Xavisys» WordPress Plugins

The Xavisys WordPress Plugin Framework

AaronCampbell — Thu, 26 Nov 2009 02:16:18 +0000

A few months ago I was chatting with Joost de Valk and he was talking about a new plugin toolkit that he was making. The basic idea was to make a flexible base that he could use to build on for all his plugins. It would handle all the tasks that are common to all his plugins (options page, dashboard widget, etc) and still be easily extended so each plugin could handle more specific tasks as well. Now his plugins (at least some of them) use his toolkit.

It was a great idea, and I finally got around to writing one for my own plugins. I built it as an abstract class (and a tiny CSS file) that I extend for each plugin. Here you’ll get to see a quick tour of what the framework does. Let me know in the comments if you’re interested in seeing a walkthrough of how it was built, and feel free to download Efficient Related Posts to see it in action.

Here are some of the things it does:

Stores plugin settings in a protected variable, making them easily available to all methods.
Registers the options for the plugin (making sure it works in WPMU and that options.php can handle updates to the options).
When an update to the plugin is available, it shows a changelog from the currently installed version to the newly available version (whether they’re one version apart or twenty).
Adds an options page for the WordPress plugin settings, complete with a page heading and a Xavisys icon.
Styles the options page as two columns with meta boxes (similar to the two column dashboard layout).
Adds basic meta boxes to the sidebar of the options page, including one with a donate link, one with a link to the support forums, and one showing the latest news from Xavisys.
It adds links to the plugin row on the plugins page. One link to the support forums and one to the plugin options page.
It adds a dashboard widget with a feed from Xavisys, complete with the Xavisys logo and a way to subscribe via RSS to the Xavisys site.

It does all this based on variables set in the extending class. For example, the setup for Efficient Related Posts looks something like this:

require_once('xavisys-plugin-framework.php');
class efficientRelatedPosts extends XavisysPlugin {
	protected function _init() {
		$this->_hook = 'efficientRelatedPosts';
		$this->_file = plugin_basename( __FILE__ );
		$this->_pageTitle = __( 'Efficient Related Posts', $this->_slug );
		$this->_menuTitle = __( 'Related Posts', $this->_slug );
		$this->_accessLevel = 'manage_options';
		$this->_optionGroup = 'erp-options';
		$this->_optionNames = array('erp');
		$this->_optionCallbacks = array();
		$this->_slug = 'efficient-related-posts';
		$this->_paypalButtonId = '9996714';
	}
}

Efficient Related Posts 0.3.4 Released

AaronCampbell — Wed, 25 Nov 2009 23:43:09 +0000

We just released version 0.3.4 of the Efficient Related Posts plugin for WordPress. It uses the new Xavisys Plugin Framwork (I’ll post more info on that soon), which gives it a nice new options page, links to the support forums, etc. We also did a lot of the work toward internationalizing it, and hopefully it will be fully translatable int he next version (coming soon).

If you want to request a feature, or need support, go to the Efficient Related Posts Support Forum. More information is available on the Efficient Related Posts page.

Join the forum discussion on this post

Twitter Widget Pro 2.1.3 Released

AaronCampbell — Wed, 18 Nov 2009 15:12:29 +0000

The new Twitter Widget Pro support forum has turned up some great ideas and has helped catch some easily missed bugs. This latest release of Twitter Widget Pro includes a bugfix that removes a duplicate closing tag for the title link, which was caught by someone in the forums, as well as an enhancement that makes the date format a per-widget setting (also suggested int he forums).

If you want to request a feature, or need support, go to the Twitter Widget Pro Forum. For more information, go to the Twitter Widget Pro page.

Twitter Widget Pro 2.1.2 Released

AaronCampbell — Sun, 15 Nov 2009 16:37:40 +0000

There was a small formatting issue introduced in Twitter Widget Pro 2.1.0 where there were no spaces between the tweet and meta data or between the date of the tweet and where the tweet was from (such as “from TweetDeck”). When I added the shortcode functionality I had to remove a lot of the excess whitespace so that the formatting built in to WordPress didn’t mess up the formatting of the widget when it was embedded in a post or page. I just released version 2.1.2 that fixed the spacing without messing up the formatting for the shortcodes.

