plug-ins

Keep authenticated WordPress sites up to date

Sep 15 '22
Blogging, Technology

I have a couple of WordPress sites that live behind HTTP basic authentication—they're family-related blogs that I don't want publicly accessible.

Everything works fine behind the authentication except for automatic updates (and other WordPress cron tasks). This bugged me a bit, but never enough to do anything about it until today. To fix the problem, you can either modify some code (which I generally don't like to do) or use a plug-in (easy and quick). I chose the plug-in.

If you'd prefer the customization solution, though, just follow these instructions. I haven't tested them myself, though, so I can't say for sure that they still work (they are five years old).

For the plug-in solution, install WP Cron HTTP Auth. Go to its Settings panel, and enter your HTTP Authentication credentials, and that's that—WordPress cron tasks, including automatic updates, will now work again. Hooray!

Easily copy or move a WordPress blog

Feb 16 '17Mar 3 '17
Blogging

I was looking for an easy way to make a development copy of the Many Tricks blog, which (like Robservatory) is powered by WordPress. In the past, I've done this manually, but it's a bit of a pain to get the required edits done correctly and make everything work at the new URL.

So this time, I went searching for a plug-in, and found Duplicator. Borrowing from the plug-in's description of itself…

Duplicator gives WordPress administrators the ability to migrate, copy or clone a site from one location to another. The plugin also serves as a simple backup utility. Duplicator supports both serialized and base64 serialized string replacement. If you need to move WordPress or backup WordPress this plugin can help simplify the process.

Once installed, usage is pretty easy: You follow a simple three-step process that creates a new package. Move that package to the new location, expand it, and then run the installer.php file. (I had to rename the three files from the package to remove everything except the filenames; the plug-in adds a bunch of identifying text in front of each filename.)

The installer asks questions about the new site's URLs and database connection info, then does its magic. I had a clone site up and running in minutes, saving what (for me) is usually an hour or so's aggravation. Duplicator should work equally well for moving a WordPress installation to a new host, too, though I haven't tested it in that situation (yet).

WordPress plug-ins, take four

Jan 8 '17Mar 3 '17
Blogging

This is the fourth (one, two, three) in an occasional series of articles that explain which plug-ins I use here, in case others who run WordPress blogs might be interested…and it also helps me document why I use certain plug-ins, so it's a double-purpose post.

Since the last installment two years ago, I've retired Dashboard Commander and ELI's Related Posts Footer Links and Widget, and added seven new plug-ins. Here's what each of those does:

Ajaxy Live Search: Provides as-you-type search results.
Calculated Fields Form: This plug-ink lets you do math in forms, as used in my hybrid vehicle payback calculator.
Contextual Related Posts: This is what I used to replace ELI's Related Posts plug-in; I find it seems to find more-related posts than did the prior plug-in.
Featuring CountComments: This simple plug-in just displays a comment count for logged-in users.
iframe: I added this plug-in so that I could embed a Google Docs spreadsheet in my hybrid SUVs post.
TwentyTwenty: This plug-in creates sliding before-and-after images, as seen in Revisiting ripping Blu-ray discs.
WP Original Media Path: At some point, WordPress removed the original media path field from the media library screen; this plug-in just adds it back.
WP Post Styling: Instead of editing your CSS file every time you want to do some semi-custom formatting, this plug-in lets you create post-only styles you can apply as needed. In my case, I need it with the TwentyTwenty plug-in to handle the CSS they use to manage the image swapping.
YOP Poll: Embed a poll in a post, as I did when asking how many iDevices you owned. Currently this plug-in is being "rebooted," so it's not available. Going forward, I'll probably just use Twitter polls (i.e. Apple Mail: Classic or modern layout?).

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