imsanity plugin

When they do, a couple of things happen: the site slows down. Occasionally somebody manages to put the original in the post and their bandwidth goes through the roof.

While it's possible to put a hard upload limit in which defeats the heavy uploads, the errors create a lot of unnecessary administrative overhead.

Imagine that someone created a plugin which would resize huge images to the maximum size used on your site.

Well someone just did.

Try verysimple's Imsanity.

Weird but very cool branding.

By Alec

WordPress images uploaded by client too large? try Imsanity

Post from: Foliovision

You might also like

1. How to prepare FTP uploaded images to work with SEO Images in Filezilla
2. WordPress Photo Galleries: State of the WordPress Images War
3. SEO Images: Optimising for Google Images

If you don't already have a mobile version of your site, it's time to put one in right now. Here's how you do it, from A to Z. If the beginning seems a bit complicated, just push ahead. There's an easy point form summary at the bottom of the article.

If you have even a reasonably busy WordPress site, you need to have a caching solution in place. Without caching, you'll get your site kicked off shared hosting lickety-split or you'll cripple performance on your VPS. Visitors like fast sites and cached sites are two to five times faster than uncached sites. For WordPress, there are three major choices in caching solutions: WP Super Cache, W3 Total Cache and Hyper Cache.

For a mobile site, you need to have a caching solution which will pass through mobile clients quickly and reliably to your mobile version.

Of the three above, by far the most reliable is WP Super Cache. Donncha O Caoimh has been providing reliable code (and an almost unspellable name) for five years now. (Donate here. We did.)

WP Super Cache mostly works.
A real work horse, Super
Cachejust keeps on ticking

Sometimes high performance,
always high maintenance, deploying
W3 Total Cache is like taking the
space shuttle to the grocery store

Hyper Cache seems to work
the new kid on the block,
showing promise. We've
had issues with Hyper Cache
on some of our bare bones
Debian server.

Start by making sure your caching plugin is properly set up. These settings are not the default but are where you want to be. Donncha includes the most compatible and much slower defaults in his plugin (good idea, as new WP users can get some benefits with little risk). Here are Donncha's main instructions to get WP Super Cache to really fly and to reduce your load times for Google (good for SEO):

• Mod_Rewrite. The fastest method is by using Apache mod_rewrite (or whatever similar module your web server supports) to serve "supercached" static html files. This completely bypasses PHP and is extremely quick. If your server is hit by a deluge of traffic it is more likely to cope as the requests are "lighter".
• If you are not using legacy mode caching consider deleting the contents of the "Rejected User Agents" text box and allow search engines to create supercache static files.
• Likewise, preload as many posts as you can and enable "Preload Mode". Garbage collection will still occur but it won't affect the preloaded files. If you don't care about sidebar widgets updating often set the preload interval to 2880 minutes (2 days) so all your posts aren't recached very often.

Now it's time to get ready to set up the mobile version. First you need to make a choice on building your own mobile solution or starting with a mobile plugin. We recommend using a plugin as starting from scratch is a lot of busy work. There's really not all that much room 320 x 240 pixels for creativity (the exception proves the rule guys) so you may as well set up something attractive and standard and business-like. There are a couple of good plugins out there to give you a running start.

Free and slightly unreliable: WP Mobile Pack.

WP Mobile Pack works or broken

Paid and very good but with some issues outside of Apple's i-universe: WP Touch Pro. Here's a WP Touch Pro feature chart (there is/was a free version as well).

You'll want a full list of user agents for which you will serve the mobile version. Next, make sure the list of user agents match in both your mobile plugin and in your cache plugin.

Here's a list to match WP Super Cache's list of mobile user agents which you can copy and paste into the user agent theme preferences in WP Touch Pro.

Mobi
Mobile
MMP
240x320
400X240
AvantGo
BlackBerry
Blazer
Cellphone
Danger
DoCoMo
Elaine/3.0
EudoraWeb
Googlebot-Mobile
hiptop
IEMobile
KYOCERA/WX310K
LG/U990
MIDP-2.
MMEF20
MOT-V
NetFront
Newt
Nintendo Wii
Nitro
Nokia
Opera Mini
Palm
PlayStation Portable
portalmmm
Proxinet
ProxiNet
SHARP-TQ-GX10
SHG-i900
Small
SonyEricsson
Symbian OS
SymbianOS
TS21i-10
UP.Browser
UP.Link
webOS
Windows CE
WinWAP
YahooSeeker/M1A1-R2D2
iPhone
iPod
Android
BlackBerry9530
LG-TU915 Obigo
LGE VX
webOS
Nokia5800
iPhone
iPod
incognito
webmate
Android
dream
CUPCAKE
froyo
BlackBerry9500
BlackBerry9520
BlackBerry9530
BlackBerry9550
BlackBerry 9800
BlackBerry 9780
webOS
s8000
bada
IEMobile/7.0
Googlebot-Mobile

