XtremelySocial.com » Our WordPress Tips

How to Make an Awesome Maintenance Mode Screen for WordPress

Tim Nicholson — Tue, 25 May 2010 14:55:28 +0000

Whenever you update your WordPress site to a new version or mass update multiple plugins at the same time, WordPress automatically places your site in “maintenance mode”. In this tutorial, I’ll show you to how to easily make an awesome “theme” that gets displayed instead of the blank white page that just says the site is undergoing maintenance.

The best part about this is that its all automatically handled by WordPress and they have already built in a “hook” to easily do this. If WordPress finds a file called maintenance.php in your /wp-content directory, it will use that file instead of the default blank white page.

The key thing to note is that while your site is in maintenance mode, you can’t be sure that you will have access to the traditional WordPress theme template tags or functions, such as bloginfo(‘name’) or bloginfo(‘description’) or theme “options” fields that configure the various aspects of a theme. So you’ll need to “hard code” your site name, description, the text that displays, the URL’s to image and links.

If you are good with HTML, you can code up whatever you’d like. However, the easiest way to do this is to install a theme that you like, configure it, display it in your browser and then “view source” to grab the HTML code. You’ll want to grab the full HTML from the top tag through the bottom tag. This needs to be a fully-functional standalone HTML page. It really is just about that simple.

The only thing you need to do beyond grabbing the HTML code is to add the following to the maintenance.php file.

At the very top, add the following code. This code will tell the search engines that your site is only temporarily unavailable and to try back in 10 minutes.

/* DON’T CHANGE THIS – IT TELLS SEARCH ENGINES THE SITE IS ONLY TEMPORARILY UNAVAILABLE */
$protocol = $_SERVER["SERVER_PROTOCOL"];
if ( ‘HTTP/1.1′ != $protocol && ‘HTTP/1.0′ != $protocol )
$protocol = ‘HTTP/1.0′;header( “$protocol 503 Service Unavailable”, true, 503 );
header( ‘Content-Type: text/html; charset=utf-8′ );
header( ‘Retry-After: 600′ );
/* END DON’T CHANGE THIS */
?>

At the very bottom of the file, add the following line. Since WordPress is including this file into its program that handles the upgrade, its important that you tell WordPress to drop out of this section of the code when its done displaying this maintenance mode page.

/* DON’T CHANGE THIS – IT PASSES CONTROL BACK TO THE WORDPRESS UPGRADE ROUTINE */
die();
/* END DON’T CHANGE THIS */
?>

Here is a screenshot of the page that I’ve created for XtremelySocial.com.

Here is a link to view the Maintenance Mode Screen for XtremelySocial.com. You can cut and paste the HTML from that page if you’d like to use it as a starting point, but make sure you install the ice-breaker theme from CustomTheme.com that it is based on. My page needs the images, and css from that theme to work.

There are some really great “under construction” WordPress themes that you can use to generate your initial HTML code and paste it into your maintenance.php file. Check out the article Top Themes and Plugins for Under Construction WordPress Blogs from techcats.net.

Update 5/26/10: Note that this seems to only work in WordPress 3.0. Older versions don’t seem to handle automatically placing your site in maintenance mode properly. The code is there to do it, but it doesn’t seem to work. If anyone has a quick fix, let me know. If I find a fix I’ll post it here.

How to Create a Popular Content (Top 10) Page in WordPress

Tim Nicholson — Wed, 27 Jan 2010 18:02:34 +0000

This article will show you how to create a special page in WordPress that lists your most popular content. I had enhanced another plugin’s code to allow you to easily do this and he has already incorporated into the latest version!

I have no idea why Wordpess doesn’t simply include the number of page views in the posts file, but it doesn’t. In order to track your page views in a way that you can actually access them, you need to use two different plugins. The good news is that if you acted upon my article 11 Must-Have Plugins for Every WordPress Site, then you already have them. If not, you’ll need to download both of these plugins:

WordPress.com Stats Plugin
WordPress.com Popular Posts Plugin

Since the original author has already included my updates, simply installing the plugin will allow you to create your popular posts page!

