Just a head’s up to anyone that needs me — I have to be moved out by the 30th (that’s two weeks, ugh). I have no clue where I’m moving to (I’m trying to find an apartment), if I’ll have Internet or what (I need it of course), and so forth.

And before then, I gotta spend major amounts of time cleaning up 9 years worth of crap in this house so we can move out ASAP as well as time spent on my new job.

In short, I may be MIA for a while.

So I tried to upload another blog on this server via the automatic upgrade and it apparently freaked out and apparently it deleted all of my plugins and uploads for this blog. I have no idea why, but it did.

Waiting on my friend who runs this server for me to find a backup, but until then this blog is mostly broken.

UPDATE: Turns out automatic file backups were never set up, so the most recent backup we could find was from exactly 2 months ago. I think I already reinstalled all of the new plugins I had installed since then, but I’ll need to reupload any uploads I’ve done in the past 2 months. Please report any issues via this post.

Now you too can show the WordPress download counter on your website! This plugin adds a widget to your blog that shows the current download count and even refreshes the count every 15 seconds automatically.

No demo here on my blog as my current theme isn’t widgetized and I haven’t made the plugin work with anything but widgets. I have plans for the future though to allow you to display the counter anywhere.

For further details, check out the plugin’s homepage.

jQuery Lightbox For Native Galleries v2.0.0 has been recoded to use a new and better lightbox script. This one resembles the original and infamous lightbox script, but is jQuery powered because jQuery is awesome. It also works with WordPress 2.8 (the previous version of my plugin may not have, I’m not sure).

Here’s a demo:

Images by Microsoft

I’ve decided to shut down my support forums today in favor of the WordPress.org forums.

The problem with me running my own forums is that people had to register there separately to post and they relied on just me basically to provide support. By opting to provide support via the WordPress.org forums, they probably don’t have to sign up for yet another account and best of all they can receive support from other knowledgeable users rather than just me.

So if you need support for one of my plugins, please visit it’s page on the WordPress.org Plugins area (http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/plugin-stub-here/) and then click on “See what others are saying…” on the right side. That’ll take you to a new thread forum with the tag field already filled in with my plugin’s name (if you don’t properly tag your thread, I won’t see it).

Threw together another plugin the other day.

Twitter Tools is an excellent plugin for posting notifications of new blog posts to Twitter. However Twitter Tools just sends the URL to the new post normally which is then shortened by Twitter itself to a bit.ly short link. This is done anonymously.

This plugin will replace the normal URLs sent by Twitter Tools to Twitter with bit.ly URLs tied to your bit.ly account. You can then easily track the number of clicks from your bit.ly profile.

For more details, check out the plugin’s homepage.

This is just a test post testing a new plugin of mine. Ignore me.

In order for WordPress to be able to upgrade your plugins and the WordPress core without any modifications, at least one of four situations needs be true:

1. Your server runs Windows: file permissions are less restrictive under Windows, so PHP can directly write to and replace the existing plugin and core files.
2. PHP is the owner of the files: with some hosting companies, such as MediaTemple, PHP runs as the same user as you. Files uploaded by you and files created by PHP (for example, uploads) are owned by the same user. That means PHP can write to or edit any file on the server.
3. You have FTP access to your server: WordPress comes built in with a library allowing the server to connect to itself via FTP to replace files. File permissions don’t really matter in this case.
4. Your version of PHP has been compiled with the SSH module: this is rare and only done on dedicated servers really. It also makes it somewhat of a pain to upgrade PHP.

Unfortunately, none of those situations applied to me and my server. I couldn’t do direct writes as Windows is crap and PHP runs as it’s own user, FTP was disabled for security (I manage my server via SSH), and recompiling PHP is a major pain in the ass. So what to do? Enter a little bit of code, care of DD32. This code either goes in a plugin (that’s what I did) or your theme’s functions.php file (but if you switch themes, this “hack” will go away).

Please note that this code should only be used on a well managed, secure dedicated server where you keep all scripts (including WordPress!) up to date. If a hacker manages to gain access to a script on your server, for example via an insecure script, then they can literally delete or modify all of your files. Don’t use this code unless you know what you are doing!

The first thing to do is to tell WordPress to use the “direct write” method, which is used in situations 1 and 2 above. This is done via a filter:

add_filter( 'filesystem_method', create_function( '$a', 'return "direct";' ) );

The usage of create_function() is just a quick way of doing it. You could create a real function if you wished.

The second thing to do is to tell WordPress what permissions to use on any files and folders it creates. The permissions need to be 0777 (or similar) so that you can still modify the files/folders if need be. That is done via two constants:

define( 'FS_CHMOD_DIR', 0777 );
define( 'FS_CHMOD_FILE', 0777 );

Put that code altogether for a plugin and it’ll look something like this:

<?php /*

**************************************************************************

Plugin Name:  Force Direct Filewrites
Plugin URI:   http://www.viper007bond.com/2009/05/07/wordpress-how-to-force-direct-filewrites-for-upgrades/
Version:      2009.05.01
Description:  Forces the "direct" filesystem method to be used and tells WordPress what permissions to use.
Author:       Viper007Bond
Author URI:   http://www.viper007bond.com/

**************************************************************************/

add_filter( 'filesystem_method', create_function( '$a', 'return "direct";' ) );

define( 'FS_CHMOD_DIR', 0777 );
define( 'FS_CHMOD_FILE', 0777 );

?>

Lastly, you need to adjust the permissions on any existing plugins so that PHP can modify them. You need to chmod your /wp-content/plugins/ folder and everything inside of it to 0777 or similar (767 may work, or even 757). If you wish to be able to one-click upgrade your WordPress install as well, then you will need to make your entire WordPress folder writable as well. Please first read this warning about the dangers of 777 though.

And that’s it! Now when you go to do a plugin upgrade, WordPress will directly replace the files. No having to wait on the slow FTP method.