plugins – Page 2 – Behind the Scenes

We won! We won!

It is with extreme pleasure that we are proud to announce we won the WPMU Dev Lifetime Membership contest!

Our recent review of WPMU Dev Plugins that help power the Tripawds Blogs community was selected at random along with two others, so we now have continued access to the best WordPress Multisite pugins and themes available. This means we’ll be able continue to offering great functionality like network-wide user and blog Avatars, the searchable Members Directory of all Tripawds Users, and our our new Global Site Search for searching all Tripawds Blogs, and much more – forever, and all for free.

We would have gladly kept paying our WPMU Dev Premium subscription for the quick and helpful WordPress multisite technical support we receive in the WPMU Dev forums alone. And we’ll probably be keeping the developers just as busy answering our questions, but now with our lifetime membership we can ask for just a little less support for our efforts to maintain the this community.

Consider this a big shout out to the entire WPMU Dev team for hosting this contest. Other winners included a site supporting home schooling in South Africa and a WordPress resources blog. Just goes to show you how the best WordPress plugins can be used in such a wide variety of ways.

How to get free WPMU Dev Membership

Any WordPress multisite network administrator looking for a free WPMU Dev membership is not out of luck because this awesome contest is over! Members can get a Free WPMU DEV Premium Membership by helping out in the support forums to accumulate reputation points. Reach 1,000 and they’ll give you a free lifetime membership! Like I said, great plugins, themes and support from a good bunch of folks.

What makes Tripawds run?

When we first started Jerry’s original three legged dog blog to share the news about his osteosarcoma treatment and recovery, we never in our wildest dreams expected tripawds.com to grow into such an incredible community of support for so many people facing a bone cancer diagnosis or amputation for their dogs.

While installing Simple:Press to power the Tripawds Discussion Forums was the first of many content enhancing improvements, it was our migration from WordPress to WPMU and subsequent transition to our current WordPress Multisite network that make the site such the valuable resource it has become.

In fact, Tripawds was recently added to the acclaimed WPMU Dev Showcase among some of the leading WordPress MultiSite communities online!

Best WordPress Multisite Plugins & Themes

So what exactly makes this network work? Simply said, it’s our WPMU Dev Premium subscription that enables us to offer such amazing functionality. Here’s a rundown of some of our favorite WPMU Dev plugins and themes that power the Tripawds community.

Admin Ads: We provide a row of dashboard “Quick Links” to many of our community’s most valuable resources using this simple plugin. It also allows us to notify bloggers of pending upgrades and other special announcements.

Admin Help Content: This provides a simple interface for creating the custom content we provide in users’ dashboard Help drop-down menu, instead of confusing them with the default WordPress support forum links.

Anti-Splog: This ultimate spam blog plugin and service stops nearly all splogs from even being created in our WordPress Multisite network. If a splog does get created, no posts are visible to the community, and an easy interface allows us to moderate or delete them.

Avatars: Ths is how we allows users to upload ‘user avatars’ and ‘blog avatars’ which then appear in blog / forum comments and blog / user listings throughout the Tripawds community.

Blogs Directory: This plugin provides a paginated, fully searchable, automatic and rather good looking directory of all of the blogs on our WordPress Multisite installation.

Members Directory: This creates and automatic directory of all Tripawds users, with avatars, pagination, and a built in search facility with extended customizable user profiles.

Invite: Allows all Tripawds bloggers to invite their friends and colleagues via email to check out their blog and register for a Tripawds account.

Recent Comments: This widget lets us display a list of recent comments from all Tripawds blogs throughout the News blog.

Recent Global Posts Widget: This widget shows recent posts from all Tripawds blogs, with user avatars.

Sitemaps and SEO: Automatically generates and submit Google sitemaps for all blogs on this network

Supporter: Lets us easily offer paid Tripawds Supporter Blog accounts with automatic upgrades including premium themes, premium plugins, extra storage space, the ability to instantly remove banner ads and more.

Terms Of Service: This plugin places the Tripawds Terms of Service on the signup with an approval checkbox users must select in order to continue their registration.