1. Create a new page in WordPress. Call it something like “Top 10 Posts” or “Our Most Popular Content” or something like that.

2. Insert the following shortcode into the page. This code creates a nice top 10 list, complete with title, number of views, excerpt, and its cached for performance. Just be SURE you paste this into the WP page in HTML or the editor will screw up the HTML formatting in the format= parameter.

My Info on Facebook (15,975 views)
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My Greetings on Facebook (6,294 views)
My Greetings (formerly WallPoke) - Share Mood ...
Smashing Magazine: 100 Free High Quality WordPress Themes: 2010 Edition (5,901 views)
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My Info: How to Show off your Facebook Page on your Personal Profile (4,289 views)
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If you want to make changes to any of the above suggested parameters to retrieve a different number of posts or display things differently, then check out the original author’s WordPress Popular Posts Plugin FAQ.

And how would this article be complete with showing you my most popular content? Here’s out list generated directly via the above shortcode.

XtremelySocial.com Most Popular Content

My Info on Facebook (15,975 views)

My Info (formerly My Profile Box) -- Add a Custom Tab to your Facebook Business or Fan Page My Info lets you place any HTML in a custom tab on your Facebook business or fan...
How To Allow Users To Invite Facebook Friends On Your WordPress Site (13,203 views)

In my first article about Wordpress, I'll show you how to easily add a page to your Wordpress site that allows your users to invite their Facebook friends to check out your website. You'll first...
My Status: New Facebook Profile Publisher (6,948 views)

I'm very excited to announce that you can now use My Status to update your Facebook and Twitter status from within the built-in Facebook profile publisher. My Status can now be used on your Facebook...
My Greetings on Facebook (6,294 views)

My Greetings (formerly WallPoke) - Share Mood ...
Smashing Magazine: 100 Free High Quality WordPress Themes: 2010 Edition (5,901 views)

It’s hard to believe that a year has passed since our last WordPress theme collection, but there you have it — the time has come again. Once a year we feature the most useful and interesting...
Facebook Roadmap: Removing All Profile Boxes in Early January (5,034 views)

Back in October, Facebook published a "roadmap" of changes that would be taking place then through the beginning of 2010. We have posted articles on this here, but wanted to dig deeper into an area...
Mashable!: 10 Cool Facebook Status Tips and Tricks (4,894 views)

With Facebook’s ever-changing layout, and the fact that other social sites are encroaching on its real-time update strangle-hold, it’s easy to forget that there are some pretty nifty tricks you...
Smashing Magazine: Designing A Facebook Fan Page: Showcases, Tutorials, Resources (4,825 views)

Despite its privacy issues, Facebook clearly has a key role in global Internet activity. It has become a kind of universal social network, being used for both personal and business needs. For...
My Info: How to Show off your Facebook Page on your Personal Profile (4,289 views)

Facebook recently rolled out a wizard for creating a profile badge to show off your Facebook page(s). Its an image-based badge that doesn't require javascript or iframes, so it works just fine in...

11 Must-Have Plugins for Every WordPress Site

Tim Nicholson — Tue, 19 Jan 2010 19:53:39 +0000

Regardless of whether you are running a simple personal blog or using WordPress as a full-featured corporate content management system (CMS), you should seriously consider adding all of these plugins.

These plugins help you control spam, optimize your site for search engines, track site visits and other metrics, allow you to display related posts throughout your site based on what each user is currently reading, provide a mobile optimized version of your site, allow users to join your site with the existing social networking and/or email ID’s, and more.

1. Add to Any – Add Social Networking Share and Email

This plugin lets you easily add links for your users to share your articles on tons of social networking sites and through email. You can choose to highlight certain social networking sites and then have all the rest under a popup windows.

2. Akismet – Stop Comment SPAM

Akismet checks your comments against the Akismet web service to see if they look like spam or not. You need a WordPress.com API key to use it. You can review the spam it catches under “Comments.”