This list doesn't include the WP Super Cache substrings as they are too short and dangerous to use in WP Touch Pro as WP Touch Pro matches substrings throughout the user agent, while WP Super Cache matches substrings against just the beginning of the user agent. Pasting the full list of substrings into WP Touch Pro makes full Safari and Opera display mobile versions (they match on "tosh"). We'll keep working on a better version of mobile agents for WP Touch Pro and post it here.

If there's a problem, all that will happen is that mobile user will get the standard site uncached.

Here's the WP Touch Pro theme preferences where you should paste the user agents above:

WP Touch Pro user agents

There's some discussion about whether to give a full site or the mobile site to an underpowered device which can't really handle the full WP Touch experience.

In principle these weak web browsers like Opera Mini 4 have special mobile modes to deal with standard sites, doing the reformatting themselves. But the reformatting will be easier if they are starting from WP Touch's advanced mobile version.

The difference won't be that great.

Here are some screenshots of WP Touch Pro iPhone version and Opera Mini minified version.

Opera Mini WP Touch Pro version
Not bad for a start if a bit too wide

Opera Mini WP Touch Pro filtered mobile
that's more like it and includes site colours

The minified version of the normal website through Opera's built-in mobile proxy is not much worse but the navigation (not shown) is much more difficult. And you have to rely on the end user to turn on minified versions. Relying on the end user is a fool's game.

Opera Mini full site Opera mobile proxy filter

WP Super Cache handles mobile settings a bit differently than W3 Total Cache and Hyper Cache. WP Super Cache doesn't let you hand in a list of mobile devices but generates it itself and puts it in .htaccess along with the basic rewrite rules. Here's what the list looks like:

RewriteCond %{HTTP:X-Wap-Profile} !^[a-z0-9\"]+ [NC] RewriteCond %{HTTP:Profile} !^[a-z0-9\"]+ [NC] RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} !^.*(2.0\ MMP|240x320|400X240|AvantGo|BlackBerry|Blazer|Cellphone|Danger|DoCoMo|Elaine/3.0|EudoraWeb|Googlebot-Mobile|hiptop|IEMobile|KYOCERA/WX310K|LG/U990|MIDP-2.|MMEF20|MOT-V|NetFront|Newt|Nintendo\ Wii|Nitro|Nokia|Opera\ Mini|Palm|PlayStation\ Portable|portalmmm|Proxinet|ProxiNet|SHARP-TQ-GX10|SHG-i900|Small|SonyEricsson|Symbian\ OS|SymbianOS|TS21i-10|UP.Browser|UP.Link|webOS|Windows\ CE|WinWAP|YahooSeeker/M1A1-R2D2|iPhone|iPod|Android|BlackBerry9530|LG-TU915\ Obigo|LGE\ VX|webOS|Nokia5800|iPhone|iPod|incognito|webmate|Android|dream|CUPCAKE|froyo|BlackBerry9500|BlackBerry9520|BlackBerry9530|BlackBerry9550|BlackBerry\ 9800|BlackBerry\ 9780|webOS|s8000|bada|IEMobile/7.0|Googlebot-Mobile).* [NC] RewriteCond %{HTTP_user_agent} !^(w3c\ |w3c-|acs-|alav|alca|amoi|audi|avan|benq|bird|blac|blaz|brew|cell|cldc|cmd-|dang|doco|eric|hipt|htc_|inno|ipaq|ipod|jigs|kddi|keji|leno|lg-c|lg-d|lg-g|lge-|lg/u|maui|maxo|midp|mits|mmef|mobi|mot-|moto|mwbp|nec-|newt|noki|palm|pana|pant|phil|play|port|prox|qwap|sage|sams|sany|sch-|sec-|send|seri|sgh-|shar|sie-|siem|smal|smar|sony|sph-|symb|t-mo|teli|tim-|tosh|tsm-|upg1|upsi|vk-v|voda|wap-|wapa|wapi|wapp|wapr|webc|winw|winw|xda\ |xda-).* [NC]

The advantage of this system is that it makes bypassing normal processing ultrafast (the movement happens at an OS level, rather than on invoking PHP).

It also means you as the end user don't get to fiddle endlessly with what devices to include. You'll have to count on Donna to choose the right ones.

