We’ve been testing Gravity Forms here as part of our WordPress CMS, allowing users easy access to be able to make forms and manage them right inside WordPress. So far, our tests have been positive, and we’re set to open it up to all our users.

We’ve run into a challenge though as we get ready to roll this out. When set up and turned on in one of our sites (we run multi-site), only administrative users could access and see Gravity Forms.

We set up our campus users as editors, so they can’t go and switch themes and install rogue plugins. Even though the plugin was installed, editors couldn’t see Gravity Forms. They could see all our other functions and custom post types, but not Gravity Forms.

I wrote to their support, who suggested I use yet another plugin. That’s fine if I was just running one site, but at 140 sites and growing, I can’t be spending all day in that plugin turning things on and off. I figured there’d have to be a way to give the editor role access.

Enter some code. It’s one of the things that I really love about WordPress. With a bit of good code, you can do a lot of different things.

I added the following to my functions.php file, making Gravity Forms see that the user role of editor had the correct privileges and could run it. After some trial and error, I found the following snippet of code worked for an editor:

	function add_grav_forms(){
		$role = get_role('editor');
		$role->add_cap('gform_full_access');
	}
	add_action('admin_init','add_grav_forms');

So far, so good. I can make new forms, see entries and more as an editor, and I think I won’t have to manage this with a plugin, which is good to avoid that overhead where possible. Here’s what an editor sees now. The other things (taters, tots, etc) are custom post types we’ve developed.

Each year, we do a “donor honor roll,” or a listing of all the people who gave money to my University in the past year. We’ve transitioned it from a print publication, sometimes inserted as part of our alumni magazine, to a stand-alone web-based site.

Basically, it’s a ton of text broken into pages based on giving levels. Some of the pages are rather short – like those that gave over $50,000. The longest list, unsurprisingly, was our list of people who gave under $1,000. It was near 30,000 words long – which is a LOT of text in one WordPress page.

As a donor to this University (and in the under $1k group), I was able to find myself using WordPress’s built-in search tool. When I went to the full list page, it was blank. Well, our header, sidebars and footer was there, but the actual page content, the stuff being pulled by the the_content() tag, was missing.

It was in the database, but WordPress wasn’t actually displaying it on the page. At all.

After some poking, I discovered that it was too much data for PHP to do any functions/plugin actions on it before it was displayed. I didn’t really want to break it into multiple pages, so I Googled around and found other people having similar problems with very long pages and posts.

The solution: change some PHP settings to up certain buffer sizes. The lines I used were this:

/** Trick for long posts */
ini_set('pcre.recursion_limit',20000000);
ini_set('pcre.backtrack_limit',10000000);

Those two lines, placed in either your php.ini file or your wp-config.php file, give PHP a bit more space and power to process large amounts of text and make sure there’s enough room to do all the processing on a post that WordPress has to do.

We host our sites on a dedicated machine, so I’m not sure what, if any, effect this will have on WordPress sites hosted on a shared server. Otherwise, I’d recommend breaking them into multiple pages or posts.

One of the new features in the newer versions of Google Analytics (GA) is the ability to track event actions on a link. This can be not only clicks, in our case, on a button, link or graphic, but you can setup javascript triggers when a user starts, stops or pauses a video, for example.

Setting this up is pretty straightforward. First, you’ll need to add a quick snippet to your GA embed code, if you aren’t already. It’s the trackPageview function. You’ll add it under the line in your GA code where you’re account code is. For example:

<script type="text/javascript">

  var _gaq = _gaq || [];
  _gaq.push(['_setAccount', 'UA-XXXXX-X']);
  _gaq.push(['_trackPageview']);

  (function() {
    var ga = document.createElement('script'); ga.type = 'text/javascript'; ga.async = true;
    ga.src = ('https:' == document.location.protocol ? 'https://ssl' : 'http://www') + '.google-analytics.com/ga.js';
    var s = document.getElementsByTagName('script')[0]; s.parentNode.insertBefore(ga, s);
  })();

</script>

That will allow you to start tracking events on your pages. To add the event tracking action to a specific element on your page, you add a line of code that looks like this to your a tags.

onClick="_gaq.push(['_trackEvent', 'Videos', 'Play', 'Baby\'s First Birthday']);"

There are three fields there to pay attention to. The first is the category field. In the above example, it’s Videos. You can have multiple categories on a certain page. On our WordPress sites, we’re specifically tracking banners and small image buttons, often on the same page.

