One of the scariest things a developer can hear from a new client is the infamous claim: “I know just enough to be dangerous.” Translation: I don’t really know much but I sure love to tinker with things! This always puts up a little red flag in my mind. However, a seemingly harmless bit of tinkering can have disastrous consequences on a live website.

Unfortunately, there are some clients out there who feel more confident about tinkering after they’ve hired a developer to assist with their site. Something gets broken and then the burden of fixing the website is on you. Want to prevent this scenario from happening? Here’s a quick fix:

Disable the Plugin and Theme Editor

Access to plugin and theme code is readily available in the WordPress dashboard. One thing you can do to protect the site from tinkering is to disable the both of these editors. You can do this in under a minute. Open your wp-config.php file and add the following constant:

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define('DISALLOW_FILE_EDIT',true);

Now, when you’re in the dashboard it is impossible to access the theme or plugin editor, even with the admin account.

Want to take it one step further? The WordPress codex has another gem for your wp-config.php file:

Disable Plugin and Theme Update and Installation

If you really want to lock things down, you can block users from installing/updating themes and plugins through the dashboard. Add this quick snippet to your wp-config.php file:

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define('DISALLOW_FILE_MODS',true);

Not only will it prevent users from installing and updating themes and plugins, but it will also automatically disable theme and plugin editing in the dashboard. This constant essentially kills two birds with one stone and saves you from having to mop up a mess later on after your client decides to tinker around with this and that.

For example, let’s say your client decides to start installing plugins like a mad man, but one of them is poorly written, loads an extra copy of jQuery and breaks a bunch of Javascript on the site. Or maybe your client decides to upgrade WordPress before any of his critical plugins or theme have been updated. He ends up with a bunch of broken functionality. These are the types of troubleshooting scenarios we hope to avoid. The solution is to prevent it from happening in the first place by disabling theme and plugin updates.

One note of caution – You should only use these particular constants if you are your client’s sole developer with an agreement to maintain that site. Otherwise, you could be locking your client out of the freedoms that he needs to maintain his own site, should he choose a new developer. In most cases these healthy boundaries will help to keep your client safe from his predisposition to ill-advised and uninformed tinkering.

photo credit: Alex E. Proimos via photopin cc

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When you browse the code in the default WordPress theme, you have no idea what any of it does and you are running out of time. You need a crash course in the worst way. You need the Naked WordPress Theme.

Learn how to theme WordPress with the Naked WordPress theme

The Naked WordPress theme was created by Joshua Beckman to be “The solution for designers who don’t know WordPress”.

This is not your ordinary bare bones theme, stripped of everything but the essentials. Naked WordPress assumes that you know nothing about WordPress and includes comments on all aspects of the theme. Every single piece of the template files is commented so that you can understand what it does. Armed with that knowledge you can safely rearrange and customize your theme. You’ll be able to remove pieces without worrying about deleting something essential.

Here’s a quick example of just how useful the Naked WordPress theme is for beginners. If you’re brand new to WordPress, you probably have no idea what wp_head() does. Naked WordPress clues you in to how important it is so that you don’t screw things up:

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<?php wp_head(); 
// This fxn allows plugins, and WordPress itself, to insert themselves/scripts/css/files 
// (right here) into the head of your website. 
// Removing this fxn call will disable all kinds of plugins and WordPress default insertions. 
// Move it if you like, but I would keep it around.
?>

With this kind of commenting built into the theme, there’s no need to look things up in the codex when you’re building in a hurry. The functions are neatly summarized and commented inline to save you time.

Naked WordPress features:

• Responsive styling
• Custom menus
• Custom sidebar and widgets
• Blog, with all the WordPress goodies we know and love (comments, categories, tags, etc.)
• Pages, Home page

Of course, reading up on the codex and learning all the ins and outs of WordPress theming is highly recommended if you want to be able to expertly navigate it and create your own themes. However, if you’re more interested in designing the theme than building it, then the Naked Theme will help to keep things moving while you’re still learning WordPress. It functions as both a starter theme and a crash course all in one.

Download the Naked WordPress theme for free from its homepage and follow the project on github. If it helps you build something, consider showing a little love to the developer by way of a donation.

photo credit: emanuela franchini via photopin cc

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Checking through each site on your network to see what plugins are in use is simply not an option. The task is much too tedious for a busy site admin like yourself. That’s where Plugin Activation Status saves the day. It essentially performs a plugin audit so that you can get rid of any extra baggage.

