Pixel Jar

Eliminate BuddyPress Spam Registrations

Brandon — Wed, 19 Sep 2012 07:32:18 +0000

If you’ve ever managed a BuddyPress site, you know that SPAM registrations quickly became the bane of your existence. When we built NetDivvy, we were cleaning out thousands of spammy user records every single day. It didn’t take long for me to start brainstorming ways to get rid of the problem.

To solve this problem, I’ve seen people add image verification (captcha) or other user entry field to the registration process to verify that the user was human. Personally, I’ve always hated captchas, so I wasn’t about to subject our users to that torture. They’re so frustrating sometimes that I’ve made the decision to not sign up for a web site because they employed them.

So if we’re not going to burden our users with extra fields to fill out, how are we going to stop these spam bots?

We treat them like thieves. They’re stealing our most valuable asset, time. Just like in the movies, we have to outsmart them – we have to set a trap. In the computer world, we call this a honeypot. But in order for it to work, we have to get into their virtual heads and think like they do. Much like you do with a mouse trap, you have to tempt the spam bot with something they want. So, what are spam bots are looking for? Inputs to fill out.

Here’s the plan.

Create an extra text field hidden via CSS
1. Since it’s hidden from view, users won’t see it or fill it out
2. Spambots will usually fill out all form elements so they don’t miss any required fields
Upon submission, check the hidden text input to see if it has a value. If it does, it’s a spammer.

Sounds straight forward, right? After implementing this on NetDivvy, we have gone from thousands of SPAM registrations per day to one or two per week. Since it’s been so helpful to us, we’ve decided to release the functionality to the public. We’ve created a plugin that you can install and it will just work.

You can download the plugin here.

If you’re interested in seeing the code, continue reading.

First, we utilize the ‘bp_after_signup_profile_fields’ BuddyPress action to add our hidden text field.

We then check to see if the input is empty via the ‘bp_core_validate_user_signup’ filter and return an error if it is filled in. BuddyPress and WordPress take care of the rest.

If you find any errors, or have any additions, please submit an issue on the github repo.

WordPress Community Summit

Brandon — Tue, 07 Aug 2012 23:34:46 +0000

I was notified today that I’ve been invited to the first WordPress Community Summit in October. I’m humbled to say the least. The list of invitees is chock full of top-notch developers, businesses people and community leaders. I can’t wait to go and represent the Orange County area.

WordCamp Las Vegas 2011

Jeff — Thu, 22 Dec 2011 19:40:18 +0000

I had the honor of speaking at this year WordCamp Las Vegas. I presented on Actions and Filters which were once my arch nemeses, but are now my best friends. Hosts @sdenike and @vegasgeek did such a good job putting on this year’s event.

As always it was super sweet to see all my WordPress friends – the seeds, the mobiah contingent, the binary chaps, cody, the reno-ees, the cuban twos… And of course, I made new WordPress friends. I finally got to meet Trafton and Jason from WPEngine in person after having email, skyped and phoned with them for months. Stephanie was very sweet and diplomatic about fixing an error I had in my presentation. I met Brian and Tom at the after party and had a fun conversation about WordCamps and website designs. I had a awesome conversation about clients with The Andy Straton. Also got to discuss the all important topic of beards with Danny.

But to everyone at the event, thanks for a very positive and wonderful WordCamp!

IE9 Straight Up Ignores Cufon

Jeff — Tue, 04 Oct 2011 16:09:55 +0000

Today I learned that IE9 disregards Cufon font replacement completely! (This has been written about before, but just in case you are stumped and looking for solutions, I’m posting them here as well.) It’s not just that it drops out and defaults to a web safe font, it’s simple leaves an empty spot. Just when the web world was starting to make big strides away from web safe fonts IE9 wiped out an entire alternative option.

Option 1

Update your Cufon javascript. Make your script is at least up to version 1.09i. Download Cufun 1.09i here: Cufon 1.09i

Option 2

There’s also the hilarious option of telling IE9 to behave like IE8. Insert the following meta tag into the of your webpages.

Microsoft pushed pretty hard with the PR campaign leading up to the IE9 release – big promises of a better browser. So far, as a programmer, it’s just been a different headache in a long line of headaches.

bbPress 2.0 Basics

Jeff — Tue, 27 Sep 2011 02:37:32 +0000

bbPress 2.0 is out and I’m excited. While there is still room to grow (and JTrip will be the first to tell you this), it is a great improvement over previous versions of the plugin. Thanks John James Jacoby and the bbPress team for all your hard word; it’s greatly appreciated.