The WordPress Popup Plugin: Allows us to display a simple ad directing new visitors to the valuable information in our first Tripawds e-book, Three Legs and a Spare – a Canine Amputation Handbook.

Update Notifications: This keeps us automatically updated of any WPMU Dev plugin and theme updates for best security and functionality!

WPMU Nelo: The custom homepage CMS WordPress theme we customized to improve navigation and address site performance issues.

What’s next?

I often turn to the WPMU Dev support forums for quick answers whenever I need help tweaking things behind the scenes here. I have requested development of a couple things that might help us continue enhancing the Tripawds experience. For instance, I’d like to have a Map plugin that would automatically generate a map page with member locations based on profile data.

With all this that we already offer in mind, what other new features might Tripawds members like to see?

New features in WPMU 2.9.1

In his post about how to add commentmeta tables to your WordPress MU database, Donncha said …

…nothing quite like the stress of upgrading and finding that something has broken.

So true. I’m just happy nothing broke during our recent upgrade to WPMU 2.9.1, because apparently the upgrade function can choke when creating all those tables. We have over 160 blogs and all went well, but Admins for large MU sites should take care to run the script Donncha provides before upgrading. Then they should also skip ahead to WordPress 2.9.1.1.1.1.1.1.1.1.1.1.1.1. Supposedly this will be the last release before the big merge.

WordPress MU 2.9.1 New Feature Overview

What does all this mean for Tripawds community members? Just that we are successfully running on WPMU 2.9.1 now, which includes some great new features in addition to various bug fixes.

Video embedding made simple

WordPress 2.9 introduces native video embedding! Now all Tripawds Bloggers can easily insert a video from sharing sites like YouTube, simply by adding the video URL to their post …

See! It’s that simple. Just copy and paste the video page URL onto a new line in your post and the video will be automatically embedded. It is important that the video URL be on a line by itself and that the text is not wrapped in any tags, so don’t style it or link it to the video page itself. Native video embedding supports the following video sharing web sites: YouTube, Vimeo, DailyMotion, blip.tv, Flickr (both videos and images), Viddler, Hulu, Qik, Revision3, Scribd, Photobucket, PollDaddy, Google Video, WordPress.tv.

Viper’s Video Quicktags Enhance Embedded Videos

So what does this mean for Tripawds Supporters who have been using the Viper’s Video Tags plugin? Just that they now have advanced control over how their videos appears if they choose to continue using it. Viper wrote the new native object embed code, so his plugin is completely compatible. Supporter blogs can still embed movies and have additional video sharing sources to choose from. Supporters also have the ability to embed raw Flash video files, and have much more control over how their videos display …

Viper’s Video Quicktags plugin allows embedding from the following video sharing web sites: YouTube, Google Video, DailyMotion, Vimeo, Veoh, Viddler, Metacafe, Blip.tv, Flickr Video, IFILM/Spike, MySpaceTV, Flash Video (FLV).

Viper’s Video Quicktags plugin has been disabled. WordPress now supports auto-embedding of videos.

WordPress MU Blog Dashboard Trash Can

Tripawds Bloggers will also now notice a Trash link when managing posts and comments on their blog. This allows for the removal of items without immediately deleting them. The Trash can (and should) then be emptied periodically to permanently deleting the unwanted items. This protects bloggers from inadvertently deleting valid comments or valuable post drafts.

Issues with New WordPress Image Editor

One of the most anticipated feature enhancements has to be the new Image Editor built right into the WordPress Media Library. There have been a number of reports, however, regarding difficulties so we will report back with an update on that. For now, feel free to provide feedback in the forums.

We have a blog ring now.

Wanna see a random Tripawds Blog?

Every Tripawds Blog is now linked together in a true Blogger style Ring of Blogs. Users can now stumble upon another totally random three legged dog blog by following the links now found site-wide here at Tripawds. Each Tripawds Blog now has a common navigation strip, something like this…

» RANDOM TRIPAWDS BLOG » FORUMS » CHAT » DIRECTORY » JERRY’S BLOG »

By clicking the RANDOM TRIPAWDS BLOG link, you will be taken to the next RANDOM TRIPAWDS BLOG which has the same strip for visiting the next RANDOM TRIPAWDS BLOG, and so on, and so on.

