Clearskys.net Blog

Documentation and Forum sites down

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Hi all

This is just a short note to say that the Documentation and Support forum sites are currently not very stable.

This is due to Media Temple having an increasing number of problems with their Grid server, which still hosts those sites.

Luckily, I had already moved this blog to our new Slicehost server. As soon as I can regain consistent access to the old server it looks like I will have to bring forward the transfer. There goes my weekend…..

Tags: gridserver, mediatemple, unstable

Introducing StayPress

After a great deal of work, I am pleased to introduce a sneak peek at the new StayPress system.

StayPress is a collection of plugins that will turn a standard vanilla installation of WordPress or WordPress MU into a property management and bookings system. Of course when I say Property, I actually mean any bookable resource of which there is a finite availability. So the StayPress system will be able to manage property rentals, hotel room rentals, conference rooms and centres, B and B’s, training rooms, bands, etc…

The new StayPress system takes over from the previous clearskys.net collection of plugins and brings everything together into a more manageable and co-ordinated group.

Whilst there will obviously be a downloadable version of the StayPress plugins, we are also planning a hosted version of the system for those who do not want the trouble of running their own website.

If you would like to be kept informed of updates and our release dates then please subscribe to either this sites RSS Feed or visit StayPress.com and subscribe to the StayPress only blog.

StayPress is in no way affiliated with Automattic or WordPress, other than being built on one of the best web CMS systems around.

Tags: availability, booking, calendar, mu, property management, staypress, wordpress

If you can read this…

I have just moved this blog across to our new server, if you are reading this message then your DNS has updated correctly and you are looking at the new site.

At the moment I haven’t transfered everything across so I will be spending the next few days going though all of the posts and pages and tracking down what is missing or not working. At the moment NONE of the sample clearskys.net plugins are installed and active but I will get around to bringing them across.

Thank you for your patience.

Tags: mu, transfer, update, wordpress

Amazon establish Service Health Dashboard

Are you tired of wondering if it’s your system or code that is causing a problem, or if the service you are using is the reason for all your errors?

Amazon yesterday announced the availability of their new Service Health Dashboard.

Customers have told us that having such a status indicator would be more useful than visiting a service-specific forum to see if messages have been posted about an issue with a service. As soon as we know about a change in the status of a service, we’ll change the color as appropriate on this page. It is intended as the single, authoritative source of information on the status of our services, eliminating doubt as to when and where to check.

It looks very thorough, displaying not only the current status but also a historical record. It even has RSS feeds for each of the Amazon services. I recommend bookmarking the page and keeping it handy if you are a serious Amazon AWS user.

Tags: amazon, aws, dashboard, ec2, s3, status

Quick Tip - Installing Eaccelerator with Litespeed

As mentioned in an earlier post, I am currently in the process of moving web hosts. As late as this morning I was perfectly happy with the configuration I had set up using the Nginx webserver and was ready to start the move, until I decided to make life easier for myself and try the Litespeed webserver (which WordPress.com uses) instead. Installation went swimmingly, despite a 3 hour power cut at a critical stage, up until the point I decided to install Eacceelerator as well and then things sort of stopped. For those of you who find yourself in the same situation - there is an extra step you need to perform to get Litespeed to see your Eaccelerator extension.

Once you have compiled Eaccelerator on your server (even if you use the Litespeed PHP compiler built into the administration website), you may find that you will need to copy the eaccelerator.so from the standard directory into the very strange looking Litespeed extensions directory before it can be enabled in your php.ini file.

To find out the directory you need, create a php file with the following content on your webserver:

and load it in your browser. You are looking for a line under PHP Core that looks like this:

You may need to create the directory, as on my installation it didn’t exist, but once you have the eaccelerator.so file in the right place you can add the following to your php.ini file:
extension="eaccelerator.so"
eaccelerator.shm_size="16"
eaccelerator.cache_dir="/tmp/eaccelerator"
eaccelerator.enable="1"
eaccelerator.optimizer="1"
eaccelerator.check_mtime="1"
eaccelerator.debug="0"
eaccelerator.filter=""
eaccelerator.shm_max="0"
eaccelerator.shm_ttl="0"
eaccelerator.shm_prune_period="0"
eaccelerator.shm_only="0"
eaccelerator.compress="1"
eaccelerator.compress_level="9"

Finally, restart the Litespeed server, create the cache directory (shown in the above configuration details if it doesn’t already exist) and run your phpinfo() page again. If it has all worked you should see the following at the bottom of the first block of information:

More notes on this issue can be found here and here

Tags: eaccelerator, litespeed, nginx, ubuntu, wordpress

Hacking Kses

As I spent a great deal of time (and hunting on the Internets) on this I thought I would share the result of my efforts and hopefully save your sanity and hairline.

kses is an HTML/XHTML filter written in PHP. It removes all unwanted HTML elements and attributes, and it also does several checks on attribute values. kses can be used to avoid Cross-Site Scripting (XSS).

