Since I’d honestly forgotten the details since the site-wide search was set up almost three years ago, I logged into the server and looked.  The answer is that we currently use “GT Search all Blogs” by Giovanni Tufo:

/*
Plugin Name: GT Search all Blogs
Plugin URI:
Description: Search in all Blogs, Posts, Pages(both in the title and in the post), based on "WordPress MU Recent Posts" by Ron Rennik
Version: 0.2
Author: Giovanni Tufo
Author URI: http://joevanni99.wordpress.com
*/

However, it looks like I have a problem… that plugin seems to be NO LONGER MAINTAINED.

The web page referenced is no longer online, the plugin isn’t listed in the WordPress plugin directory, and while I did find the author’s current website it is in Italian and I couldn’t find anything referencing WordPress.

Which, to me, means that I get to add yet another action to my “to do” list:

Find a new “search all blogs” plugin.

Now, what I have works, obviously, (and works well!) but as WordPress continues to evolve and change I’m not really comfortable using plugins that aren’t also tracking the development of WordPress. At some point in the future, this plugin may stop working… and then it’s up to me to fix it.

In looking through the Plugin Directory, this MultiSite Global Search plugin looks pretty good:

http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/multisite-global-search/

My one concern that I don’t see listed in the plugin info is whether or not it only searches public blogs on the site. I would hope that is the case, and if it doesn’t is probably a minor modification. (I have a number of “private” blogs on the site that are for experimentation and testing… but I don’t want those posts showing up in search results.)

Unfortunately, I don’t really seem to find any other “global search” or “search all blogs” plugins in the plugin directory.

What are other people using out there?

©2010 Behind The Blog. All Rights Reserved.

BUT NOT WITH ANYONE I WOULD RECOMMEND!!!

Here is what I got:

Now I very definitely did NOT recommend either of those accounts.  The “SMS” one appears to be a dormant account (at least, it has no tweets) and, no offense to Twitter, I wouldn’t go recommending their account from our corporate account.

What’s up, Twitter? Are you going to follow the recommendations that I have asked for in configuring the Tweet button? (using the plugin)

Or are you going to be randomly displaying recommendations of other people?

Because if you are saying “Voxeo (@voxeo) recommends you follow” and then including random users, YOUR “TWEET” BUTTON WILL BE YANKED OFF OUR SITE faster than you can say “tweet”!

I’m hoping this is just a failure of a half-baked feature…  and that it will soon be fixed.

What are others seeing?  If you are using the “Tweet” button and tweeting out links from your site, what recommendations do you see?

©2010 Behind The Blog. All Rights Reserved.

Last night I wanted to create a graph of the site-wide quarterly trend in the number of blog posts published across ALL blogs on our blogs.voxeo.com corporate blog portal. After looking through a great number of potential WordPress plugins (with special thanks to the always awesome Andrea_R for her pointers), I got rather frustrated because most of them seem to focus on either site-wide visitor stats, which I’m already tracking through Google Analytics, or provided some “activity” stats – but only for a single blog.  (And if I missed one that does what I outline below, I’d love to hear about it.)

I did finally get the kind of chart that I wanted… but through a kludgey use of SQL and Excel that I’ll describe below.  Here was my end goal:

THE REASON

My purpose in this was somewhat simple – I wanted to see and chart the growth of our content creation efforts on the blog server.  I want to show trends in the amount of content we are publishing… and then potentially tie those in to other trends such as increased visits (which I track through Google Analytics) and increased sales inquiries (tracked through Google Analytics and SalesForce.com).

I have other reasons, too. We have set up a number of different blogs on different topics. I would like to be able to see which of the blogs we are writing in more often than others… and which might need some attention – or potentially archiving.  I’d like a chart like the one above for each individual blog over time… or perhaps with the ability to graph multiple blogs on the same chart as a comparison.  You could see this being interesting data in a larger organization with different teams creating different blogs… to see which teams are creating the most online content.

To that point, it would be interesting to see which users are generating the most content… conceivably across all blogs.  In part from a individual performance point-of-view, and in part from a site-wide “health” point-of-view.  Our blog portal used to only have posts written by me. Now there are a good number of writers and to me that is the sign of a healthy content creation environment. As the one responsible for the overall site, I’d like to be able to see how the contributions are across the site.

I’d also like to be able to see the trend in comments.  How many comments?  How many track/pingbacks?