3. All in One SEO Pack – Optimize Your Site for Search Engines

Out-of-the-box SEO for your WordPress blog.

It allow you to change how the titles of your posts display, can automatically build meta descriptions and keywords based on the assigned categories and/or tags for your posts, and even lets you specifically set the post title, description, and keywords for individual posts or pages. It has some ther nice built-in SEO optimization tweaks as well.

4. Google Integration Toolkit – Track Your Site Visits and Other Valuable Metrics

Integrate Google services (Analytics, Webmaster Tools, etc.) with Your Blog.

This plugin adds the necessary Google Analytics code to your website. If you aren’t using that yet, you need to. Its the most comprehensive offering out there. It provides valuable insight into where your website traffic is coming from, how long people are staying on your site, what they are viewing and clicking on, etc.

It also supports Google Adsense ads, but I’m not using that feature on this site.

5. NuRelm Get Posts – Show Related News Articles on your WordPress Pages

Adds a shortcode tag [get_posts] to display a list of posts.

WordPress doesn’t have the ability to link page hierarchy to news article hierarchy. However, most WordPress sites would benefit from this. Most sites featuring products or services typically have related news categories for each of those products or services. Personal bloggers often do this as well in describing the various things they are passionate about. This is a very simple plugin that lets you specify a list of related posts on each of your pages.

For example, we have a WordPress page for each of our Facebook applications and also a related news category for each. With this plugin we can display related news articles for each individual Facebook application right on that applications feature page.

6. Subscribe To Comments – Let Users Subscribe to Article Comments via Email

Allows readers to receive notifications of new comments that are posted to an entry.

How many times have you gone to a website and commented on something and didn’t bother to go back and see additional comments that were made. This plugin solves that problem by letting your users subscribe to get email notifications when someone else comments on the same article.

7. WordPress.com Popular Posts – Show off your most Popular Articles

Shows the most popular posts, using data collected by WordPress.com stats plugin.

Pretty much all WordPress sites, whether commercial or personal, typically have a handful of articles that are very popular and drive most the traffic to the site. Why not show these articles off to every person that looks at your site? This plugin will let you do just that. On this website, we display popular content in our footer, but you can place it in your sidebar if you want.

8. WordPress.com Stats – Track Site Visits and Other Metrics Without Leaving WordPress

Tracks views, post/page views, referrers, and clicks. Requires a WordPress.com API key.

You might be asking why I’m recommending this after the rave review of Google Analytics above. Well, the reason is because this plugin works right in your WordPress dashboard for immediate viewing of your popular articles, search terms, etc. Its also required for the plugin above that shows popular posts.

9. WordPress Mobile Edition – Optimize your Site for Cell Phones and Touch Phones

Show your mobile visitors a site presentation designed just for them. Rich experience for iPhone, Android, etc. and clean simple formatting for less capable mobile browsers. Cache-friendly with a Carrington-based theme, and progressive enhancement for advanced mobile browsers.

Mobile web browsing is close to exceeding desktop web browsing these days and your full WordPress site will be slow and look like garbage on a cell phone. This particular plugin even shows an optimized version for touch phones, like the iPhone, Blackberry Storm, and Andriod devices.

10. Yet Another Related Posts Plugin

Returns a list of related entries based on a unique algorithm for display on your blog and RSS feeds. A templating feature allows customization of the display.

Its definitely a best-practice to display related articles to the user currently reading one of your articles. The better the matching logic, the more likely the list of articles will be interesting to that reader. This plugin does a great job of matching articles and it also uses a caching system for top performance.

11. Login with Social Networking ID’s – Gigya Socialize or JanRain RPX

Since this article specifically is my list of plugins that I think every WordPress site should have, I’m recommending one of these plugins so that your users don’t need to sign up directly for “yet another site”.

Both of these plugins support logging in with Google, Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, and tons of other social networking and email sites. Both work quite well and will significantly increase the number of registered users on your site. I prefer the Gigya plugin, but really only because it has more advanced Facebook Connect capability than RPX and lets developers do more with the data should we chose.

