Posted by Randy on 3rd March 2010
I wrote early last month on an employee workplace feedback tool we launched using our WordPress MU installation and the Survey plug-in. Overall the plugin worked well. Here is a screen shot of one of our forms:
The main issue was a problem in the table that holds the responses. The field that stores the user answer is limited to 255 characters, but no limit is enforced on the form. And when users are invited to submit free form comments they quickly exceed the 255 limit. The result is that a number of the responses were cut off in the database, and some of the user response was lost. Not the nicest thing to realize after the fact, but luckily the fix is easy.
To make the alteration change open the plugin’s surveys.php file and find the create table section. Right around line 101 you’ll see the code that creates the surveys_result_answer table. Alter the ‘user_answer’ column to use the blob data type — you’ll see it is set to a text(255) type, which is too short for many users.
CREATE TABLE {$wpdb->prefix}surveys_result_answer ((
`ID` int(11) unsigned NOT NULL auto_increment,
`result_ID` int(11) unsigned NOT NULL,
`answer_ID` int(11) unsigned NOT NULL,
`question_ID` int(11) unsigned NOT NULL,
`user_answer` blob NOT NULL,
PRIMARY KEY (`ID`),
KEY `question_ID` (`question_ID`),
KEY `answer_ID` (`answer_ID`),
KEY `result_ID` (`result_ID`)
) ;
This small change fixes that problem. The only other note is we used this tool on a members-only site. I’d want to give it a thorough security check before using this on a public site. I did note the user-text was escaped, so it looks like some protections are in place. But these days you can never be too security conscious.
Surveys < Plugins < WordPress < Tools < Bin-Co
Surveys WordPress plugin lets you add surveys to your blog. You can let the visitors take surveys and see the result from the admin side. The user who take the survey can enter their details at the end of the survey – or leave it as an anonymous result.
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Posted by Randy on 25th February 2010
I have been using a basic Twitter plug-in to auto-tweet new blog posts to my twitter account. It was always a little fussy, and recently it seemed to stop working — maybe something related to the recent WordPress update? No matter, it seemed a good time to go looking to see what else was available. And so far Twitter Tools is looking very promising. It can be set to pull in Tweets that contain a specific hashtag — allowing selective tweet-posting of new entries. And, assuming this message makes it over to Twitter, you can set your posts to go go to Twitter as well. The big question is how it will work with posts originating from other external tools, like ScribeFire, or scheduled posts — both of which I do a lot. We’ll see…
WordPress › Twitter Tools « WordPress Plugins
Twitter Tools is a plugin that creates a complete integration between your WordPress blog and your Twitter account.
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Posted by Randy on 8th February 2010
Just yesterday I had a request to create a tool to collect some follow-up responses from our staff regarding a recent university-wide workplace survey. So we need something simple, easy to maintain, quick to launch AND that collects the responses in a format that permits easy and flexible reporting. As I recently demonstrated our WordPress MU installation makes it easy to launch a project-specific site which includes user-login tied to the school’s central user authentication system. So simple-easy-quick — doing this through WordPress gets me at least half-way there. And I remembered a recent suggestion in my Twitter feed to look at the WordPress Surveys plugin.
The plugin is pretty simple and written clearly enough to make adjustments easy. And most importantly it utilizes a table structure that is normalized, and well structured, which will work well for the eventual reporting needs. I did do some hacking around in the code to change some of the default behavior — mostly just commenting out features we didn’t want. These would lend themselves well to some additional options in the plug-in settings — maybe I’ll get around to adding those in at some point. When it comes to the reports I’ll also go into the background, using PHPMyAdmin to grab the tables directly — again it wouldn’t take much to add more flexibility into the WordPress admin panel options for the plug-in, but I’m still running in the quick/simple mode here. And with the help of the Plaintxt theme it is up and running.
The plugin could be quite useful for all sorts of user feedback on a site, not just surveys. The nicely structured data collected in plugin-specific tables would make reporting really flexible.
WordPress › Surveys « WordPress Plugins
The Surveys WordPress plugin lets you add surveys to you blog. You can let the vistors take surveys and see the result from the admin side.
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Posted by Reverend on 6th February 2010
I find myself in every recent version of WP (and WPMu) searching for the ID numbers for various pages, posts, categories, and/or tags on a number of occasions. I’m not sure when this feature got dropped from the core, but I do remember it was at one time part of the edit post/edit page metadata. As of the latest versions the only way to find ID numbers is to actually edit the page (or post, tag, category, comment, etc.) and look for the ID value in the URL field (pictured below). Not very intuitive, in fact, ridiculous.
ShowID for Post/Page/Category/Tag/Comment plugin actually shows the ID value right from the edit section of any of these elements. Something like the following:
I am going to activate this plugin sitewide for UMW Blogs, because a number of the plugins/widgets we have actually ask for page/posts IDs to exclude pages/posts etc. from a widget, or include categories in a page. And explaining how to find this information without this plugin is just that much more difficult. I really don’t understand why this isn’t a core feature of WP given core widgets (such as the pages widgets) and a wide variety of plugins depend on ID values.