The second field is the action variable – which in the example above is Play. For our WordPress pages, we use the term Click. Through javascript and PHP variables, you can make your actions very specific, such as:

_gaq.push(['_trackEvent', 'Videos', 'Play - Mac Chrome');
_gaq.push(['_trackEvent', 'Videos', 'Play - Windows Chrome');

And finally, the label. Above, it's Baby's First Birthday. For our uses, we tailor this to the specific banner or button getting clicked. After a few days, we realized it would also be good to know what site the visitor was on. As with the other fields, this should be tailored to the specific content being clicked on. In the video example, you'd have something like this for different videos being played:

_gaq.push(['_trackEvent', 'Videos', 'Play', 'Gone With the Wind']);
_gaq.push(['_trackEvent', 'Videos', 'Play', 'Huckleberry Finn']);

To our user, our links look like this:

<a href="http://sites.jcu.edu/newsroom/?p=1697" onClick="_gaq.push(['_trackEvent', 'Taters', 'Click', 'Princeton Review Best in the Midwest (Site: JCU Newsroom ID: 1694)']);">
<img src="http://webmedia.jcu.edu/newsroom/files/2011/08/princeton_review-700x230.jpg" alt="Princeton Review Best in the Midwest" />
</a>

In our WordPress templates, it looks like this:

<a href="<?php echo $url; ?>" onClick="_gaq.push(['_trackEvent', 'Taters', 'Click', '<?php echo get_the_title($ID)." (Site: ".get_bloginfo('name')." ID: ".$id.")"; ?>']);">
<img src="<?php echo $img[0]; ?>" alt="<?php echo get_the_title($ID); ?>" />
</a>

We are tracking the individual banner that was clicked on, as well as the site the banner appears on. We add an additional field for our own, the actual ID of the banner asset. We do that just in case we need to find one quickly, or two banners get named the same thing. It’s happened.

That gives us a very nice report in GA that looks like this:

We can very easily filter by a specific site to see what buttons and graphics are getting clicked on. You could also add this to any static link as well, but I’m specifically interested on what specific calls to action are getting noticed by our users.

One of the reasons we selected WordPress was its Word-like interface for working with copy. For our users who had been using Dreamweaver for years, they’ve found it to be an easy transition.

The feedback we were getting is that what they were typing in the visual editor in WordPress wasn’t what they were seeing once when they previewed or saved their pages. They wanted to see actual line spacing, bulleted lists, blockquotes and more look more like what they’ll be like once they are published.

For our users, we want them to not see this:

But see this:

Luckily for us, it’s pretty easy to do this in WordPress. Here’s how:

Create a file in your theme’s main directory called editor-style.css. This is where you will style the HTML elements such as p, a, ul and so on for viewing in the editor. We made sure it matched up with our site’s CSS. Here are a few lines from it:

body, input, textarea, p{
  font-size: 14px;
  line-height: 24px;
 font-family: Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif;
  }

a{
	color: #003969;
  font-weight: bold;
  text-decoration: none;
}

blockquote{
	border: 4px solid #ebefef;
  border-width: 4px 0;
  margin: 0 0 32px -20px;
  font-family: 'MuseoSlab500', Georgia, "Times New Roman", Times, serif;
  padding: 8px 20px 0 40px;
}

blockquote p{
	margin-bottom: 8px;
	font-family: 'MuseoSlab500', Georgia, "Times New Roman", Times, serif;
}

Once that’s saved in your theme’s directory, open your functions.php file. You’ll need to insert this line somewhere in there:

add_editor_style();

Reload your editor and text put in the editor or using TinyMCE’s buttons should be styled correctly. Depending on your site’s CSS, you can add additional tags if you are styling them a certain way, such as hr or img.

Things mentioned:

• Scaling WordPress Site
• @scalingwp
• New Relic
• Pingdom

Want to learn more about WordPress and using it at your institution? Check out this webinar series at HigherEdExperts going on in a few weeks.

I use the Google XML-Sitemap plugin in all my WordPress installations. It’s a great way to tell Google, Yahoo and Bing when my site updates, and for them to easily see what’s new. It’s a nice set-and-forget kind of plugin.

I’ve been noticing something strange on one of my sites lately – the sitemap keeps timing out and producing nothing but a blank screen. That’s never good – so I’ve been digging into the site to suss out the issue.

I think part of the problem is that this particular site has over 2,700 blog posts. Building the sitemap for that site, and including all the tags and categories was killing the process.

My question today is this – should we be limiting the number of items we put in our sitemap.xml file? Should I cut it off at an arbitrary number, such as 25, or leave all 2,700 in there knowing that only the most recent 5 or so posts are the ones I really want Google to see.

Two weeks ago, my VP and I were interviewed by the campus newspaper. They’ve noticed the improvements we’ve been doing and wanted to know more about the process and why these changes were important. The article came out well, which, when you’re dealing with writers at a college paper, isn’t always a given. I should know – I wrote and edited my college newspaper.

The following week, the newspaper ran an positive editorial about the direction the web is taking and why the web is important. It was a nice pat on the back and is helping set expectations as we get ready to roll out a redesign in the new year.

My favorite bit was this editorial cartoon that ran with the story. I lol’d.

We talked about using WordPress as a CMS, magazine, ticketing system, book publishing tool, even a Blackboard/LMS replacement.

Here are the slides from our presentation:

I’ve gotten into watching all the World Cup soccer/football games going on the last few weeks. More than one cheer was heard down the hallway at work when the US scored in extra time to win their group and move on to the next round of play. I’m thinking of getting the marketing group vuvuzelas.