I’d like this data available in a quarterly basis, as I’ve shown here, and perhaps also in a monthly or weekly basis. Maybe even yearly if the site has been around for a bit.

THE IDEAL PLUGIN

In my mind, the ideal plugin would be something that is a panel in my WordPress admin interface where I go to generate these reports.  For performance, I wouldn’t want this hitting the database and running all the time – but just there to generate on-demand reports.  Some of the ideas I would like to see:

• Allow me to set a date range
• Choose from weekly, monthly, quarterly and yearly  (perhaps daily needs to be in there, too)
• Allow me to choose which of the blogs I want to get trends on (some of our blogs are experimental or, like our Events blog, have pages only and no posts)
• Choose whether to get trends on only public blogs or also private blogs
• Choose whether to aggregate all data together or to graph blogs separately
• Graph different types of data:
  • Count of posts by blog (or in aggregate)
  • Blog posts by user
  • Comments by blog (or in aggregate)
• Allow some modification of the title, legend, etc.
• Or… alternatively… just create a CSV file with all the data that could be brought into Excel

There’s probably more, like overall word count and stats like that… but that’s a start.  If you are reading this, what would you like to add?

THE KLUDGE

To get the chart I wanted, I had to sweep away some of the cobwebs on the SQL knowledge in my brain and play around at the MySQL command line.  I logged into the blog server, launched “mysql“, connected to the “wordpress” database and started playing around with “select” statements.  There is a table, wp_blogs, that lists all of your blogs and, most importantly, shows the “blog_id” for each blog.  For each blog, there is then a table named “wp_<blog_ID>_posts“, as in “wp_4_posts” which contains the info about the posts, dates, authors, etc.  I found that I could get the data I wanted by doing this:

 select ID, post_title, post_date from wp_4_posts where post_type = 'post' and post_status='publish';

Now, I didn’t include “post_author” in my work last night, but I wish I did because it would have let me gather the author stats I want.  Anyway, I continued mucking around until I eventually came up with a SQL statement that gave me a pipe-delimited text file that I could easily import into Excel on my Mac. (I couldn’t use commas because some of my post titles have commas!)  Naturally I then had to automate the process so I hacked up a very quick python script to create the relevant SQL statement and then send that to MySQL.

import os

for i in [4,7,8,11,12,13,15,16,19,22,24]:   # This is a list of the blog_ids of the blogs I care about

    target = "select ID, post_title, post_date from wp_"+str(i)+\    "_posts where post_type = 'post' and post_status='publish' ORDER BY post_date INTO OUTFILE '/tmp/b"+\    str(i)+ ".txt' FIELDS TERMINATED BY '|';"

    os.system('mysql wordpress -e "'+target+'"')

Like I said… a total kludge.

The end result was a series of pipe-delimited text files that I could import into Excel, combine together, and do some kludging there to get me the quarterly data which I could then chart.

If I knew how to use the various MySQL modules for python, I’m sure it could have been done much more elegantly. (And yes, I know that the python “os” module is deprecated in newer python versions and “subprocess” should be used instead… I’m old school and this was a quick late-night hack.) Or if my SQL knowledge weren’t so rusty, there’s probably some big SELECT statement that could join this all together and give me a nice unified output, perhaps even with the counts I want.

THE FUTURE

And if someone out there is handy with SQL or already has a WordPress plugin that does some or all of this… it would be great to see!  Given that my usage of WordPress MU (yes, I’m still on 2.9.2, but will be moving to 3.0 soon) is for a corporate blog portal, these are the kinds of statistics and trends that are of interest.  I would think that even if someone were running a more open site, these kind of trends would be helpful to know and understand.

Hopefully there’s just some plugin out there that I’ve missed!

What do you think?  What would you want in a plugin like this?

©2010 Behind The Blog. All Rights Reserved.

I’m looking for a new solution to link this site to our Facebook Page at www.facebook.com/voxeo. Right now I’m using Facebook’s ability to import a RSS feed to pull in all blog posts from the entire blogs.voxeo.com site into our Facebook page. I’m just pulling in our “All Blogs” feed.

Here’s the problem – Facebook is incredibly inconsistent with pulling in the RSS feed. Sometimes a post here gets pulled into Facebook quickly… other times it might be hours after posting… sometimes days later! Sometimes no articles get posted to the Facebook page and then a whole batch of posts gets posted all at once.

It’s rather frustrating.