It’s easy to get up and running. Just down the plugin and activate (http://bbpress.org). It’s easy and works well. However, if you want to start customizing the layout and styles, that’s where it’s get a bit more technical and less plug-and-play. But here’s a few tips for the less obvious mechanics:

Add Forums to Navigation (2 options):

Use Custom Links to add “/forums” to a menu (this link may differ if you change the base for forums in the forum settings)
Create a page and use shortcode [bbp-forum-index]; add that page to a menu

Custom Theming

Use the default (easiest option)
Replace Styles
- Remove the bbPress styles.css
  remove_action( ‘bbp_enqueue_scripts’, ‘bbp_theme_compat_enqueue_css’ );
- Copy default styles to your theme’s stylesheet
  /wp-content/plugins/bbpress/bbp-themes/bbp-twentyten/css/bbpress.css
- Adjust styles to your whimsy
Replace template files

Copy files from “/bbpress/bbp-themes/bbp-twentyten” folder into the folder of your theme, and make your own edits from there. The files to copy include the single-*, archive-*, page-*, and anything in the subfolders
Replace all files, there is no defaulting
Add add_theme_support( ‘bbpress’ ); to functions.php

Shortcodes

* Forums
[bbp-forum-index] – Show the forum index/archive
[bbp-single-forum id=$forum_id] – Show a single forums topics

* Topics
[bbp-topic-index] – Show the topics index/archive
[bbp-topic-form] – Show the new topic form
[bbp-single-topic id=$topic_id] – Show a single topic

* Topic Tags
[bbp-topic-tags] – Show a tag cloud of all topic tags
[bbp-single-topic-tag] – Show the topics within a specific tag

* Replies
[bbp-reply-form] – Show the topic reply form

* Views
[bbp-single-view] – Show topics associated with a specific view

* Account
[bbp-login] – Show the login screen
[bbp-register] – Show the register screen
[bbp-lost-pass] – Show the lost password screen

If you have any other questions, check out the bbPress forums. It’s a great resource and John is particularly diligent about answering questions. I don’t know how it does it.

WPMU DEV Membership Plugin Error with WordPress 3.2

Brandon — Tue, 05 Jul 2011 18:01:24 +0000

Last night when I upgraded to WordPress 3.2 on a site we’re working on, I got a WSoD on the front end of the site after I logged in. I tracked down the source of the php error in the error log to a call to a missing method “WP_User” on the WP_User class. It turns out that the membership plugin from WPMUDEV was calling the WP_User class constructor in the older PHP4 style instead of the new PHP5 style. With the drop of PHP4 support in WOrdPress 3.2, this presented a problem. Luckily it was an easy fix. On line 23 of /wp-content/plugins/membership/membershipincludes/classes/class.membership.php, Change the following code from:

parent::WP_User( $id, $name );

parent::__construct( $id, $name );

Hope this helps!

La Aventura Del Amor

Brandon — Fri, 29 Apr 2011 07:04:31 +0000

Last Tuesday evening, Jeffrey and I participated in the 3rd Annual Krochet Kids international Gala. We knew that it was going to be awesome, but had no idea how much progress they have made in their efforts in Uganda. They announced that 2010 will officially mark the year that their program in Uganda was fully sustained by hat sales alone. This is a HUGE accomplishment for them. Not only are they a huge success story, but they continue to expand their business and grow as human beings.

An Evolution in Business

One thing Kohl Crecelius, CEO of KKi, said during his talk that really stuck with me was that they’re at the forefront of a revolution in business. That, in a few years, the terms “Social Entrepreneur” will be gone, and all entrepreneurs will inherently care about the social ramifications of their business.

I couldn’t agree more. And I’m excited about where they’re headed.

The Krochet Kids business model is built around love, caring and the idea that a few passionate kids with an idea can change the world. They are bringing back the human element to business. They are bringing the world into your own backyard by connecting consumers with producers.

As their web developer, we feel invested in their success because it makes us look good to our future customers, but on a human level we are determined to do everything we can to make their efforts successful because it’s the best thing for humanity. I hope that their business inspires you to make changes to your business that will bring people closer together.

Click here to view the embedded video.

WordCamp Las Vegas Aftermath

Jeff — Sun, 24 Oct 2010 15:59:40 +0000

A thousand thanks again to the crew at 9Seeds for putting on WordCamp Las Vegas. They put on a brilliant camp; a real class act that was the model of what a WordCamp should be. Brandon and I met up with old friends and, as always, made a bevy of new ones. We traded WordPress tricks and tips and otherwise engaged in the WordPress community that we dig so much. If you missed out, kick yourself immediately, then make a point of being here next year.