Find and dump all your unused plugins

When you first activate the plugin, you’ll see this screen with an empty list, located at Network Admin >> Plugins >> Active Plugins.

Click continue to generate the lists. Don’t do this during peak traffic time if you have a massive network as it might cause slow downs.

Plugin Activation Status will produce two lists:

• A list of plugins that are not currently active on any sites or networks
• A list of plugins that are active somewhere within the installation, accompanied by details of where and how those plugins are activated

Please note that this plugin is only for multisite networks, as it does not make sense for single site installs.

A good WordPress admin must clean up after himself.

Installing plugins just to try them out and not deleting them is a nasty habit. Sure, you’re in a hurry, but later on you’ll forget why you added those plugins and wonder if you’re really using them. Removing unused plugins is an important part of multisite maintenance. You’ll be able to see issues more clearly when troubleshooting if you have fewer plugins active, minimize security risks and keep your site leaner. Install Plugin Activation Status and it will tell you exactly which plugins you can dump for spring cleaning.

photo credit: atibens via photopin cc

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Solid multisite compatibility is one of the reasons that MarketPress is so popular. There is no better WordPress e-commerce plugin for operating multiple stores with one global shopping cart. This new extension compliments MarketPress’ built-in multisite capabilities.

The MP Product Search Widget plugin features:

• Advanced Product Search Options – narrow down the search through different parameters, such as category, tag, and price range.
• Compatible with Multisite for Global Searches – allow customers to make global product searches across your MarketPress network – just like Etsy.com does it.
• Built to Impress – display all the search results in a nice, beautiful modal view, together with product thumbnail, price, and ‘buy now’ button for each item.
• Advanced Sorting Options - allow your customers to sort the search results based on different parameters, such as release date, title, price, sales.
• Powered by AJAX – perform high-level search queries without crashing the server.

Multisite Compatible: Global Product Search Widget

Configuration options are the same as the single store search widget. The only difference is that it searches all stores.

Options for the widget include:

• Show or hide category filter
• Limit to custom categories
• Show or hide tag filter
• Limit to custom tags
• Show/hide price range
• Choose from 7 different color skins
• Limit visibility to store pages only

Want to try out a live demo of the search to see how it works? Check out the search widget on any of these themes:

Live Demo: FlexMarket | PRO | GridMarket | SimpleMarket | Twenty Twelve

Download MP Product Search Widget for Free

There are a couple of different avenues for downloading the plugin – either way it’s free. The first option is to visit MarketPressThemes.com and create an account. Then you can proceed to the user dashboard to download the plugin. The plugin is also available at github if you want to grab the zip file directly. Many thanks to the folks at MarketPressThemes.com for making this plugin available for free.

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Once installed and activated, BuddyPress Activity Privacy adds the following privacy controls to the post update box for members:

• Anyone
• Logged In Users
• My Friends
• Admin Only
• Only Me

Why anyone would select the “only me” option, I can only guess. Perhaps it’s a decent alternative for those who like to vent on social networks. “My Friends” privacy option puts the BuddyPress core friends component to good use, making it worthwhile for users to send and accept friend requests.

Certain privacy controls are component-dependent. For example, the “Friends Only” privacy option in the dropdown will not show up unless you have the Friends component activated in the BuddyPress settings panel.

When posting within a group the group-specific privacy options will be added to the dropdown, inlcluding:

• My Friends in a Group
• Group Members
• Group Moderators
• Group Admins

In the past, the lack of privacy controls has turned many people off to using BuddyPress. This new plugin should help to alleviate some of those concerns, since most of the content flows through the activity stream and group components. I’ve tested the various privacy controls and they all seem to work just as advertised. The BuddyPress Activity Privacy plugin is one I would recommend for any BuddyPress site. It gives each member multiple privacy options on activity posts and should encourage more confident participation on your social network.

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Did you know that WordPress has a NOBLOGREDIRECT constant that you can use to customize the URL it redirects to for nonexistent blogs? Add this to your wp-config.php file and change the URL to wherever you want to send your visitors.

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define('NOBLOGREDIRECT', 'http://example.com');

Using this handy constant you can redirect to your home URL, a blog directory or any page that you think might help to get your visitor interested in staying on your site.

This is one of those really easy customizations that improves a new visitors experience on your website. Instead of landing on a 404 error page, the user can be sent to a more engaging page with information about your network. Any WordPress multisite admin can implement this quick customization in less than a minute.