It is built into WordPress and WordPress MU and acts on all the content you enter into your posts and pages and strips out all the nasties that WordPress doesn’t think you should be using. 99% of the time you won’t even notice that it is there, but everynow and then you will try to include something in your post and it just won’t save. In a round-a-bout way, this is the situation I found myself in earlier this week.

Try as I might, I just couldn’t get WordPress MU to accept style attributes (this is also the case for normal WordPress). Everytime I saved a post the style would be stripped out completely (MU also removes class and id attributes as well). Most annoying and after pulling out what little hair I had left I turned to the Oracle of all knowledge.

More »

Tags: class, id, kses, stripping, style, wordpress

Server moves, testing and updates

This blog post is, in all honesty, a way of testing the blogging bundle in TextMate. Yes I have succumbed… I’m only 14 days into the 30 day trial period but it certainly looks like I will be putting my hand in my pocket and buying a license.

After months (over a year actually) of being reliant on Eclipse PHP I pretty much thought that my process of development was as streamlined as it could get. Boy was I wrong!! I highly recommend trying it out (Mac owners only though I’m afraid).

Server Moves

We’ve been hosted on the MediaTemple Grid-Server now for almost a year, and whilst it has been mostly fine and certainly better than our previous hosts, the extra level of control and ssh access has spoilt me a bit. I was planning on upgrading to a MediaTemple DPV server until I found Slicehost.

I’ve been playing with a basic Slicehost slice for a few weeks now and have managed to get WordPress MU running on it with the Nginx webserver and PHP5 running as a FastCGI process. I may write up a tutorial at a later date, but all I can say for now is Wow, does that thing fly. It certainly shows up the availability and latency problems MediaTemple have been having over the past 4 months.

I will be posting as parts of the site make the move over to the new server, so if some things stop working, then you know why.

Development Updates

I must admit to being rather inspired by the recent release of the new BuddyPress website and WordPress MU plugins. So I am contemplating taking the Property management plugins in a similar direction (though obviously not by getting a job at Automattic).

The main Property management plugin is very close to approaching an Alpha release. It is primarily a backend administration plugin that has no interaction with the public side of the WordPress powered site. The front-end plugins will use the information generated by the management plugin to display the required information to your site visitors, these will be released a bit later.

I have the Property management plugin currently in use and undergoing testing on one WordPress MU powered site and so far it seems to be behaving itself, there are a few bugs I am working through (and browser issues - yes I am looking at you Internet Explorer) but nothing major.

I will post more on this early next week, and maybe include a screencast of some of the functionality, if I can manage to operate a computer after my planned birthday weekend Irish pub crawl.

Tags: buddypress, management, mediatemple, plugins, property, slicehost, wordpress

Making the move to PHP5

Following on from this post made late last year, I have decided to move forward with PHP5 based development where it is appropriate.

This doesn’t mean that all future versions of our plugins will require PHP5, but if a particular bit of functionality can be developed quicker using PHP5 only code, then that will be the way I will approach it.

Also, whilst I am on the subject of backward compatibility, as WordPress 2.5 brings with it a brand new design to the administration system, I will also be working to this design for the plugin administration pages (though for the time-being I’m stuck because WordPress MU still has the old look).

So far only the development versions of the Property plugin and MyDashboard 0.5 are PHP5 only

Tags: development, php5, plugin, wordpress

WordPress 2.5

Hi all
I’ve been busy beavering away behind the scenes on a few new plugins and websites which I hope to be announcing shortly. In the meantime, the WordPress team have announced the release of WordPress 2.5. They haven’t made a 2.5 tag for this release in their SVN repository yet, so those of us who are upgrading via SVN will need to use the Trunk for now (if you don’t know what this all means read here).

I’ve just installed the latest version on my development server, and can report that so far the latest version of MyDashboard looks to be working correctly. If anyone would like to write a “Right Now” dashboard gadget or work on a style to emulate the new WordPress dashboard then please let me know and I will look to include your work in a new release.

In the meantime, it’s back to the grindstone for me.

Tags: 2.5, mydashboard, style, theme, wordpress

Plugin refactoring

Beginning today (well in a bit, I’m on a quick coffee break) I will be performing a complete audit on all of our property related plugin code (enquiries, bookings and property manager) and also moving everything from Google Code across to it’s new home at Assembla.

Since starting developing these plugins, I have increased their scope and functionality to the point, now, where they have started to overlap in more and more complex ways (development versions). Whilst this is fine, to a point, for a single person to maintain, I have increasingly found myself spending longer trying to work out where a particular bit of functionality should belong. So I dread to think what trouble there will be with more than one person to maintain the code base.

What does this mean?

As I don’t currently know of anyone who downloads the plugins using SVN, it will mean very little to everyone out there. Downloads of the existing versions will still function as before. The code held in the Google code SVN will be frozen as of today.

For myself, and the new team, it provides us with a lot of new toys such as an integrated Trac system, ticketing and project management. Which will, hopefully, mean the new development will move forward quicker and in a more structured fashion than my current “code when I have time” development method.

More announcements coming soon.

Tags: google code, plugin, property, svn, trac, wordpress