Which it seems he does.

As you can see, it's very complete, including iPhones, Androids, Palm, Blackberrys, Palms, Nokias, Symbian.

On the other end though, if you are using WP Touch Pro, you'll have to give it a list of devices. Look out for versions under 2.2. The Skeleton template 1.0.8.1 does not handle blackberrys very well. Skeleton Template 1.2 definitely does, so if you're having trouble, make sure to upgrade WP Touch Pro to the latest version and then update your template.

Both Hyper Cache and WP Super Cache have built in compatibility with WordPress Mobile Pack. If you haven't already jumped on the WP Touch Pro bandwagon, WP Mobile Pack might be worth a try as it's already fully integrated to two of the top cache plugins and free. Unfortunately, WPMP appears to have some compatibility issues and is not kept up to date. You'll have to do some digging of your own to get it to work properly.

Once you are up and running, you'll want to test your settings. Here are the easy tests. Opera has a desktop emulator for their advanced mobile browser and an online java version for Opera Mini.

http://www.opera.com/mobile/demo/
http://dev.opera.com/articles/view/opera-mobile-emulator/

Test for iPhone with Safari by enabling the developer menu and then reassigning user agent. On a Mac, I recommend Keyboard Maestro to set up a hot key on the menu command (usually application menu items can also be done in keyboard section but it's a bit trickier). I've assigned command-U and it really speeds up testing for different user agents. You can also then use Safari to test for Blackberry user agents and other exotica.

Ideally you'd have at least a few real mobile devices with which to doublecheck your site. An iPod Touch is a great inexpensive stand-in for an iPhone/iOS. Opera Mini will install into most devices in parallel with the main browser. Make sure to navigate around to be sure everything is working.

When you know that your mobile versions are making it through you'll want to sit down and have a think about what someone visiting your site on a mobile browser would want to see (insurance calculator, mortgage calculator, listings search, catalogue or weblog posts) and put those front and center. You might even want to remove large sections of your site which won't display well on a mobile device from mobile navigation.

With multiple mobile device formats (think iPad), WP Touch Pro has alternately display models which it handles internally.

So to recap here are the steps.

How to Quickly Build a Great Mobile Version of Your Site

1. Put together a list of user agents which you would like to show a mobile version (the longer the merrier, there's no sense in being parsimonious here).
2. Set up your cache plugin not to pass through mobile devices (not to show cached full pages). Recommendation: WP Super Cache which comes with baked in list.
3. Set up your mobile plugin to serve a mobile version to those same user agents (if you miss a few, no worries). WP Touch Pro recommended.
4. Check appearance with Safari in iPhone mode and with Opera Mini online emulator.
5. Tweak appearance to match site colours.
6. Tweak menu items to show what is important for mobile and hide what is irrelevant for mobile or will not display well.
7. Remove mobile plugin branding (branding on commercial plugins/themes is obnoxious: are you listening Brave New Code?).
8. Add a large 512 pixel icon for people who bookmark, create automatic apps in Safari. (WP Touch Pro feature).
9. Test that mobile versions are being served up to the principal user agents and browsers with Safari.
10. Test on whatever real devices you do have.
11. Send your client to visit the site on his or her mobile device (remember what I said about adding Blackberry user agents: this is the moment of truth, an astonishing number of clients will have Blackberrys).
12. Prepare to do this for all the rest of your clients.

Every site should have a mobile version now. WP Super Cache and WP Touch Pro make it very easy for developers to provide high quality mobile versions at an affordable price. There's no excuse not to offer clients an affordable mobile version of their site.

By Alec

Ten steps to build a great mobile version of your website

Post from: Foliovision

You might also like

1. SBI (Site Build It) versus WordPress: How to Structure a Website
2. Basecamp Mobile Platform Subscribes Everyone. Note to 37 Signals: Mobile has to work to be useful
3. FV Clone Screen Options Version History

This is a great idea. From the beginning WordPress has generally looked great when going out with visitors but she dresses awfully sloppily around the house.

The front end just keeps getting better as the backend stagnates.

Unfortunately, current previews of the updated WordPress 2.4 Admin interface show a getup which looks worse if anything, than what's there now.

I'm having visions of Mambo circa 2004. What's with the dreadful new brown and orange? The blue on blue colour scheme is about all the WordPress Admin Panel has going for it aesthetically.

The only good looking Admin interface for WordPress has been Steve Smith's  WordPress Tiger Administration, which first saw the light of day in June 2005. 