For those wondering just who might be blogging about their dogs here, this is a easy way to discover what you’re missing. The top 100 active Tripawds Blogs are always listed on the directory page, but cruising the blogs this way should be more fun. We hope you enjoy it.

The only problem I see so far, is that many Tripawds members create a blog upon signup, but never actually start blogging. 🙁

So why not drop on comment on those blogs to let them know what they are missing? The more stories we can share here, the better a resource this community becomes for those facing cancer or amputation with their dogs.

So, how did I do this?

For anyone interested, I implemented this Blogger style blog ring for WorPress MU using these two free plugins available from the WPMUDev.org project repository:

WPMU Footer HTML
This WPMU Plugin enables you to insert any HTML into the footer of all blogs posted within a single WPMU install. With a little hacking, it will place inserts in the header too. Sure, it’s takes a little hardcode effort to customize, but for a CSS neophyte like me it just worked better than Global Header which had the sweet Admin interface I preferred.

WPMU Random Blog Redirect
This mu-plugin allowed me to create a global link to http://tripawds.com/?random which will redirect readers to a random Tripawds blog, in classic StumbleUpon-like fashion.

I am always cautious about installing old WPMU plugins, especially those that appear to be no longer maintained or supported. I much prefer to install the plug and play plugins available with our WPMU Dev Premium membership. But I wanted to make this specific functionality work, and I carefully tested things first on our development installation.

This version of Random Blog may be two years old, but it is apparently working fine. And since the discussion about WPMU Footer that helped me get it working seems to have disappeared into the ether, I’ll share how to ad header inserts in this global footer plugin…

First, I’m using v. 1.0 since v. 1.1 had some issues with the header inserts, which I just added right before the final php function:

add_action(‘wp_head’,’jas_wpmu_css_footer’)

Correct, the header insert code goes after that for the footer. Whatever, it works for me! No promises for anyone else. 😉

But your saying Jim, banner ads are in the header too? Using the WPMU Dev Premium Supporter plugin, we are able to automatically remove banner ads from all blogs while keeping the community navigation strip. I did this by wrapping the ad code within an optional Supporter script and placing HTML for the navigation after that.

Hope this helps clear up any questions about the new Random Tripawds Blogs navigation strip, and how it got there.

UPDATE: Download WPMU Footer HTML v.1 here.

Supporters Demystified

wpmu premium supporter wordpress menu tab Tripawds community members may have some questions about the enhanced features enabled for Supporter blogs. WordPress MU site administrators might be interested in how the upgrade function works.

I hope to shed some light here on all of the above. So, let’s talk about Tripawds Supporters and the WPMU Dev Premium Supporter plugin.

As a reminder, all free Tripawds Blogs include basic comment spam protection – using the TypePad anti-spam plugin – and 25MB of upload space for storing photos. Free blogs also show banner ads at the top and bottom of every page. The Supporter mu-plugin allows us to automatically increase a Supporter’s upload quota to 1GB and turn on enhanced blog features by activating additional plugins on that blog. It also immediately removes the banner ads from upgraded blogs, and allows Supporters to turn off ads on other Tripawds blogs. Best of all this is all done automatically upon upgrade, which can be done via single payment or recurring subscription.

I would like to think I was at least a little helpful in identifying certain issues with the new Supporter v. 2.0, but I can take absolutely no credit for the amazing development work and quick update release. We are now running Supporter v. 2.0.2 and I am happy to say it’s new features are impressive. How does it work? The mu-plugin includes various files, some required, others optional, all of which are simple to install if you can follow the clear instructions. Let’s take one feature at a time…

Hiding Ads on Supporter Blogs

For Site Administrators: a small snippet of code is used in conjunction with an optional component (supporter-ads.php) to show or hide whatever text you want, wherever you want. We use it to hide Google ads in the header and footer of Supporter blogs. Simply wrap the AdSense HTML within this snippet where indicated, and it will only display if the the blog is not a Supporter. The exact opposite can be done with a different bit of code, showing any desired text only on Supporter blogs. There are also admin settings for the number of blogs – from 0 to 100 – on which ads that can be disabled by Supporters.

