Author Archives: Shacker

SoloMail is a WordPress plugin designed to email an HTML-formatted copy of single posts (not batch digests) to site subscribers. There are quite a few solutions out there designed to send regular digests of recent posts to subscribers. SoloMail solves a different problem – you may want to cherry pick just certain posts to go out via email, and you may want the ability to “send now.”

The subscriber list can EITHER be the group of all registered users on a site OR a single address, such as a mailing list. Though you can use SoloMail either way, I recommend sending through a proper mailing list, which provides advantages such as handling and unsubscribing bounced/dead addresses, and metered sending for large lists.

Please see the included readme.txt for configuration and usage instructions.

Download SoloMail
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For sites with multiple authors and editors, there is often a need to provide a style guide and/or technical instructions for site contributors. This very simple plugin will create a “Site Notes” menu item in the WP Dashboard. Clicking it will take the user to a page or set of pages. The administrator simple creates the site documentation in HTML format and stores it in the plugin body itself. I know, not very elegant – this is meant to be quick-n-dirty – but gets the job done.

Create a file called site-docs.php or similar with the following contents, upload it to your plugins directory, and activate. That’s all there is to it.

In my example, we just use in-page anchors to separate the different documentation sections, but you can do whatever you like. Season to taste.

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<?php
/*
Plugin Name: Site Documentation
Plugin URI: http://software.birdhouse.org
Description: Documentation for site authors and editors
Version: 1.0
Author: Scot Hacker
Author URI: http://birdhouse.org/
License: GPL
Last modified: 2007-05-05 9:54pm EDT
*/
 
// mt_add_pages() is the sink function for the 'admin_menu' hook
function mt_add_pages() {
    // Add a submenu to the Dashboard:
    add_submenu_page('index.php', 'Stuck Notes', 'Stuck Notes', 2, 'stuck-notes', 'stuck_notes');
}
 
 
 
// stuck_notes() displays the page content for the Stuck Notes submenu
function stuck_notes() {
echo <<< EOF
<p><a name="top" id="top"></a></p>
 
<div class="wrap">
	<h2>Stuck Notes - Docs and tips for writers/editors</h2>
 
	<div class="wrap">
		<ul>
			<li><a href="#process">Review process</a></li>
			<li><a href="#style">Editorial style notes</a></li>
			<li><a href="#contrib">...</a></li>					
		</ul>
	</div>
 
	<p><a name="process" id="process"></a></p>
 
	<div class="wrap">
		<h3>Review process</h3>
 
		<p>...</p>
 
		<p><a href="#top">Back to top</a></p>
	</div>
 
	<p><a name="style" id="style"></a></p>
 
	<div class="wrap">
		<h3>Style notes</h3>
 
		<p>...</p>
		<p><a href="#top">Back to top</a></p>
	</div>
 
</div>
 
EOF;
}
 
// Insert the mt_add_pages() sink into the plugin hook list for 'admin_menu'
add_action('admin_menu', 'mt_add_pages');
?>

WordPress Mass Management Tools is a small collection of tools for managing multiple WordPress installations on a Unix/Linux/Mac server (or perhaps a Windows server with Cygwin (untested)).

Yes, users can often self-install via Fantastico or similar programs, but what guarantee do you have that they’ll upgrade as soon as new releases become available? Letting users run old versions of web software is a great way to get hacked. This kit lets you take control of users’ installations by checking them out via svn and upgrading them en masse.

At Birdhouse Hosting we use WordPress Mass Management Tools to create all new installations. When WP updates are released, we’re able to upgrade more than 100 WP installations belonging to 80+ users in a few minutes flat.

The kit is designed to be run by root – these are not tools for WordPress end users. The kit assumes basic knowledge of the bash shell.

This kit replaces the old wp-create and wp-mass-upgrade scripts which were distributed separately and are no longer supported. Includes:

wp-create.sh: Super fast way to install WordPress for clients, via subversion. Performs the following tasks:

• Gather installation info
• Create install dir and check out a copy of WordPress
• Create database, db user, set db privs via external .sql file
• Create WP config file
• Create upload dir and set filesystem permissions
• Generate array line for wp-sites.sh

Final setup is done via browser.

wp-mass-upgrade.sh: Iterates through all sites listed in wp-sites.sh, backs up the site’s database, upgrades to a specified version of WordPress, and sends the site owner email announcing the upgrade.

wp-mass-plugins.sh: Generates a list of all active plugins used by all sites on the server. The list can be compared to lists of known-incompatible plugins to help you make decisions about whether to skip any sites on the list.

Download wp-mass-tools 1.1

See the included readme.txt for documentation.

Want to contribute/make this project better? It’s also available at github.

This is a very crude mass category deletion script for WordPress. I recently inherited a WordPress site with more than 6000 categories. After deleting a ton of old posts, we were left with more than 4000 unused categories, and I needed a way to remove them quickly. Couldn’t find a plugin up to the task, so wrote this. Very crude, but effective. Not a plugin, but a small WP companion script. See instructions in the comment at top of script.

Download Cleancats

WP-Create has been folded into the WordPress Mass Management Tools kit.

A dirt-simple WordPress plugin that lets you provide workflow docs to your authors and editors from within the WP admin interface.

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A WordPress plugin aimed primarily at events sites, where you want to be able to timestamp posts in the future but have them appear immediately (by default, WordPress will not display a future timestamped post until its go-live date rolls around). This plugin sets the post_status field to “publish” rather than “future” when publishing a post, even if its timestamp is in the future. Written by Ryan Boren and modified by Andrew Nacin – I’m just hosting it.
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Designed for hosts with lots of individual WordPress blogs to manage. If all blogs are managed via subversion, this script can iterate through all of them and upgrade each to the latest version in seconds.

WP-Mass-Upgrade has been folded into the WordPress Mass Management Tools kit.

Sends periodic email notifications of new WordPress blog entries (in either plain text or HTML mode) to a separate subscribers mailing list. Maintains cache file recording ID of last-sent post. On subsequent runs, sends all posts created since the previous run.

Currently driving weekly email updates from birdhouse.org and other sites.

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WPBlogMail is now deprecated. Please use WP-Digest instead.