Tiger Admin Page Management

Tiger Admin Dashboard

I gleefully ran WordPress Tiger Administration for about six months back in 2005. Sadly, WordPress Tiger Administration doesn't run on Internet Explorer - there's some very fancy CSS involved, which Steve didn't feel like bending to Internet Explorer. As WordPress Tiger Administration is free, who can blame him?

The end result though as the clients started to edit the sites themselves, I didn't want to be using an interface that was in any way different than theirs. Otherwise, I just might now know if a site was working properly.

John and I talked about doing an Admin panel redesign but John talked me out of it for compatibility reasons. Had I known just how long the stagnation would go on, he might not have dissuaded me so easily.

In the end we did create Foliovision Edit Templates, now part of the full Foliopress CMS suite with Foliopress WYSIWYG, Foliopress SEO Images and Foliopress Advanced Page Manager and Foliopress Dashboard. 

foliopress edit templates

foliopress advanced page management 

foliopress dashboard

Frankly, Foliopress Edit Templates and Foliopress Advanced Page Manager look better to my eye than what's coming WordPress 2.4. I'd still like to see a first rate designer have a go at the CSS.

As soon as John gets our registration and download system setup, I will release them for download for free non-commercial use. All of the Foliopress Admin enhancements are easily installed plugins which are fully compatible with all WordPress versions between 2.1 and 2.2 so switching over is not difficult.

By Alec

Current WordPress 2.4 Admin Theme a Disappointment

Post from: Foliovision

You might also like

1. How to Sponsor a WordPress Theme Successfully | How to audit a theme sponsorship
2. Lost WordPress Admin Password and Email? How to get back into your weblog…
3. FV Edit Templates user guide

That figure should be enough to strike terror into any developer. But that number will change very soon as PHP4 has hit the end of the line.

PHP4 incompatibility started off not as a deliberate decision. Generally I like wider compatibility.

But on serious consideration, I'm not worried about Foliopress WYSIWYG being PHP5 only.

Why not?

• Our own webhost no longer supports PHP4 (they will put up with it on legacy projects, but strongly discourage it).

• 
  One click image posting from Foliopress WYSIWYG
  via updated KFM right click: this image and caption
  were posted with a single click

  One of the core components in Foliopress WYSIWYG is Kae Verens's brilliant KFM (Kae's File Manager) which we have turned into an advanced image manager (see illustration right). Kae is no longer supporting PHP4 in future development: "PHP4 is a hindrance. My own project has already announced a similar plan - we will no longer be catering to PHP4 after the present release."
• PHP5 has been available for 3 years now and is thoroughly tested and is at version 5.2.5
• PHP5 has a lot of improved functionality over PHP4.
• PHP4 will start to disappear like dry brush this year. In six months there will no longer be PHP4 legacy issues as anybody keeping their online applications up to date will have moved on to PHP5 for one reason or another.
• Foliopress WYSIWYG target user profile: our users will be running PHP5 for the most part. If not now, in two months. Anyone who cares enough to change the default text editor in their WordPress or Drupal install is likely the kind of person to be running PHP5 and not PHP4.

Sometimes releasing new software is great. One isn't hindered by legacy issues. We are looking to the future - Foliopress WYSIWYG will be PHP5 only. In any case, Foliopress WYSIWYG is good enough that it's worth upgrading in a heartbeat to PHP5.

Other Discussion: PHP4/PHP5 Compatibility Decisions

• Mantis: Dropping Support for PHP 4

• 

• GoPHP5
• Matt Mullenweg speaks out against PHP 5
• Threshold State: Why PHP 5?
• The PHP4 Dilemma!?
• ifacethoughts: The PHP Rift
• WordPress and PHP 5
• What MM doesn’t know about PHP5, and how it hurts him and his users
• PHP5 Only Version?
• phpCollab 3 only for PHP 5?
• Website Baker 3 will be PHP5 only
• Next Midgard will be PHP5 only

By Alec

Why Foliopress WSYIWYG will be PHP5 Only

Post from: Foliovision

You might also like

1. Foliopress WYSIWYG: Known Bugs
2. True WordPress WYSIWYG: Foliopress
3. New Foliopress WYSIWYG version with Dropdown Customization

[sniplet signup]

and then I began seeing double. That is to say two me:

dd add signature plugin error

That nice headshot with the articles is created by Alastair Dagon Design's Add Signature Plugin. What's seems to be causing the doublevision is the inclusion of a form inside a post. I tried moving the form into a Sniplet (where it should have been in the first place, quite frankly and reuseable). I've cured a few WordPress malfunctions by pulling code outside a post and into a Sniplet - but that was pre-Foliopress WYSIWYG. Most of the WordPress Editors damage or modify code so a Sniplet can stop them from getting a chance to break code. But this time the Sniplet trick didn't work.

