WPML WordPress plugin for a while now, and I finally took the plunge today and updated my professional site to the latest version of WordPress, as well as WPML. (Sadly, the content still needs a major overhaul.)

Until now, I had built it using two separate WordPress installations, one in English, one in French, linked together by my quick-and-dirty plugin Bunny’s Language Linker (which, in the light of today’s experiment, I will be retiring from rather inactive development — Basic Bilingual remains, though, and still very much makes sense).

Here’s a summary of what I did:

backed up my database
upgraded both WordPress blogs to the latest version and exported their content
removed the automatic language redirection based on browser language preferences to make sure it wouldn’t interfere (I want to find a way to insert it back in, help appreciated)
added and activated the WPML plugin on the English installation
went through the settings after activating advanced mode
translated widget text and site tagline
manually imported content from the French site (import failed due to PHP on my server not being compiled with ctype_digit()), but it was only a dozen pages — it’s easy to specify language and of which English page a new one is a translation of, if any)

I did encounter some grief:

when selecting the “different languages in directories” I kept getting an error message which didn’t make much sense to me; tip: if that happens, make sure that your site and pages all work fine (in my case, I had to reset permalink structure because it had got lost somewhere on the way — even though the settings didn’t change)
I’m using a theme with an existing .mo file for French, so I selected that option (to figure out what the textdomain is, look through a theme file to see what the second argument to the gettext calls is — they look like __("Text here", "text domain here")) but it seems that all the strings for my theme still appear in the “string translation” pane
initially the strings for my widgets and site tagline weren’t appearing in the “string translation” pane — you have to click the “Save options and rescan strings” button for that, even if you haven’t changed any settings (that was not exactly obvious to me)

Here’s what I still need to fix:

the rewrite rules are set to hide the “language directory” part of the URL when browsing the site in the default language — I want to change this as explained in this forum post
reimplement automatic language detection
set up a custom language switcher that looks more like “Français | English” somewhere at the top right of the page

And honestly, once that is settle, WPML is as close as it gets to my dream multilingual plugin for WordPress!

Category Archives: Wordpress

On Being Hacked

Similar Posts:

WordPress.com Still Messes Up Tags and Categories

Similar Posts:

Traduction suisse romande de WordPress.com

Similar Posts:

Plans for Basic Bilingual

Similar Posts:

Four Lazy WordPress Plugin Desires

Similar Posts:

WPtouch iPhone Plugin Now on CTTS

Similar Posts:

WPML to Make Your WordPress Site Multilingual

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