For Tripawds Members: There is no need to anything to remove ads from your blog, other than upgrade to Supporter status via the Supporter tab in your blog dashboard. Ads will immediately disappear upon upgrade. An added plus for Supporters is the ability to turn off ads from displaying on up to 10 of their favorite other Tripawds blogs. After becoming a Supporter, simply visit your Blog Dashboard -> Supporter -> Disable Ads. Simply follow the instructions there to search for blogs on which you wish to turn off the ads. Add them to your list, and you will no longer see ads when visiting those blogs.

Activating Premium Pugins

For Site Administrators: The new Supporter admin menu now includes plugin management features very similar to the free WPMU Plugin Manager mu-plugin. No surprise really, considering it was built by the same developer. Many kudos to Aaron for adding functionality for admins to enable plugins on non-supporter blogs. But using the Premium Plugins menu, admins can simply select which plugins they want Supporters to have, with the following options:

None: Plugin is available for activation by site admins only
Anyone: Plugin can be activated by any member blog
Supporters: Plugin is only available on Supporter blog
Supporters (Auto-Activate): Plugin is automatically activated on Supporter blogs upon upgrade

For Tripawds Members: For non-supporters, the Blog Dashboard -> Plugins tab will show the TypePad Anti-Spam plugin, which should be activated if it is not already. This will help reduce the spam comments received through your blog. There will also be a list other plugins available upon Supporter upgrade. Here is a rundown of the plugins we currently offer Supporters, and their status upon upgrade:

WP-SpamFree (Auto Activated): This powerful anti-spam plugin will virtually eliminate comment spam. Includes a spam-free contact form that can be easily added to your blog. Visit plugin website
Viper’s Video Quicktags (Auto Activated): Easily embed videos from various video websites such as YouTube, DailyMotion, and Vimeo into your posts. Visit plugin website
Subscribe To Comments (Auto Activated): Allows readers to receive notifications of new comments that are posted to an entry after they have commented on the post. Visit plugin site
All In One SEO Pack (Requires Activation): Comprehensive Search Engine Optimization options for your blog. Visit plugin website

Offering Premium Themes for Supporters

For Site Administrators: Much like Premium Plugins, the new version of Supporter now allows site admins to make certain blog themes only available to supporters. All members would be able to preview how their blog looks in the Premium theme, but they would be presented with a message about upgrading upon an attempt to activate it.

For Tripawds Members: We have not yet implemented Premium Themes as we are still seeking feedback about which themes might be considered, well … premium! We offer more than 100 blog themes and in all honesty have only tried out a handful. A whole bunch of new themes are in the works so stay tuned.

What does it cost?

For Site Administrators: All of the WPMU Dev Premium plugins, themes, videos, and support are included with a WPMU Dev Premium membership subscription. Site admins can set the price for Supporter upgrades for one, three, and twelve month subscriptions or for the single payment method. An option for setting the number of free days blogs have with Supporter features is also available. The new Supporter sign-up page even includes daily cost calculations to show members what they can save by upgrading for longer periods.

For Tripawds Members: A Tripawds Supporter blog upgrade subscription costs only $25 a year. A one month subscription costs $5, and we offer three months for $10, so savings are clearly realized with the annual option. We chose the subscription method (over single payment) since Supporter features are automatically disabled upon the expiration date. We don’t want any members getting surprised by deactivated plugins, so we went with the automatic renewal.

NOTE: Be sure to cancel your PayPal subscription before it expires if you do not want to pay for another year of enhanced blog features!

Believe it or not, this just brushes the surface of all the new features available in Supporter 2.0, but hopefully it explains a few things for our members. We would love to hear your feedback, so please leave a comment below. Or, feel free to ask any questions in the Tripawds Technical Support discussion forum. We’re especially interested in what Tripawds members think about the subscription vs. single payment method for Supporter upgrades, and whether anyone is interested in using the new optional Amazon payment gateway.

For the record, as of today there are eight active Tripawds Supporter blogs. With nearly a thousand members, and operational expenses in the thousands of dollars, please don’t think we actually making money here. We offer plenty of tips to make the most of free Tripawds Blogs, and use these Supporter features to thank those members who generously show their support.