wordpress

Migrating WordPress to Drupal

mglaman — Sat, 30 Nov 2013 09:29:50 -0600

Right now two of the most popular open source content management systems are WordPress and Drupal. WordPress is very simplistic and easy to roll out, which is why there is nearly 80,000,000 websites using WordPress. Then you have Drupal which is a more robust content management system that needs a little bit more love to get things moving.

I migrated my personal blog from WordPress to Drupal so I can have more control, from performance to marketing specific content at visitors. I'd love to do write a WordPress vs. Drupal battle blog, but I want to share how easy it is to migrate. WordPress is a great platform to start but it is not future proof for large companies, things that Drupal does provide.

Facebook Albums 2.0.5

mglaman — Sun, 10 Nov 2013 19:39:51 -0600

After a few months I decided to give Facebook Albums some love. With 2.0.4 I implemented WordPress's caching mechanism to cache Facebook API responses for better performance. Will it never occurred to me about clearing said cache if the widget or that post updates.

So now if you update your Facebook Album widget, it will clear the cache and reflect your changes (such as image limit.) Ditto goes for posts, anytime a post saves the plugin checks for the shortcode (<3.6.0 compliant ;)) and clears that albums cached output.

What I'm sure most people are looking for is the damned Facebook app and authentication, right? I mean c'mon it can't be that hard to have the plugin connect with Facebook, take the access token, then request an extended one and make sure it all works. Right? Well it should be fixed now, extended tokens last about 2 months. That means you'll have to visit the settings page every so often.

Responsive Facebook Like Box

mglaman — Sun, 22 Sep 2013 11:31:01 -0500

We've all been there - create this awesome responsive design for a client's website and then you have to try and slap a Facebook Like Box in there..somehow..without breaking your responsive work. Sucks, doesn't it? But it doesn't have to. Using a little jQuery you can cause the Facebook Like Box to re-render on window load or resize allowing it to become responsive versus hardcoded.

This post is based on dineshcooper's Gist, however it's a little simplified and I'm tossing in a WordPress plugin and Drupal module. First let's see why this social plugin provided by Facebook is not responsive.

View GitHub Gist //gist.github.com/6661905

WordPress: Migrate your database easily

mglaman — Wed, 31 Jul 2013 08:42:50 -0500

Need to migrate a WordPress website? Moving files is the simple part, however migrating the database isn't so simple. Check out this screencast on my YouTube channel for my WordPress database migration workflow. This screencast will show you how to update absolute URLs that WordPress saves in its database. In a given month I'll have to migrate at least one WordPress website from my localhost, to the staging area, and then finally migrate to the production version of the website.

Facebook Album: Caching and Localization

mglaman — Sat, 27 Jul 2013 14:40:49 -0500

My Facebook Album for WordPress has one major issue: performance. Each time a the plugin is loaded it polls the Facebook API for a response to parse the photos feed. I am going to integrate the caching method WordPress's RSS widgets use for caching Facebook's API response. By default the cache will set to one day, but I will be sure to add a setting that allows adjustment. Secondly I want to localize the plugin since there is such a wide variety of users from different countries. I'm going to start localizing the plugin based off of the demographics analytics of the plugin's page. I will be simply using Google Translator unless plugin users could kindly provide true translations for the settings page. If you have any suggestions for which languages to localize the plugin for, or any feature requests, please reply in the comments below. Please also remember I develop this plugin during my free time outside of work for free.

Facebook Album 2.0 Released!

mglaman — Tue, 25 Jun 2013 21:27:23 -0500

I have just pushed out version 2.0 for the Facebook Album WordPress plugin! Go on and get it, or use your WordPress's plugin updater to get the latest version. Need help?

Facebook Album 2.0 Coming soon!

mglaman — Tue, 25 Jun 2013 18:44:40 -0500

I've been hard at work in the labs revamping the Facebook Album plugin for WordPress. Very soon you will be able to use a Facebook application to authenticate with the Facebook API. That means you'll be able to embed personal albums into your WordPress site - and give me better ability to extend the plugin in the future.

Sneak peak at settings page for Facebook Album 2.0

If you're interesting in beta testing, let me know, otherwise I hope to have this out within the week. This post is also serving as the first post of the news stream I'm going to include into the plugin. That way I can keep users aware of any updates or bleeding edge releases.

Custom WordPress Widget CSS Classes

mglaman — Tue, 11 Jun 2013 20:25:59 -0500

One thing that I has always bothered about WordPress widgets is the lack of ability to define custom widget CSS classes for each widget - it is kind of ugly using the stock widget IDs when you have four text widgets. I've been working on a plugin to extend widget functionality to match features found in Drupal's blocks. I just posted a GitHub gist quickly highlighting the WordPress filter hook.

Flush WordPress rewrite rules through phpMyAdmin

mglaman — Fri, 26 Apr 2013 22:20:05 -0500

I migrate a lot of WordPress installs from a localhost to the beta server and then to production. It's easy enough to update the URLs in _options and guids in _posts, but the one thing that irritated the hell out of me was the rewrite rules. WordPress caches the rewrite rules within _options; if you've migrated a WordPress you'll notice links are broken even though .htaccess is fine. Simply find "rewrite_rules" in _options table and clear out it's value - badda bing. You could just re-save via Permalinks, but this is just as easy if you're already in there.

Matt Cutts from Google on WordPress and SEO

mglaman — Sat, 30 Mar 2013 16:42:47 -0500

This video was recorded from WordCamp 2009 in San Francisco back in 2009. Four years may have passed, but the basics of search engine optimization are still there. I think one of the problems we all face when dealing with SEO is becoming too calculated and analytical instead of trying to be natural - which Google tries to do. If you have 45 minutes to kill, I highly recommend watching this video: Matt Cutts from Google on WordPress & SEO