Category Archives: WordPress

Monitor Logins 0.2.0

Posted by in WordPress > Plugins

Introducing Monitor Logins, a simple plugin that allows you to monitor login attempts (successful and unsuccessful) made against your user account on your WordPress install. Failed attempts to login to user accounts cause email notices to be sent to that user. That is, if they have notifications enabled. Notifications are enabled on a per user basis, and are off by default.

Additionally, Monitor Logins will remember devices used to login with, should a device be “new” upon successful login a notice will be sent to the user. Devices are forgotten if they have not been seen for a few months. The last several successful logins are remembered and displayed in a list akin to what Gmail does. Only a user can view his/her own login activity.

I originally wrote this plugin to gain greater visibility into login attempts made against user accounts on this site almost a year ago (Way before the recent botnet dictionary attacks). Since then, it has been steadily refined to make it more suitable for a wider range of users. For those of you who attend the MSP WordPress meetups, this is the plugin I demoed during a lightning talk session in March.

More information is available on the Monitor Logins project page.

Download Monitor Logins 0.2.0 from Git Hub.

-John Havlik

[end of transmission, stay tuned]

Benchmarking WordPress (Investigating the Optimal Server)

Posted by in WordPress

With WordPress powering an estimated 16.7% of all websites1, having tools to evaluate server performance for running WordPress is becoming necessary. At the time of writing this article, there are no known published investigations into determining the optimal server configuration for WordPress. Yet, hosting providers will make bold claims, such as “My blog is 4x faster than your blog”. While these claims make for entertaining t-shirts, without a defined methodology there is no way to verify them.

Continue reading

Notes:

  1. Mullenweg, Matthew. “State of the Word 2012.” WordCamp San Francisco 2012. San Francisco . ↩

WP Lynx 0.6.0

Posted by in WordPress > Plugins

Say hello to a new, better organized, settings page. Settings are now organized by context, with many of the advanced, infrequently used settings sitting under the advanced tab. In the process of updating the settings page, the underlying plugin core was updated to the latest mtekk_adminKit, which already ships with Breadcrumb NavXT.

Additionally, WP Lynx now supports capturing a screenshot of a website and using that as the thumbnail image. This is provided though Snapito!, you’ll need to grab an API key for it to work. Note that the site screenshot will always be the second image in a thumbnail set, unless no other thumbnails were found. Also note that the initial loading of a screenshot may take several seconds. Please wait for the screenshot to load in the window before inserting the lynx print to ensure WP Lynx can cache the image properly.

Lastly, a few tweaks were made to the scraping engine to fix the causes of PHP notices in cases where something went wrong in retrieving a site.

Note that this release  is the first in a series of planned releases between now and 1.0. Each will add a minor number of features, tracked in the WP Lynx GitHub Repository.

-John Havlik

[end of transmission, stay tuned]

I’m Speaking at WordCamp Minneapolis

Posted by in Announcements > WordPress

My presentation titled “The Power of Custom Types” was accepted into the “Intermediate” track for WordCamp Minneapolis 2013. This is based off of the presentation I gave twice at WordCamp NYC last year. Based on some feedback from organizers this presentation will take a slightly different path than its predecessor.

Yes, it is still on Custom Post Types. However, custom taxonomies and post (custom) meta will also be covered. Inspiring members of the audience to use WordPress’ custom types in their next project is the aim of the presentation. In the presentation I will be covering the basics of CPTs, taxonomies, and post meta, presenting a few cool tips and tricks, discussing when a CPT, taxonomy, or post meta use is appropriate, and showcasing some cool plugins that use a combination of CPTs, taxonomies and post meta. As always, there will be plenty of time for Q&A so bring your questions.

Psst. If you haven’t registered yet, register for WordCamp Minneapolis while you still can.

-John Havlik

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Breadcrumb NavXT 4.3.0

Posted by in WordPress > Plugins

Holy incremental improvements Batman! Rather than one big new thing, this release has several tweaks that improve the overall plugin. Two new breadcrumb template tags were added, %ftitle% and %fhtitle%. These two tags are not affected by bcn_breadcrumb::trim() and are thus suitable for the title attribute in links when a max breadcrumb length is set. Support for the Theme Hook Alliance’s proposed tha_breadcrumb_navigation filter was added.

The Home and Main site titles were removed as they were redundant. While doing this, now the %title% and %htitle% tags return the “Site Title” for the home breadcrumb and “Network Name” for the mainsite breadcrumb. This should make multisite installs a little more manageable until the network admin is available.

As a security precaution, all settings that accept HTML now are passed through wp_kses. A reasonable set of accepted HTML tags were added, if you run into an issue where a tag or attribute you were using is being stripped, please report it in the comments section below.

Finally, several bugs were fixed. Loading of translated default settings now works again. And, some tweaks to the tabs in the settings page were made to improve the look and feel in WordPress 3.5.

The Translation Team:

[glot-translators=breadcrumb-navxt]

As always, you can grab the latest version of Breadcrumb NavXT from the Breadcrumb NavXT page. If you experience any issues with this version of Breadcrumb NavXT, please leave a comment on this post detailing the issue.

-John Havlik

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