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The upcoming WordPress 3.6 release will add native support for audio and video files. This one is a real game changer. We’re going to give you a full introduction to the new capabilities and show you how you can use them on your WordPress site. But first, let’s take a look at how we’ve previously been managing multimedia files.

In the old days…

If you’re a podcaster or video blogger, in the old days your WordPress site required a plugin in order to play the audio or video files that you created.

For example, if you were going to upload a video, here’s what it would look like in the WordPress post edit screen:

As you can see, inserting an uploaded video into a post just results in a clickable link with no player on the front end. Boo! If this was a first time discovery, I’d be off to find a suitable plugin for displaying my media.

Of course, you could always take advantage of a third party service like Youtube or Vimeo and easily embed it in WordPress. But what if you just want to use your own server? There was no way to do this before without the help of a plugin.

A Preview of Audio/Video Uploads in WordPress 3.6:

Below is a quick preview of how you might upload a video in WordPress 3.6. You can also see how the post format selection will appear:

What I like about the update is that it provides a clear path of action. Once the user selects “Video”, he doesn’t have to wonder what’s next or how to get the video to display. He can either paste in the URL to the video or upload one. The shortcode is automatically provided. Here’s what that looks like on the front end:

The whole experience is much easier than before, don’t you think? These updates make it possible for anyone to post the occasional audio or video file without having to search for a media player.

What’s under the hood?

Some of you may already be familiar with MediaElement.js and have perhaps even used in on your WordPress site via a plugin. There are a number of reasons MediaElement.js was chosen to power WordPress’ core audio/video support, but these are perhaps the most compelling:

• Outstanding support for all major browsers and devices
• MediaElement.js uses the same HTML markup, regardless of playback implementation
• The players can be easily skinned with CSS

If you’re wondering just how robust the browser and device support is, check out this chart from the MediaElement.js website:

MediaElement.js Features:

• HTML5 audio and video players in pure HTML and CSS
• Custom Flash and Silverlight players that mimic the HTML5 MediaElement API for older browsers
• Accessibility standards including WebVTT

The awesome thing about the media players is that any regular Joe with just a little bit of CSS can style them to make them look completely custom. Full visual control of the media player was quite rare in the old days of using plugins. In fact, many media players come branded for the software and make their logos/links difficult to remove. Not so with the new native players. The display is entirely under your control.

Why Native Audio/Video support makes life easier for everyone:

Third-party services like Youtube and Vimeo no longer required

So now if you take a quick video with your phone, you can easily upload it to your WordPress blog without having to jump through a bunch of different hoops. Multimedia bloggers, bands, podcasters, magazines and news sites can their own audio and video libraries with WordPress – no plugins or third-party services required. Just remember that streaming audio and video can take a huge toll on your server, so you may still want to use a service like Youtube or Vimeo. WordPress 3.6 has you covered with new embed handlers if you go that route.

The new native audio and video support is a giant leap forward for all WordPress users. Since WordPress powers a very large chunk of the web, we’re bound to see a huge increase in multimedia blogging. Are you excited about the changes in WordPress 3.6? Will you ditch your audio/video plugins and use the new native capabilities?

Image Credits:
Creative Commons license:Untitled by wakingphotolife
Creative Commons license: Your petite tune by Esellee

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There are many situations where you may need to copy your WordPress database. The most common scenario would be to set up a development site in order to test new themes or features. In the past you may have exported a copy and then re-imported that to a new blank database. If you want to copy your database onto the same server, then this is probably the easiest way.

This quick tip is based on a phpMyAdmin operations feature, so it won’t apply to you if your host is using something else for managing databases.

First, select your database in phpMyAdmin. Then click on the “Operations” tab. At the bottom you’ll find “Copy Database to:”. Here you want to enter the name of your new database, make sure to select structure and database and check the appropriate boxes.

After you click “go”, you should see a “Copying Database” message displayed on the screen. If it’s successful, a message will pop up on the screen to let you know that your new database is ready.

Double Check The Database Copy

Double checking the copied database is a crucial step. Please be advised that this does not always work with massively huge databases. It may time out and not copy the entire thing. No matter what the size of your database, you’ll want to verify after copying that the tables are the same and the size matches for both databases. With most small databases, this is the quickest way to make a copy without having to export and import.

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Displaying BuddyPress profile data outside of the main BuddyPress components is a little trickier than you might imagine. However, this is a common request, especially since many of our readers manage multisite networks. So for this quick tip we’re going to examine a few examples of displaying BuddyPress profile data on multisite blogs.

