WordPress – Ben Lobaugh Online

Canonical URL plugin for WordPress released!

On August 31, 2018

In Computing, Web Development, WordPress

Have you run into this scenario? You have content that needs to live on multiple sites but you are concerned about SEO issues duplicating said content?

As search engines crawl the web looking for pages to include in their search indexes they may run across content duplicated from another site. When that happens the search engine will first attempt to determine which site is the “source of truth”. The site with duplicated content will be penalized in rankings. If no source can be found both sites rankings will be penalized. An SEO nightmare.

Is it possible to distribute the same content to multiple sites without incurring this penalty? The answer is a resounding YES! All you need to do is let the search engine know where the real of the article is, the canonical article. This is done by including a tag in the html head area. It is for search engines, humans do not typically see it.

WordPress has some built in canonical abilities however in WordPress itself there is no way to set the canonical url. I tend to have articles published all over the web that I would like to copy to this site for posterity. Today I whipped up a little plugin that provides a simple url field to add the article’s canonical url in a search engine friendly way.

It is as simple as adding the url as you create the article!

Publish your post and WordPress will handle the rest.

Here is an example post that I wrote on team building for WebDevStudios.

9 Critical Concepts for Leading High-Performance Teams

You may notice there is also a brief disclaimer at the top of the article. That is optional and may be helpful to some readers and/or required by the site you are reposting from to comply with guidelines.

If you want to use this plugin on your own site simply head over to Github and download the plugin!

https://github.com/blobaugh/canonical-url-for-wordpress

Find total number of post records on a WordPress Multisite in MySQL

By Ben Lobaugh (blobaugh)

On August 3, 2018

In Computing, MySQL, Programming, Web Development, WordPress

I was recently asked for the total number of posts on a WordPress website. Normally as simple as looking at the number in the dashboard, however in this instance the WordPress install was a Multisite with nearly 100 sites. That would have taken far too long to do manually, but what about having MySQL do the heavy lifting for me?

The information_schema database contains data about every database and table on the server. One of the metrics it stores is the count of rows in a table. We can use that to extrapolate roughly how many entries are in all the posts tables combined. This is not an exact science, however it will get you close to the real numbers. I argue that it will typically be “close enough” on larger installs, such as the one I was looking at.

In the following query, just replace the database name with your database and run it.

SELECT SUM( table_rows )
FROM information_schema.TABLES 
WHERE 
	table_schema = "{{YOUR_DATABASE_NAME}}" 
	AND table_name LIKE '%_posts';

Run a wp-cli command across the network

By Ben Lobaugh (blobaugh)

On April 16, 2018

In Computing, Web Development, WordPress

Need to run a wp-cli command across a network of WordPress sites?

Here is an example of how to add/update an option on every site on the network using wp-cli.

wp site list --field=url | xargs -n1 -I % wp --url=% option update my_option my_value

This is really two commands in one. Lets break them down:

wp site list --field=url

This command will get a list of all the sites on the network. The output is a list of the urls for the given site. Passing the url to a command on a network chooses the site to run the command on.

xargs -n1 -I % wp --url=% option update my_option my_value

Here is the kicker. This command takes the output of the previous command into xargs. Xargs then run the new wp command with each site’s url in it.

Find and update WordPress posts with comments older than NNN days

By Ben Lobaugh (blobaugh)

On March 12, 2018

In Computing, MySQL, Programming, Web Development, WordPress

I have a use case where I need to disable comments on posts in WordPress where the last comment was more than one year, or 365 days, ago.

Posts can be found with this query:

SELECT p.ID, p.post_title, p.post_date, p.comment_status, p.`ping_status`
FROM wp_posts AS p
WHERE p.ID IN (
     SELECT c.comment_post_ID
     FROM wp_comments AS c
     WHERE DATEDIFF( curdate(), c.comment_date ) <= 365
  );

The outer query takes the inner query as the search parameter. The inner query is finding the latest comment for each post based on the number in the WHERE condition. 365 represents 365 days, or 1 year.

Therefore, this query is getting the latest comment for post where the comment is less than 1 year old.

Now let’s say you need to update the posts to disable comments. The goal is to disable commenting for all posts that have not had a comment within the last year. It can be accomplished with the following:

UPDATE wp_posts
SET comment_status='closed', ping_status='closed'
WHERE ID IN (
		SELECT c.comment_post_ID
		FROM wp_comments AS c
		WHERE DATEDIFF( curdate(), c.comment_date ) >= 365
);

Here again the number 365 represents the number of days.

Check the posts and you should see the comments have been closed.

WordPress Multisite: Global options that can be overridden per site

By Ben Lobaugh (blobaugh)

On November 27, 2016

In Computing, Web Development, WordPress

I recently ran into a situation where a WordPress Multisite install needed to have some options replicated across each site, both new and existing. It also needed to be able to override the options per site if so desired. The solution is fairly trivial.

Setup the options page in wp-admin. Ensure it exists on all subsites
On the main site fill in the values that should be defaulted across all sites
Drop the following code into your site and replace the placeholder with your own option name
Freely use the values from the main site or alter the options on a subsite

All you need to do to get this working is drop the following code into your site and change the placeholder to be the same as the option name that should be replicated.

add_filter( 'option_{OPTION_NAME}', 'my_option_settings', 10, 2 );
add_filter( 'default_option_{OPTION_NAME}', 'my_option_settings', 10, 2 );

function my_option_settings( $value, $option_name ) {
  // Do not loop on ourself
  if( 1 == get_current_blog_id() ) {
    // Bail out
    return $value;
  }
  if( ! $value ) {
    $value = get_blog_option( 1, $option_name );
  }
  return $value;
}

Ben Lobaugh Online

I think, therefore I am. I am, therefore I sail

Category: WordPress Page 1 of 20

Canonical URL plugin for WordPress released!

Find total number of post records on a WordPress Multisite in MySQL

Run a wp-cli command across the network

Find and update WordPress posts with comments older than NNN days

WordPress Multisite: Global options that can be overridden per site

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