Just the ramblings of a LAMP DevOps

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Category Archives: WordPress

WordPress pending review status email

Posted on by Posted in WordPress 2 Comments

I had a request for a WordPress plugin that sent an email notification whenever a blog post was put into pending review status. It is amazing that this functionality is not already included in WordPress core.

But, anyway.

I did a quick Google search and found this code snippet, it works but I really did not want to make a database call every time it needed to send an email.

I noticed that every time a post is saved I can access that information via the $_POST variable.

$_POST[‘post_status’] holds the post status.

Cool.

Now I can have a plugin that checks the contents of $_POST[‘post_status’] and if it equals ‘pending’ I know I have a post in pending review status.

Ok, so I built a plugin and it worked, it worked a little too well. I kept recieveing two emails. A little more digging and I discovered that the save_post hook is called twice during each save.

Ok.

So now I need to add some sort of indicator to the class that keeps track if an email has already been sent. I added a private property to the class $_email_sent_flag this will be set to true once an email is sent.

Alright.

Now I have everything ready. Except that it sends an email once every minute after being set to preview pending status.

Auto-save.

I need to disable auto-save for this to work. A quick google search brought me to this page that had the code to disable auto-save.

Done.

Now we have a class that, once in plugin format, will check the post on each save and if it is pending status it will send an email, and set a flag indicating that an email has been sent, so we don’t get multiple emails.

You can grab this class in gist form on Github, I left the exercise of putting this in a plugin for the reader.

Facebook WordPress plugin error during install

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When trying the new Facebook WordPress plugin, I kept getting an error, the cause of the error was that I did not have the OpenSSL module configured for my PHP install, and there are several Facebook pages that the plugin tries to access using “https”.

Easy enough to fix.

When I didn’t have OpenSSL for my PHP the plugin was trying to throw an exception, but it couldn’t. It complained about wrong number of parameters for the exception method. I looked at the exception method signature and it was requiring a $msg and $code.

$msg is a string.
$code is an integer.

Here is the value of $msg that was being passed to the exception method when I did not have OpenSSL installed.
string(80) “There are no HTTP transports available which can complete the requested request.”

Here is the value for $code.
string(12) “http_failure”

$code was not an integer. This is what was causing the fatal error. So, I added a check before the the plugin called the constructor of parent of the exception class and made sure that if $code was not an integer then make $code = 0.

To fix this I had to make a change to facebook/includes/facebook-php-sdk/base_facebook.php, to the constructor of the FacebookApiException class.

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class FacebookApiException extends Exception
{
  /**
   * The result from the API server that represents the exception information.
   */
  protected $result;

  /**
   * Make a new API Exception with the given result.
   *
   * @param array $result The result from the API server
   */
  public function __construct($result) {
    $this->result = $result;

    $code = isset($result['error_code']) ? $result['error_code'] : 0;

    if (isset($result['error_description'])) {
      // OAuth 2.0 Draft 10 style
      $msg = $result['error_description'];
    } else if (isset($result['error']) && is_array($result['error'])) {
      // OAuth 2.0 Draft 00 style
      $msg = $result['error']['message'];
    } else if (isset($result['error_msg'])) {
      // Rest server style
      $msg = $result['error_msg'];
    } else {
      $msg = 'Unknown Error. Check getResult()';
    }

    //////
    // I added this to make sure $code is an integer
    //////
    if(!is_int($code)) {
      $code = 0;
    }

    parent::__construct($msg, $code);
  }

Cool, no more fatal errors, and once I installed OpenSSL I had a working plugin.

WordPress MS using SSL for admin panel access

Posted on by Posted in WordPress 1 Comment

At work, we are securing the admin panel for the multi-site WordPress installation we are running. We have 300+ sites currently and it grows every week. We are also migrating an additional 1000+ blogs from a legacy platform to WordPress so in the near future we will have close the 1400 blogs on a single multi-site installation.

Configuring WordPress for a SSL admin panel is not very difficult. In fact that was the easy part, thanks to a plugin from Mvied the hard part is getting all of the currently used plug-ins to work correctly under SSL. Making sure they are not using hard-coded schemes, the fix is easy but on a current installation that contains well over 50 plugins, I have to log into enough blogs to cover all of the installed plugins and check for any non-secure pages.

Not fun, but necessary.

Plugins I have sent patches in to add SSL support are:
co-authors-plus
WPMU Domain Mapper

I also sent patches in for the WordPress HTTPS plugin, and once I get a few free cycles(yeah, right) I’d like to help with the performance of the plugin.

There is a noticeable slow down in the admin panel when it is behind SSL, even though I am terminating the SSL on the load balancers so the WordPress servers(Ubuntu running Nginx with PHP-FPM) are not doing any of the heavy lifting with encrypting traffic. The increased traffic caused by the encrypted text is enough to cause a slow down in responsiveness, not bad but you can tell is is slower.

We have a couple of sites in production right now, with pretty good results, but we still need to verify many more plugins.

I’ll keep you posted on the results.