Basic Example of Displaying BP Profile Info on a Multisite Blog

A very common scenario is where you want to display an author’s bio on his multisite blog, pulling the content from a BuddyPress profile field. The code below gets the blog admin’s user ID and displays the profile field that you specify. You only need to replace the ‘Bio’ with the name of the field you’re trying to display:

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<?php 
global $bp;
$thisblog = $current_blog->blog_id;
$user_id_from_email = get_user_id_from_string( get_blog_option($thisblog, 'admin_email'));
$myfield = xprofile_get_field_data( 'Bio', $user_id_from_email );
echo $myfield;
?>

This works for any kind of basic text field and can be added anywhere within the blog’s theme templates.

Display Data From a Checkbox Profile Field on Multisite Blogs

I took a hint from a WordPress StackExchange post for displaying unserialized profile fields. The key is to use $multi_format = ‘comma’ to output your chexboxes or dropdowns.

In this example we’ll display a ‘Counties Served’ checkbox field with each county separated by a comma, using the following code on a multisite blog:

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<?php 
global $bp;
$thisblog = $current_blog->blog_id;
$user_id_from_email = get_user_id_from_string( get_blog_option($thisblog, 'admin_email'));
$myfield = xprofile_get_field_data( 'Counties Served', $user_id_from_email, $multi_format = 'comma' );
$data = xprofile_format_profile_field('checkbox', $myfield);
echo $data;
?>

Here you’ll want to replace the ‘Counties Served’ with the name of the profile field you are wanting to display. Pretty simple, right?

There is an old plugin that does this and quite a bit more with easy-to-use widgets, but in this case I wanted something simpler. If any of you know a better way to show BP profile fields in mulitsite, please let us know in the comments.

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This revolutionary app allows you to tailor your site’s search results to help users find the most relevant content. The app works alongside WordPress via a plugin and gives you the ability to fine tune search queries. Essentially you’ll be creating your own search engine that is more efficient and user-friendly than the WordPress default.

How is Swiftype better than the default WordPress search?

Swiftype Features:

• Easy to set up – the Swiftype crawler creates your search engine in minutes, no coding required
• VIP-approved plugin – The plugin has passed the VIP standards for quality and performance
• Detailed Analytics – Built-in real-time search analytics
• Custom Result Ranking – Drag-and-drop your search results to re-order them and changes will be instantly reflected on your website.
• Excellent Mobile Support – Search works great in mobile browsers and Swiftype’s native iOS and Android SDKs make it easy to integrate with apps
• Advanced Developer API – Get more of your search engine with the Developer API
• Search Across Multiple Domains – Show results from any of your linked sites

What we love about Swiftype:

We’ve been using Swiftype to power our search capabilities for several months on Edublogs and WPMU.org and couldn’t be more pleased. From our experience with Swiftype on Edublogs we’re finding a decrease in support requests. Users are letting us know it’s easier for them to find the information they’re looking for.

There are two features that are making the biggest impact on Edublogs support:

• 1. Auto suggest of posts based on search terms – nearly half of all searches are “auto selects”. This tells us that users are finding their answers faster than before.
• 2. Being able to manually adjust search results to prioritize our most common searches.

We also love the stats Swiftype provides in the search engine dashboard. For example, one section is dedicated to showing you “Top Searches With No Results”. Those are search terms that you’ll want to pay attention to and get to work creating better results. It also shows you the top searches on your site so you can get a better idea of what people are looking for when they come to you.

How can your site benefit from Swiftype search?

WordPress sites with products for sale can also benefit from its detailed analytics. Knowing what visitors are searching for on your site can help you to know what products to add to your inventory. It can also help you to tailor your UI and marketing to focus on your most-searched for products and increase sales.

Exclusive WPMU Discount: 75% Off the first month

Swiftype is trusted to handle search functionality for many well-known online businesses, including Shopify, SendGrid, MailChimp, KISSmetrics, Mixergy and many more. A basic account is free and offers all of the same powerful search features. This is perfect for smaller sites and you won’t be obliged to upgrade.

Upgraded accounts enjoy use on multiple domains, unlimited query customizations, more frequent recrawls, dedicated support and more. Take advantage of all of these awesome features and search power with our exclusive 75% off discount for WPMU.org readers. Sign up for a free account today, install the Swiftype Search WordPress plugin and take it for a test drive. We’re big fans of Swiftype and we know that you won’t be disappointed.

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