We needed a WordPress Multisite install locally so that we could test flexibly, privately, and securely throughout the development process for a new project. It’s definitely worth the effort especially if you – like us love developing locally.

Things you’ll need

• Terminal
• Editor – vim, nano, mate
• MAMP installed

Getting started

First lets create a site in /Applications/MAMP/htdocs/ – call it mutest

mkdir mutest
cd mutest

Now checkout wordpress with your favourite version control (we use subversion).

svn co http://core.svn.wordpress.org/tags/3.3.2 .

You’ll see it checking out wordpress now – when it’s done navigate to localhost:8888/mutest/ and complete the WordPress installation, i’m going to assume your competent with installing it normally.

Now open up the MAMP portal and perform the following.

Now go to Ports and change the default port from 8888 to 80 – once you do this mamp will restart and probably prompt you for your admin password.

We’re going to use the subdomain mapping for wordpress rather than the subfolder so next we need to edit the /etc/hosts file (which is on your mac).

I use textmate with the terminal hook, so I fire up terminal and run a command like so.

mate /etc/hosts

You could run vim or any other terminal editor if you like.

Add two new example domains to the hosts file (you will probably add more in the future but two will do for now).

example.site.com
example1.site.com

Save and exit.

Edit your Apache vhosts config file

Open /Applications/MAMP/conf/apache/httpd.conf in a text editor and scroll down to the line that says “#NameVirtualHost *”. Replace that line with the following code:

NameVirtualHost *
<virtualHost *>
 ServerName example.site.com
 ServerAlias example.site.com *.example.site.com
 DocumentRoot "/Applications/MAMP/htdocs/mutest"
 <directory "/Applications/MAMP/htdocs/mutest">
  Options Indexes FollowSymLinks Includes
  AllowOverride All
  Order allow,deny
  Allow from all
 </directory>
</virtualHost>

Save and restart mamp server.

Configuring WordPress MU

WordPress Multisite is really easy to configure just start by adding the following to your wp-config.php file.

define('WP_ALLOW_MULTISITE', true);

Once you’ve done this head to wp-admin backpanel and then look for the submenu ‘Tools’ and click Network.

On this page you will now see an option to use sub-domains for your site addresses. Make sure that’s selected, check the other details, and then click the “Install” button to make it happen. Note that you’ll see a warning message that says, “Wildcard DNS may not be configured correctly!” – we can ignore this warning because we know our DNS is correct.

Finally, complete the steps outlined there on the “Enabling the Network” page (i.e., create a blogs.dir folder and add the required code snippets to your .htaccess etc). After that, re-login to the Admin area and go to Network Admin > Sites > Add New to begin adding your sub-domain network sites.

Your done! It’s all over. Your now rocking a nice little wordpress multisite setup locally. Good job. Grab a coffee and get coding!

Something like this:

$widgets = get_option('sidebars_widgets');
$widgets['wp_inactive_widgets'] = array();
update_option('sidebars_widgets', $widgets);

Then i’m afraid to say it’s just not possible…ha…only kidding…keep reading if you want to find out how, it’s actually really quite simple.

So to setup these ultra cool, simple shortcut commands for your mac terminal you need to locate or create a .profile file.

If you have one already you’ll be able to find it using the following commands.

cd ~/
ls -f

This either will or won’t reveal a .profile file. If it doesn’t, no sweat, we’ll just go ahead and create it.

mate ~/.profile

(note i’m using Textmate here, you could use vim / nano or whatever gui takes your fancy.)

Once you’ve got this file open we’re going to use alias to define our shortcuts.

Here’s an example.

alias davetest="cd /Applications/MAMP/htdocs/davetestsite/"

Save the file, relaunch terminal and type “davetest” or whatever your shortcut is and wollah you’ll have created your very own customised mac terminal shortcut command.

Good work.

I have been using PHP and the CURL library ascertain the final URL after redirects whilst also picking up on javascript redirects etc.

This is what i’ve come up with so far, and it’s working a dream.

function get_final_url( $url, $timeout = 5 ){
    $url = str_replace( "&", "&", urldecode(trim($url)) );

   	$cookie = tempnam ("/tmp", "CURLCOOKIE");
	$ch = curl_init();
	curl_setopt( $ch, CURLOPT_USERAGENT, "Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; rv:1.7.3) Gecko/20041001 Firefox/0.10.1" );
	curl_setopt( $ch, CURLOPT_URL, $url );
	curl_setopt( $ch, CURLOPT_COOKIEJAR, $cookie );
	curl_setopt( $ch, CURLOPT_HEADER, true);
	curl_setopt( $ch, CURLOPT_FOLLOWLOCATION, true );
	curl_setopt( $ch, CURLOPT_ENCODING, "" );
	curl_setopt( $ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, true );
	curl_setopt( $ch, CURLOPT_AUTOREFERER, true );
	curl_setopt( $ch, CURLOPT_CONNECTTIMEOUT, $timeout );
	curl_setopt( $ch, CURLOPT_TIMEOUT, $timeout );
	curl_setopt( $ch, CURLOPT_MAXREDIRS, 10 );
	$content = curl_exec( $ch );
	$response = curl_getinfo( $ch );
	curl_close ( $ch );

	if ($response['http_code'] == 301 || $response['http_code'] == 302):
	    ini_set("user_agent", "Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; rv:1.7.3) Gecko/20041001 Firefox/0.10.1");
	    $headers = get_headers($response['url']);