12. “Bonus Plugin” — XtremelySocial Facebook Invitations Theme Template

If you are using Gigya (or any other plugin that support Facebook Connect features), you can have a nice page that lets users invite their Facebook friends to your site. Please check our our article, How To Allow Users To Invite Facebook Friends On Your WordPress Site. Its easy to install and won’t tax your server. Please note that RPX does not support true Facebook Connect features, so this won’t work with that.

Future Article: Add Social Networking Capabilities to Your WordPress Site

We will be covering plugins for more full-featured social networking functionality in a separate article. If you are chomping at the bit for this right now, here are a few plugins worth taking a look at:

Facebook Connect WordPress Plugin by Socialable.es
WordPress Facebook Connect Plugin unofficially developed by one of the Facebook Developers
WordPress Multi-User (MU) with BuddyPress – Adds full-on social networking and community features
Mingle - Adds social networking features such as friends and activity streams to your site, but does provide login capability using Facebook or other social network ID’s.

I’m using a pretty heavily modified version of the Sociables.es plugin as it was the most comprehensive framework to start with. I tweaked the main code quite a bit and added full modules for displaying a user’s entire news stream/wall and displaying a list of all of a user’s Facebook friends. I’m trying to work with the developer to roll some of this functionality into his plugin or to work in logic that let’s myself and others add functionality to the plugin.

How To Allow Users To Invite Facebook Friends On Your WordPress Site

Tim Nicholson — Fri, 15 Jan 2010 22:23:50 +0000

In my first article about WordPress, I’ll show you how to easily add a page to your WordPress site that allows your users to invite their Facebook friends to check out your website.

You’ll first need to have Facebook Connect up and running on your site. More on that later.

What I did was make a WordPress Theme Template that will display the Facebook Invitation screen, complete with a friend selection box. It automatically pulls your website name, URL, and description to populate the Facebook invitation fields.

The reason I made this a theme template instead of a plugin, is because plugins are generally slow. WordPress loads all the code for the plugin on each page, whether the code is needed or not. This takes up valuable memory. Plus, the plugin gets called every time a page load, further cuasing overhead. With a theme template, nothing is loaded until the specific page that needs it is accessed. Some other advantages of this method are: it will automatically show your invite friends link in your page navigation, it will show up in the search engines, and it will show up in your WordPress site search as well.

To use the theme template, simply upload the template file (page-fbinvites.php) to your theme directory, then create a new page in WordPress and select “Page – Facebook Invites” as the Template.

It should work just fine for standard themes that have a header, sidebar, and footer. You must already have a Facebook connect plugin working on your site, though.

The original plugin built by a programmer at Facebook is called WP-FacebookConnect. It allows your users to log in with Facebook and uses Facebook profile pictures automatically on comments. It also lets your users optionally post their site comments back to their Facebook profile.

The plugin that I’m using on this site is the Sociable.es Facebook Connect WordPress Plugin. It is more robust than the plugin above as it adds a nice widget to show recent visitors, your Facebook friends that use the site, and your friend’s site comments. I have further modified it to show the full Facebook stream (your home page or your friend’s wall) and to also show a full list of all your Facebook friends regardless of whether they use the site or not. I’ve reached out the original developer to see about rolling these enhancements into his plugin.

One thing to be careful of, though, with both of the above plugins: If you already have a large number of users, make sure they log in to your site first before connecting with Facebook or they will get a completely new user ID created on your site.

There are many other Facebook plugins for WordPress, so you might want to just search for some in the plugin directory. Please let us know if you find a particularly interesting one.

I’d like to thank Adam over at http://www.intafuse.com/ for asking me to help get this working on his site. It motivated me to build the theme template as the easiest way to handle this.

If you’d like to help me out, please just spread the word about my Facebook Applications and the XtremelySocial.com website. Or maybe you might be able to help me one day with some WordPress stuff. I’ve had people ask how they could donate money to help pay for my dedicated webserver, so I finally set up an easy way to donate with Paypal.

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