I was asked today to review a WordPress site a relative just launched. It was very nicely done, but I noticed that they were missing what I think to several crucial plugins that any WordPress installation should have installed. So, I decided to put together a winning 11 plugins for WordPress. They all play their position well and contribute to your website winning (or at least getting out of your group.)

Here’s the list in random order.

All-In-One SEO
One of the best SEO plugins available, this plugin makes short work of creating all the META tags you need. It generates tags automatically from the tags of your post, or allows you on the post entry page to customize any of the META tag it has access to, such as description and page title. Mostly, it’s a set it and forget it tool. Link.

Google Analyticator
This plugin adds in the necessary Google Analytics tracking code, which is helpful, but it’s the extra stuff this plugin does that’s nice. It will automatically track outbound links, downloads and more without having to install any other code. Perhaps the best feature of this plugin is that it can add graphs and stats to your dashboard page, which is incredibly helpful. Link.

Google XML Sitemaps
This plugin creates handy sitemaps and lets Google, Bing and others know when your site’s been updated. You can take the sitemap created by this plugin and enter it in the Google Webmaster area so Google knows exactly where to look to find what’s new on your site. Another set it and forget it plugin. Link.

Use Google Libraries
Google hosts many AJAX and javascript libraries as part of it’s AJAX Libraries API. Included in that bit is jQuery, which many many sites use. Letting Google host jQuery for you may speed up the loading of your site, since chances are your site visitor has been to some other website using Google’s version so it should be cached already, not to mention the fact that Google hosts all sorts of versions of jQuery and their nice and compressed. Link.

W3 Total Cache
I’m a big fan of WP-Super-Cache, but if you’re looking to take your caching and content delivery to the next level, check out W3 Total Cache. Not only will it cache and minify your files for quicker delivery, it will automatically move and deliver much of your static content (javascripts, CSS and more) from the CDN of your choice, including Amazon S3, SimpleCDN, Limelight and more. Link.

WPTouch iPhone Theme
This plugin automatically makes your site’s content look nice on mobile devices. It’s the best plugin for mobile devices – so much so that it’s used by all WordPress.com blogs. That’s a pretty good endorsement for a plugin. Even though it is simple, it does give you a bunch of advanced options to tweak the presentation of your blog on a mobile device. Link.

WP Security Scan
WordPress has gotten more secure over time, but no software is ever perfect. This plugin provides you a set of tools to make sure common security holes are closed and file permissions are set correctly, ensuring that your blog is locked down as much as possible. Link.

Akismet
Akismet is installed by default on every new WordPress installation and all you need to get it running is a WordPress API key. That takes a few seconds to get and this plugin does a very good job at keeping the spam off your blog. Link.

Automatic WordPress Backup
This plugin will backup your databases and other content and move it to Amazon S3. That piece of mind is worth the few pennies a month storage at Amazon will cost you. Set it and forget it. I blogged more extensively about backing up your WordPress installation a few months ago. Link.

ShareThis/AddThis
Many themes are now starting to have sharing tools built in, but these plugins make it very easy to add sharing tools to each post or page on your site. I like AddThis as they give you some analytics and other data about the sharing people are doing, including how they are sharing and what they are sharing. Data = good. Link.

WordPress Automatic Upgrade
WordPress has very much improved their upgrade process, but I like what the Automatic Update plugin does when it comes to updates. It will backup your databases and files, turn off plugins and put your site in a maintenance mode before doing upgrades. It updates files, reactivates the plugins and turns your site back on.

Am I missing any key plugins that you think are mission critical?

Me? I use MarsEdit, a stand-alone blogging program. In fact, I’m writing this post it in right now. MarsEdit is nice because it will connect to a myriad of blogging tools, giving you a one stop center for all your blogging needs. It will work with WordPress (including WordPress.com), Blogger, Tumblr, Squarespace, TypePad, Movable Type and dozens more through standard MetaWeblog and AtomPub interfaces.

Why a stand-alone program? A lot of reasons.

A few years ago, when I was a big Movable Type guy, I found myself losing a lot of posts, due to the browser and software crashing. I don’t get that as much now that I’ve switched to WordPress, but I’ve yet to lose a post in MarsEdit. Add in MarsEdit’s preview ability and you can tweak your posts before they ever touch the web, future posting, custom tags, categories and fields and MarsEdit can pretty much run your site for you.

I like having the ability to from one program manage all the blogs that I work on. As we evaluate using WordPress as a CMS on our campus, the ability to quickly manage content on dozens of blogs is compelling, especially the ability for MarsEdit to upload images and other media right to my servers.

Here’s the killer thing MarsEdit has added to MarsEdit 3, now available – the ability to edit WordPress pages. Now, I can have all my sites set up and easily edit and adjust posts and pages easily and quickly – no logging in to different back ends to manage content. I’m seriously pumped about this.

If you manage several blogs, perhaps on separate platforms, I think you’ll find MarsEdit a compelling program that will make your life easier. A 30 day trial is available and the software costs $39.99 USD. Worth every penny.

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