I also added in some links to the WordPress Twitter Widget Pro Support Forum to make it easier for you to ask questions or make suggestions or requests. For more information, go to the Twitter Widget Pro page.

Join the forum discussion on this post

Twitter Widget Pro 2.1.1 Released

AaronCampbell — Fri, 13 Nov 2009 21:51:59 +0000

Recently, a Twitter Widget Pro user (alx) asked on the support forum for a new feature. He wanted to be able to have all the links open in a new window, and that’s a great idea! I just released version 2.1.1 of Twitter Widget Pro with this exact feature. If you want to request a feature, or need support, go to the Twitter Widget Pro Forum. For more information, go to the Twitter Widget Pro page.

10 Great WordPress Plugins

AaronCampbell — Thu, 12 Nov 2009 08:00:23 +0000

One of the greatest things about WordPress is how extensible it is through it’s plugin system. There’s a plugin for almost everything. There are more than 4,400 plugins just in the WordPress.org Plugin Directory and there are plenty more that aren’t in the directory. Unfortunately, sometimes there are so many plugins that it makes it hard to find the best WordPress plugins in the massive sea of options. Here are some of my favorite overall plugins.

Akismet

Akismet is the only useful plugin that ships with WordPress (so to speak). It requires that you sign up for an API key, but it’s well worth it. Comment spam is a huge problem on any site that allows comments. The WordPress Akismet plugin checks your comments against the Akismet web service to see if they look like spam or not and lets you review the spam it catches under your blog’s “Comments” admin screen. It’s actually quite effective, more than most (if not all) the other comment spam plugins I’ve tried.

Simple Trackback Validation

Fighting spam is the never ending task of anyone running a site that allows user content of any kind. Akismet does a great job of handling the comment spam, but Simple Trackback Validation fills in the gaps and handles trackbacks. Simple Trackback Validation Plugin performs a simple but very effective test on all incoming trackbacks in order to stop trackback spam. Basically, it makes sure that the page claiming to be posting a trackback actually links to the page it’s posting that trackback to.

Headspace2

WordPress is pretty good with search engine optimization right out of the box, just by turning on permalinks. However, there’s definitely plenty of room for improvement. HeadSpace2 is an all-in-one meta-data manager that allows you to fine-tune the SEO potential of your site. Headspace will help you to better handle your tags/keywords, meta descriptions, and it does a great job of cleaning up and customizing your title tag. No longer do you need a bunch of conditionals in your title tag. A simple wp_title(”) will suffice, and the rest can be handled by Headspace2.

Clean Slugs

Another plugin that will help you get a little better search engine optimization. Joost’s Clean Slugs plugin looks for and removes more than 650 “stop words” from your post or page title when the slug is created. These are words that most search engines ignore because they are inconsequential, so removing them will help your raking. Unlike all the other plugins on this list, this plugin can’t be downloaded from the Wordpress.org repository. To get this plugin, simply sign up for Joost’s WordPress Newsletter.

Google XML Sitemaps

While it’s true that search engines can spider or crawl your site by following links, having a proper XML sitemap allows you to make sure that every post/page is properly indexed, as well as letting you specify a priority level for each. This plugin will create a Google sitemaps compliant XML-Sitemap of your WordPress blog. It supports all of the WordPress generated pages as well as custom ones. Everytime you edit or create a post, your sitemap is updated and all major search engines that support the sitemap protocol, like ASK.com, Google, MSN Search and YAHOO, are notified about the update.

Twitter Widget Pro

Twitter offer javascript widgets that display your latest tweets, but there are a couple problems. First, you need to be able to modify your theme or put the code into a text widget. Secondly, since it’s javascript, search engines don’t see the content. Twitter Widget Pro is a widget that properly handles twitter feeds, including @username and link parsing. It supports displaying profiles images, and even lets you control whether to display the time and date of a tweet or how log ago it happened (about 5 hours ago, etc). It does all this as a server-side widget, so the content can all be parsed by search engines. Requires PHP5.

WP Super Cache

WP Super Cache is a static caching plugin for WordPress. It generates html files that are served directly by Apache without processing comparatively heavy PHP scripts. By using this plugin you will speed up your WordPress blog significantly, reduce CPU/memory usage, and lessen database strain. If you have a high-traffic WordPress site, this is absolutely necessary.