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Posted by Ron on 24th January 2010
I updated SharDB (Download) for WordPress MU 2.9.1.1 and added support for the comment meta table.
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Posted by Randy on 14th January 2010
Client asks “can I list multiple authors on an article in our CMS?” After a quick search and a little playing around I could give my standard WordPress answer “it turns out there is a plug-in for that!” The Co-Authors Plus plug-in nicely met our needs. We list both the author’s display name and the Biographical Description in the author tag line with the meta information at the head of the post. And based on the suggestions in the plug-in’s readme.txt file I created the following function to generate the display:
The function checks to make sure the plug-in exists, and if not reverts to the standard WordPress author functions. You can see what it looks like here. Nice when things work! Thanks to Mohammad Jangda for a great plug-in.
WordPress › Co-Authors Plus « WordPress Plugins
Allows multiple authors to be assigned to a Post or Page via the search-as-you-type inputs. Co-authored posts appear on a co-author’s posts page and feed. New template tags allow listing of co-authors. Editors and Administrators may assign co-authors to a post. Additionally, co-authors may edit the posts they are associated with, and co-authors who are contributors may only edit posts if they have not been published (as is usual).
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Posted by Ron on 28th December 2009
Our larger WordPress MU install, Homeschool Journal has been running on multiple databases for about 3 years. Technically, it’s possible to have thousands of blogs in a single database install. Usually where people running MU start to have issues with the number of blogs is with getting complete backups of the database.
Upgrades with multiple databases have always been more work and many people running multiple databases typically did not upgrade until the .1 release of whatever version of MU. When I upgraded Homeschool Journal to MU 2.7.1, it was two weeks before I had found and repaired all of the database issues (via several plugins). I decided I wasn’t going to go through that again.
With the number of blogs at WordPress.com, Automattic must be using a database plugin that supports WordPress MU better. So, over a couple of weekends, I tweaked HyperDB to use the same MD5 hash based sharding structure that we were using.
I released SharDB (Download) last week as a beta release intended for larger WordPress MU installs using an existing 1-3 character MD5 hash (by blog id) based multi-database sharding structure. (Other structures will be added in early 2010.) The alpha testing of SharDB was carried out this fall with the help of a few people who I knew were using the same multi-database that we were. SharDB has been powering live sites since early October.
SharDB has been tested with over 50 plugins including BuddyPress 1.1 through 1.1.3, domain mapping (both Donncha’s and my version) and my multi-site plugin. I have not found any issues with any of the tested plugins. It should support any plugin that accesses data via the $wpdb object. It has been used to upgrade live sites from 2.7.1 through to 2.8.6 and I’ve upgraded a test site to the WordPress MU 2.9 release candidate tagged 2009/12/21. (Note: I used the plugin in this post to create the commentmeta tables before updating MU from 2.8.6 to 2.9RC.)
One of the features that I really like about SharDB is that I don’t need to edit the database config when adding plugins (a feature inherited from HyperDB). Also, I haven’t had issues with plugins failing to create tables. As an added bonus, I added a handy column to the site admin blog screen so that you can see which database a blog’s tables are in.
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Posted by andrea on 23rd December 2009
Here’s a wee little gift from the folks at Automattic: the custom css plugin they use over at wordpress.com. I know some people have been wanting this for ages, even though there are plenty of similar plugins out there already. 
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Posted by Randy on 22nd December 2009
I am still slowly working through the videos I shot during the WordCamp NYC 2009 event. This was the very first presentation I attended that day entitled “Building Community with BuddyPress” by Lisa Sabin Wilson. It is a great presentation and she nicely runs through all the major features of this powerful set of WordPress plug-ins.
Warning on the video — right at the end of part 1 there was a rather loud audio feedback problem which I haven’t edited out. Sorry. Part 2 picks up after the audio was fixed, and the sound quality there was much improved.
In the audio-only version I edited out the audio feedback squeal and cleaned up/normalized the audio in the first half. She does make some references to her presentaton slides in the video that are helpful, but I think you can get the gist of everything with the audio only:
Audio only: Building Community with BuddyPress
Video Part 1:
Video Part 2:
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Posted by Ron on 16th December 2009
I had a few requests to update the Bulk Import Members plugin, so that it did not require BuddyPress to be installed and that it work with WordPress MU 2.8.6. Other changes:
- it now goes in the plugins folder & activates sitewide. The only users who have access to the plugin are site admins.
- it is now MU site aware and users are added to the dashboard blog if the WPMU site has one, otherwise they are added to the main blog of the site.
- there is an option to add the users to the current blog instead of the dashboard/main blog of the site.
- users are added at the default user level set in the site options.
- I tested it with WPMU Default User Role plugin and it worked like a charm.
WordPress MU Bulk Import Users (64)
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