	    $location = "";
	    foreach( $headers as $value ):
	        if ( substr( strtolower($value), 0, 9 ) == "location:" )
	            return get_final_url( trim( substr( $value, 9, strlen($value) ) ) );
	    endforeach;
	endif;

	if (preg_match("/window.location.replace('(.*)')/i", $content, $value) ||
	        preg_match("/window.location=\"(.*)\"/i", $content, $value) ||
	        preg_match("/location.href=\"(.*)\"/i", $content, $value) ):

	    	return get_final_url ( $value[1] );
	else:
	    return $response['url'];
	endif;

}

// Simply called like so

$my_final_url = get_final_url('http://originalurl.com',10);

rsync is a software application and network protocol for Unix-like and Windows systems that synchronizes files and directories from one location to another while minimizing data transfer using delta encoding when appropriate (thanks Wikipedia).

rsync -avz -e ssh username@yourotherserver:/pathto/domain/html/wp-content/plugins .

In this case I rsync the plugins folder into the current working directory (make sure if your copying and pasting this command to CD into the right folder first before running).

Trust me this will save you time!

Game developers and game owners can list their games on topmmorpg100.com for free and encourage their users to vote for them on it. They can make use of our industry leading API’s which provide developers with everything they need to make a successful job of incentivising voting for their players. Our API’s will do such things as callback your API URL when a vote is successfully processed with the playerID you pass to us in the voting process.

It’ll even allow you to verify a userID or IP Address has voted for your game.

Topmmorpg100.com is looking for some more game owners to join, currently they are offering 100 free votes and 1 month free Gold membership to the next 5 sites that join up.

It’s certainly a very good MMORPG & Gaming voting site and is feature rich and well coded.

Come check out my hard work here if you like it, be sure to drop me a comment or buy me a beer sometime. Also if you have any improvements you’d like to see drop them here as well.

I am documenting them here for future reference.

ctrl+u – clears current line in terminal
ctrl+l – clears terminal commands without having to run the cmd ‘clear’

cmd+d – creates a split terminal window
cmd+d+shft – removes the split terminal window

cmd+shft+{ – previous terminal tab
cmd+shft+} – next terminal tab

mkdir -p /this/is/avery/long/directory/structure/and/would/be/annoying/tocreate/

Will create the directory structure in one command for you rather than doing many commands.

top – Shows the running processes on your mac

To checkout a remote branch into your local use the following commands.

git clone myrepo@git.example.com

git branch -r

Will show you all the remote branches pick the one you like…

For instance for me it would be origin/dave.

Run the following command.

git checkout --track origin/dave

WordPress is web software you can use to create a beautiful website or blog quickly, feature full and user friendly. We like to say that WordPress is both free and priceless at the same time.

I’m currently weighing up some options in terms of what to create, but at my place of work (Bytewire) we use WordPress alot for our clients and indeed many of our own projects. We have in this time come across some annoying problems which potentially a great plugin could very much help to overcome. Deciding on a feasible plugin to create is often one of the hardest things for a developer, especially so if it’s your first. I’m not venturing into making a plugin for any other reason than to help others and ticking off a personal milestone.

When developing a plugin for general public use you do have to remember a heck load more stuff, here’s some of the stuff i’m preparing my plugin to be ready for, and to handle.

Developing general release WordPress Plugins

When your developing for the general public you have to remember that your own integrity will be judged by the very integrity of your own plugin. If your plugin breaks a prospective users site, or, simply doesn’t do as it says, the user is likely to be very unhappy and potentially blacklist you as a plugin developer choice for future needs. How can you overcome these problems? Well, the simple answer is – be thorough, very thorough.

• Make sure you check your plugin can function in a WordPress MU setup, by providing different or extra funtionality if is_multisite()
• Comment your code well – WordPress is based on a GPL license, and actively encourages, code sharing and the ability to delve into one anothers code and make changes where seen fit. This helps with learning and extendability.
• Debug your code – Using the WordPress functionality, make sure you debug your code so that you are not using deprecated functions or code
• Build your plugin for the current WordPress version, do not attempt to support older versions of WordPress. As wrong as this may seem, Worpdress actively encourages this and warns all users not on the most up to date versions of WordPress they are not guaranteed a secure service unless they are. This can often be enough alone to persuade many clients and blog owners to upgrade. Generally WordPress wants to encourage upgrades as much as possible and with the possibility now to perform the upgrade in a matter of a handful of clicks, any user could do it. Suggesting to me if a user needs to use your plugin and he can’t without upgrading, WordPress effectively gets what it wants from your support as well.
• Ensure you provide the properly formatted readme.txt file when submitting it to the plugin repository on WordPress
• Make sure you are familiar with Subversion, you are required to use this to make changes to your plugin going forward.
• You are most likely to find that your WordPress plugin is naturally fairly backward compatible, depending on the functions it makes use of, but as a general rule of thumb you could make sure it’s compatible with at least the last two major releases. Given that they are done on a 3-4 month basis, this would give you all users in the last 8 months by default and any that have upgraded in that time. Which is fine.

These are just a few things that are notable about diving into the world of WordPress public plugin development, there but many more. Perhaps as time goes by I will look to add to this post and grow it with my experiences. In the mean time if your a reader and you’ve got any great ideas for a killer WordPress plugin then i’d love to here from you.