Sociable

Social marketing is a hot topic and many have found that it’s incredibly successful. There are a few plugins for WordPress that will help you with this. Add This, Share This, and Sociable are the most popular, and I think Sociable is the best. It’s the only one that allows all content to be loaded from your site, no scipts or images to load from some other site. The reason this is so important to me is that I don’t ever want my site to load slowly because of a different site. Sociable automatically add links to your favorite social bookmarking sites on your posts, pages and in your RSS feed. You can choose from 99 different social bookmarking sites!

Subscribe to Comments

Getting people to comment on your posts can be a challenge. Even more difficult is getting people to come back to the same post and continue a discussion. Subscribe to Comments is a robust plugin that enables commenters to sign up for e-mail notification of subsequent entries. The plugin includes a full-featured subscription manager that your commenters can use to unsubscribe to certain posts, block all notifications, or even change their notification e-mail address!

Twitter Tools

Twitter Tools is a plugin that creates a complete integration between your WordPress blog and your Twitter account. The only part of it that I use is the ability to automatically notify Twitter of new posts. The problem is that it prefaces all these Tweets with “New blog post:” and this text isn’t customizable. Additionally, it uses tinyurl to shorten the URL for the post, and I would prefer that it let me use something like SnipUrl which lets me track the number of clicks. Still, the fact that it’s all automatic saves a lot of time for me, especially on sites like Web Developer News where people other than me post articles on a regular basis.

Twitter Widget Pro 2.1.0 Released

AaronCampbell — Thu, 12 Nov 2009 00:38:57 +0000

I just tagged a new version of Twitter Widget Pro which includes an oft-requested feature, a twitter-widget shortcode. You can now embed a twitter widget into any post or page by simply dropping in a shortcode like [twitter-widget username="xavisys"] to embed a widget like this:

Tweets from Xavisys

@darksigns For now all .mo and .po files can be found here: http://bit.ly/cq0xPP 03:26:34 PM March 12, 2010 from Seesmicin reply to darksigns
@Beanstalkapp Here's the support case: http://bit.ly/dDr3pz 08:47:48 PM March 09, 2010 from Seesmicin reply to Beanstalkapp
@Beanstalkapp The releases for my repository aren't showing properly. They say 207 was the most recent and yet 215 is on the dev server 07:19:05 PM March 09, 2010 from Seesmicin reply to Beanstalkapp

To read more about how to use the shortcodes and to download the plugin, go to the Twitter Widget Pro page. For support, go to the Twitter Widget Pro Forum

GPL Themes Get Some Love, Plugins Suffer?

AaronCampbell — Thu, 02 Jul 2009 23:14:48 +0000

Matt Mullenweg asked the Software Freedom Law Center whether WordPress Themes are GPL too. One sentence summary: PHP in WordPress themes must be GPL, artwork and CSS may be but are not required.

As a huge proponent of the GPL, this is exciting. However, as Joost pointed out in On the GPL, Themes, Plugins & Free, there’s some disappointment as well. The exciting part is that a question that’s long been asked has been answered by a “pro” (albeit a biased “pro”), and the answer is just what many of us wanted to see. Now we can get some people to focus on commercially supported GPL themes rather than just themes with more restrictive licenses. They have even added a Commercially Supported GPL Themes page to wordpress.org! That’s awesome, and a great followup to Matt’s “State of the Word” talk at WordCamp San Francisco.

So what’s the problem? Well, Matt has said that the plugin developers have been the rock stars in the WordPress community, and it’s time for the theme designers to shine. I have no problem with the theme designers getting to shine, but as a plugin developer I wonder “Where is the Commercially Supported GPL Plugins page? I love to give to the community with GPL WordPress plugins, and will continue to do so, but I’ll also be offering premium support for many of these in the future. I’d like to see the same treatment for theme designers and plugin developers.

Having said all that, I’m really glad to see the GPL themes page and I think it’s a good step in the right direction.

The Problem with Related Post Plugins

AaronCampbell — Thu, 21 May 2009 15:52:00 +0000

Showing related content to your users is important. I don’t think there’s anyone disputing that (at least not that I’m listening to). The real question is “how?” How can you show your user good related content without adding a ton of extra work for yourself? This is where related posts plugins come into play.