My biggest take-aways this camp were HookPress and Event Espresso. Colin Loretz of the Reno Collective used HookPress during his presentation on turning a WordPress site into a Web App. I know he didn’t intend HookPress to be the crux of his talk, but that nugget shined for me. (See a demo from the creator here.) I’d never seen it before, and I definitely should have. From the repository, “HookPress turns all of your WordPress-internal hooks into webhooks. Possible uses include generating push notifications or using non-PHP web technologies.” If you’ve ever tried hooking outside technologies into your WordPress site, this is the ticket.

The kind gentlemen from Event Espresso also gave me the deluxe tour of their plugin. Event Espresso does event management and registration for a WordPress site. This plugin is rife with options without being overly bulky. If you have a specialized event need, it’s probably already in the feature set. And if not, they are probably already working on it for a future release.

Thanks again everyone for a great WordCamp. Hope to see you all again soon.

Keep and eye out for the presentation videos on to appear on WordPress.tv and John will post the speakers slides on the WCLV speaker page near the speakers site and Twitter links.

Introducing…”Social Me”

Brandon — Tue, 28 Sep 2010 09:58:46 +0000

At WordCamp LA I gave a brief demo of a plugin that we’re developing to handle the integration of your social network data with WordPress. We’ve been calling this plugin “Social Me”. I had the opportunity to demonstrate some really basic functionality of the plugin again tonight at the OC WordPress meetup. I was super excited about this, because the idea for the plugin was a suggestion from Jeff Turner, the one of the hosts of the meetup. It was great to bring the idea back full circle to it’s starting point. The plugin is still very rough around the edges, and is definitely NOT PRODUCTION READY. Up to this point we’ve been developing it in a vacuum. At this point, it’s stable enough to where we can give it to people to play around with. We’re hoping for some good user feedback and suggestions. We want this to be the penultimate social networking plugin. I’ll go into detail on a subsequent post about how we think this is possible, but for now, here’s a link to download the plugin and give it a try: http://github.com/pixeljar/social-me. Just click the “Download Source” button in the upper right portion of the screen to start the download. I’ll be posting a follow up screencast of the functionality as soon as I can remember our YouTube password .

Click here to view the embedded video.

If you’re an experienced developer, we’d love to get you involved to contribute some code. You can find the project on github at http://github.com/pixeljar/social-me. Otherwise, leave us a comment below letting us know what you think about the project.

Backing Up Your WordPress Site for OC WordPress Meetup

Jeff — Mon, 27 Sep 2010 23:02:18 +0000

Hope everyone was able to take something useful from the WordPress Back Up talk. Quick disclaimer: we are not endorsing any of these, just using them as examples. Do your research before committing you backup to any methodology. Here are links to plugins and other materials we mentioned during the presentation:

Twitter Link

http://twitter.com/pixel_jar/status/25722612431

Plugins

WP-DBManager: “Allows you to optimize database, repair database, backup database, restore database, delete backup database , drop/empty tables and run selected queries. Supports automatic scheduling of backing up and optimizing of database.”

http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/wp-dbmanager/

WordPress EZ Backup: “WordPress EZ Backup is A Administrators Plugin to allow the easiest most feature rich method for creating Backup Archives of your entire Site (not just WP Installations but Any part of your site or webspace) & allows backup archives of any MySQL Database you choose & More.”

http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/wordpress-ez-backup/

Backup Services

VaultPress: “VaultPress is a subscription-based protection, security and backup service for WordPress blogs and sites. Built on the same Automattic grid that serves over 12.5 million WordPress.com blogs and 270 million monthly visitors, VaultPress secures your site.”
http://vaultpress.com/

Amazon S3 (Automatic WordPress Backup): “Using this plugin, you can easily and automatically backup important parts of your WordPress install to Amazon S3. Amazon S3 is an extremely cheap service that is easy to set up. For pennies a month, you can make sure that your important files will be kept safe.”
http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/automatic-wordpress-backup/

BackupBuddy: “BackupBuddy is an all-in-one solution for backups, restoration, and migration. Back up to your server, Amazon S3, a FTP/FTPS account, or an email.”
http://pluginbuddy.com/purchase/backupbuddy/

WordPress Hosting

Page.ly: “We got your back on the important stuff. Hosting your WordPress site with page.ly is hassle free. Automatic nightly backups, and Automatic WP Core updates keep your site safe and secure.”
http://page.ly/wordpress/hosting

Blog on Cloud 9: “WordPress users deserve a host that is not only reliable and secure, but who can do what it takes to keep them up and running. We do nightly backups of your WordPress files, uploads, and database, minimizing any data loss and/or downtime due to any unforeseen technical issues.”
http://www.blogoncloud9.com/

WP Engine: “We make WordPress fast, secure, and scalable by hosting your site on our rock solid platform.”
http://wpengine.com/

Remember: Back up everything and back up often!