I couldn't find the issue in the plugin itself:

wp-content/plugins/dd-add-sig.php

Nor does the issue seem to be in our template index.php file, although there seems to be room for such an issue there.

But unique to our install is that the manual override for the signature (include an html comment anywhere in your post and your signature should appear there and nowhere else) isn't working either.

I don't know where to chase down the content loop itself - and presumably neither John nor Jérémie would have altered the content loop.

Somebody else will have to fix this. If anyone has any ideas, please let me know. My best advice: if you can keep computers out of your life, do. Nothing more reliable and crash resistant than pen and paper. Tolstoy, Stendhal and Lermontov all wrote with pen and ink. These gentlemen didn't even have typewriters.

By Alec

Trouble with DD Add Signature Plugin

Post from: Foliovision

You might also like

1. Trouble with WordPress Subscribe to Comment Plugin in WP 2.9: Gurken’s the solution
2. Embedded Menus Plugin
3. What’s wrong with WordPress All-in-One-SEO Plugin

Spent most of the day working on Foliopress WYSIWYG together with Peter Baran.

Our solution for the WordPress WYSIWYG and image handling nightmare is coming along quite brilliantly well. This is what the basic toolbar looks like.

Foliopress WYSIWYG toolbar preview

Foliopress WYSIWYG offers true What You See is What You Get Editing for WordPress.

• It is backwards compatible with legacy code (hello Xstandard/TinyMCE)
• It doesn't break complex forms (hello TinyMCE/Xstandard)
• It doesn't discard whole posts (hello Xstandard)
• It doesn't go haywire and create more and more nested P tags (hello WYSIWYG Pro)
• It doesn't look like hell in the WordPress interface (hello normal FCK)
• It doesn't make uploading images a never ending and hopeless struggle (hello WordPress uploader)
• It doesn't make your clients hopping mad and lead them to breaking everything (Plaintext/RAW html)
• Your drafts look like exactly like your posts will, without having to waste time with a preview function (hello Xstandard)
• You have unlimited standard undo from the keyboard (hello Xstandard)
• Very easy to configure (including site WYSIWYG) (hello Xstandard, TinyMCE, FCK)

In short, Foliopress WYSIWYG is what you always wished the WordPress Editor would do. I'm using it now and can't believe no one created and editor like this earlier.

I'm waiting for John to get back off holiday so I can put it up for downloading (we must do a custom implementation of his excellent WordPress download manager Drainhole). We plan to release Foliopress WYSIWYG and Foliopress SEO Images under the Creative Commons strictest license: Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 Unported. What does that mean?

Basically anybody is free to use Foliopress WYSIWYG for non-profit websites. We encourage and support creativity and personal expression in all forms. But for commercial websites there will be a small charge, likely with a per site license. Why should someone running two small commercial sites pay the same as someone running 300 commercial weblogs?

Currently the only WSYIWYG editor which actually works on WordPress belongs to the Semiologic pack and costs $25 for a personal license. It's a very good deal, but Foliopress WYSIWYG editor is much, much better (sorry Dennis). Specifically, Foliopress WYSIWYG is better looking, has more complete and easier to use options, offers true WYSIWYG editing and handles images at a totally different level.

You will save yourself a ton of time by using Foliopress WYSIWYG. And frustration. Money is good. Less frustration - on the web - is even better. You wil write more posts and enjoy the writing more.

The best complete freebie out there for commercial use is Dean's FCK Editor for WordPress. There's nothing wrong with Dean's WYSIWYG editor (and lots good, including a rich options panel) but it's not very good looking and pretty clunky. We sent Dean some core code which would make his editor compatible with our SEO Images plugin for FCK. Unfortunately we didn't hear back from him. He's probably swamped in mail (so am I Dean, if you must know).

In the meantime, there's a lot to clean up on this site. I got to some of it:

• The long missing breadcrumbs so that people could navigate up in the tools seciton.
• The few downloads which weren't working (misconfigured Drainhole).
• The shrinking deep menu in the static pages section.
• Documentation and screenshots for the Mambo Embedded Menus plugin.

Merry Christmas! A working WordPress Editor. A few days late, but it's been 2000 years coming.

By Alec

Site Renovation Day

Post from: Foliovision

You might also like

1. True WordPress WYSIWYG: Foliopress
2. Foliopress WYSIWYG glitch in Safari fixed
3. New Foliopress WYSIWYG version with Dropdown Customization