There are a lot of options out there. So many that it’s quite time consuming to try them all until you find one that suits you. Two of my favorites are WordPress Related Posts and Yet Another Related Posts Plugin (YARPP). Yarpp gives you more control over how matches are made, but for that very reason it’s also less efficient. Joost de Valk referred to it as a “heavy plugin” in his article on Optimizing WordPress database performance, and it definitely is. WordPress Related Posts is far more efficient, but offers you a little less control over how matches are made. Unfortunately they share the same problem.

So what is this problem? They all find matches to a post in the front end rather than the back end. They do it when a user views a specific post, rather than when a post is created or modified. On a brand new site I launched, which has only 7 posts, we’ve received roughly 2000 pageviews. That’s pretty low, but lets take a look at it. About 700 of those visits were to the home page and about 1300 were to single post pages. If you only show related posts on single post pages (which is how we currently do it) then the related posts plugin has been run over 1300 times for only 7 posts, which is roughly 185 times per post! If I were to show related posts for each post on the front page then it would have run another 4000 times (which is a conservative estimate), bringing it to 757 times per post. If you think this seems excessive, lets take a look at the stats for Web Developer News. It has had over 13,500 page views in the last 30 days. About 750 were to the home page, about 140 were to other static pages, roughly 550 were to tag pages, and another 250 were to miscellaneous pages such as search pages. That leaves 11,810 visits to single post pages and 21 posts during that same time. That’s about 562 times per post! If I added related posts to the home page, tag pages, and search pages it would need to be run roughly another 15,000 or 1,276 times per post.

In addition to the simple waste of memory and cpu cycles, putting the calculation of related posts on the front end means that when they start to slow down your users are left with a bad experience and slow loading pages. And they will slow down eventually, if your site gets big enough. I just recently worked on a site with more than 6,000 posts and over 1,800 tags (they offer investing advice, and have a lot of tags that correspond to ticker symbols). At that point, some of the related posts queries were taking 10 seconds to run. That’s really show. We can do better than that right? Well it’s not easy but I think we can.

I would always prefer that I (or my content creators) have to wait, rather than make my users wait. So, the logical solution would be to match related posts when a post is saved, and store them in the post’s meta data. Simple and solved right? Wrong. If that’s all you did, then posts would only ever be related to posts older than themselves. This would mean that part two of a series would likely relate to part one, but part one would never relate to part two. We solved the speed issue, but we took a huge hit in functionality. However, a plugin that I’ve developed and am testing takes it farther than that. When a post is saved, it’s related posts are saved, but all possible related posts are spidered and checked to see if they need to have new matches calculated for them.

For extremely large sites, the plugin still causes delays when you save a post. However, better you than your user. If you’re interested in using this plugin, I’ll be releasing it soon and I’ll add a link to it here when I do¹. However, for now I need a name for it! I originally called it Related Posts – High Volume because it was meant to fix issues on high-volume sites. However, since it can apply to almost any site, I’m looking for an inspired name that really lets people know what it can do. You can leave any ideas you have in the comment here or send them via twitter to @aaroncampbell or @wpinformer.

UPDATE:
The WordPress plugin has been released. You can download Efficient Related Posts from wordpress.org and you can read more about it at Efficient Related Posts at Xavisys.com

Efficient Related Posts

Xavisys» WordPress Plugins

The Xavisys WordPress Plugin Framework

Related Posts:

Efficient Related Posts 0.3.4 Released

Related Posts:

Twitter Widget Pro 2.1.3 Released

Related Posts:

Twitter Widget Pro 2.1.2 Released

Related Posts:

Twitter Widget Pro 2.1.1 Released

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10 Great WordPress Plugins

Akismet

Simple Trackback Validation

Headspace2

Clean Slugs

Google XML Sitemaps

Twitter Widget Pro

WP Super Cache

Sociable

Subscribe to Comments

Twitter Tools

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Twitter Widget Pro 2.1.0 Released

Tweets from Xavisys

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GPL Themes Get Some Love, Plugins Suffer?

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The Problem with Related Post Plugins

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