Category Archives: Wordpress

Debug LDAP via TLS

Yesterday I had to do some debugging to find out why an LDAPS connection didn’t work.

The main trouble was that the authLdap plugin for WordPress didn’t work for someone. After a bit of back and forth we figured out that it worked for other applications but not for PHPs LDAP-extension.

The error they got was the usual cryptic Can't contact LDAP server which says nothing at all as that can mean so many different things.

Continue reading Debug LDAP via TLS

Tweaking a WordPress blog for the fediverse

The Fediverse is taking off. Slightly. Not sure yet whether it’s similar to “Linux on Desktop” but no matter what it’s all about federation. And making it easier to get content right into the timeline of people is worth investigating.

So I decided to try the ActivityPub plugin and see where it leads me.

Installation of the plugin is straight forward. Head to “new Plugins”, search for ActivityPub, install and activate it.

The cool thing is: That’s it!

At least when you have setup your WordPress blog out of the box.

You can now follow the author on the fediverse by checking for @[authorname]@[blog-URI] . So in my case that would be @heiglandreas@andreas.heigl.org

And of course in my case it didn’t work out-of-the-box. Why should it.

Why? Well: Two reasons:

  • One was that I use the Yoast SEO plugin which by default (or did I actually set it up that way?) did redirect requests to the author-page back to the main website. Which is kind of counter productive when you want information about the author. So I changed those settings (“Yoast SEO” => “Search Appearances” => “Archives” – Set “Author Archives” to On)
  • The other was that I am running this blog from a subfolder. Which is something so common, that the plugin authors already have that in their FAQ on the plugin page. So I headed over to the server-config, made the mentioned tweaks, restarted the server and – voila – everything works!

Now I was able to find and follow @heiglandreas in my Mastodon-Client.

Things that I need to figure out now

The next things on my todo-list are:

  • That’s all nice and dandy on a personal blog. But how do I implement this so that people can actually follow a blog with changing authors – like for example 24daysindecember (did I mention that we are looking for people that want to contribute?)
  • Is there a possibility (or does it at all make sense) to somehow integrate that into my default fediverse-account? Or to get my personal account over to the andreas.heigl.org domain? Or to setup an @andreas@heigl.org fediverse account that also contains the stuff from the blog…

But those are questions that I will possibly answer in a

bootstrapping wordpress

The other day I was thinking about how to easily setup a wordpress-site for development, staging as well as production and I found that there doesn’t seem to be an easy way “out-of-the-box”.

Why is that?

WordPress is famous for it’s “5 minute installer” (which actually, after the 20th wordpress-site, takes you 2 minutes max). Upload the folder via FTP onto your server, open your webbrowser and add some basic informations and you’ve got a Blog up and running. Do some more customizations and you’ve got a decent website.

But it’s never been designed to take that site and move it to somewhere else to do some testing and then put everything back again to the live-site. Oh, but only put the configuration you changed back, not the actual data…

And that’s where it becomes tricky. The configuration resides in the same database as the content. And even though we just need the information what plugin shall be installed, we have to move the complete sourcecode of the plugin from A to B as there is no way otherwise. And to be honest, even moving the complete wordpress-core from A to B is somewhat overdone.

Dependency-Management

This can be circumvented by using DependencyManagement. the wordpress-core and all of the plugins and themes are dependencies of my website. And some examples already exist on the internet on how to setup a wordpress-site using composer. To enable that there’s even a proxy for all the plugins and themes in the wordpress-repository.

But it still misses some things.

Multiple identical setups

One thing was to allow easy installation on a development-system including a vagrant-setup while still enabling me to deploy everything easily on a different machine with a local database and webserver setup.

Version Control

Another thing is the possibility to store the setup in a VCS with a minimum amount of files. In my eyes it doesn’t make much sense to have the complete wordpress-core under version-control when a line like "wordpress" : "4.4.*" can be enough.

Automation

And it should also allow me to use the wordpress-repository to install plugins and themes as I’m used to. Update the dependencies via the webinterface or via an automated process.

An idea

Slowly an idea crept up in my mind.

And I’ve started creating it. A wordpress-bootstrap in combination with a WordPress-Composer bridge. It’s not finished yet, but I believe it’s a good way.

Now I can create a running wordpress-installation with some terminal-commands (as long as composer and vagrant are available) like this:

    composer create-project org_heigl/wordpress_bootstrap [my-wordpress-folder]
    # confirm the defaults with "Enter"
    cd [my-wordpress-folder]
    vagrant up

Now visit http://localhost:8080. You can log in using wpadmin and password (and you should change that!)

The setup already has a plugin installed that adds the plugins you activate in that installation to the composer.json-file and you can store the information of activated plugins and themes by adding that composer.json to your VCS and that’s it. No need to bloate your VCS with the complete plugin-code.

The whole thing is not yet finished! There’s a lot of stuff to do like handling Database-Transfers and stuff.

But it’s a start.

What do you think? Anything you think that should be included? Open an Issue or fork the project and create a Pull-Request.

Mobile blogging

For a Lot of People it might Be an old Story, but I just discovered the possibilities of the XML-RPC-Connector in my wordpress-blog.

It Makes editing so much easier on the Train or at the Next Break. Just open an offline-editor (I am using the wordpress-app on my iPod) And Start happy editing.

The only drawback is the Auto-Text-correction, that I have Not yet managed to Turn off and that more than once translates a Perfect english word into German garbage…. But that’s not wordpress’ fault, isn’t it?