So what I want to do is reverse the process. Instead of waiting for Facebook to pull our posts from the RSS feed, I want to push our posts over to Facebook right after they are published here. Essentially the same kind of thing we are doing to our Twitter account.

In looking at all the various WordPress plugins related to Facebook, it looks like this plugin might do the trick:

Simple Facebook Connect

The description includes this line:

• Automatically Publish new posts to Facebook Profile or Fan Page

Which sounds like what I want.

Anyone use this plugin today? Do you use another plugin to publish to Facebook?

©2010 Behind The Blog. All Rights Reserved.

The answer of course is that you can very easily do this courtesy of the Domain Mapping Plugin for WordPress MU.

Astute observers of this Voxeo blog site might have already noticed that if you view our blog portal at “blogs.voxeo.com” you might see (depending upon when you visit the site) blog posts from the Tropo blog, as in this image:

When you click on that link, though, you are taken to a site with a different look and feel:

and, in fact, the domain name is different. While the portal and most of the other blogs are off of the “blogs.voxeo.com” domain, this Tropo post is off of “blog.tropo.com“.

Both sites, though, are running on the identical WordPress MU server.

Here’s what I did:

STEP 1: INSTALL THE DOMAIN MAPPING PLUGIN

First I downloaded the Domain Mapping plugin code from the plugin page at the WordPress.org Plugin Directory. I then followed the installation instructions with regard to putting the files in the appropriate places and making necessary edits:

1. Copy sunrise.php into wp-content/. If there is a sunrise.php there already, you'll just have to merge them as best you can.
2. Copy domain_mapping.php into wp-content/mu-plugins/.
3. Edit wp-config.php and uncomment the SUNRISE definition line: define( 'SUNRISE', 'on' );

STEP 2: CONFIGURE THE SITE ADMIN SETTINGS

With the plugin installed, I had a new menu choice under “Site Admin” called “Domain Mapping” where I simply entered the IP address of the blog server and the host name to use for CNAME records (and yes, I crossed out IP address in the image):

STEP 3: CONFIGURE APACHE TO HANDLE NEW DOMAINS

In order for this to work, your webserver has to be able to know that it should be answering HTTP requests for a domain name and what content it should serve up for that domain. In our case, we use Apache and so I edited httpd.conf and added a “VirtualHost” directive pointing blog.tropo.com to my WordPressMU installation (not the real IP address, obviously):

<VirtualHost 1.2.3.4:80>
        ServerName blog.tropo.com
        DocumentRoot /var/www/html/wpmu
</VirtualHost>

Now, I do understand that I actually didn’t need to specifically create a separate VirtualHost entry for blog.tropo.com because I already had an entry for blogs.voxeo.com and because that entry is listed first it would be the default entry for unspecified domains. However, for my own sanity and ease of administration, I like creating separate VirtualHost directives for each domain so that I can easily see in the Apache config what domains it is answering for. More info about using the VirtualHost directive can be found in the Apache documentation. Obviously if you are hosting a zillion domains, you may not want to do this… but in my case I’m only hosting a few.

A quick restart of the Apache server and it’s now ready to answer for that domain.

STEP 4: CONFIGURE DNS TO POINT DOMAIN TO YOUR SERVER

At this point, you need configure your DNS records to actually point to your WPMU server. In my case, I requested our network operations team to add a CNAME record pointing blog.tropo.com to blogs.voxeo.com. In DNS-speak, the record looks like this:

blog.tropo.com.         120     IN      CNAME   blogs.voxeo.com.

For good measure, we also had them point “blogs.tropo.com” over to blogs.voxeo.com in case someone mistyped “blogs” instead of “blog”.

STEP 5: CONFIGURE THE BLOG SETTINGS

With DNS now pointing to your WPMU server, the final step is to configure your blog to respond to this new domain. In the WPMU dashboard for your blog, under the “Tools” menu, there is now a new “Domain Mapping” menu choice as shown in the screen capture on the right side.

This screen lets you add domains to the blog and also configure which domain you want to be the primary domain. Here is a shot of what the page looked like during the setup process after I had added blog.tropo.com to the blog setup:

Once you save the settings and choose the primary domain, your blog now answers with that domain name. If you look at blog.tropo.com you will see that it is its own site and has no sign of being hosted on the “blogs.voxeo.com” server.

[NOTE: The visual difference is because we created a separate WordPress theme for the Tropo blog. It could, of course, have continued to use our standard theme but just started answering from the new domain.]

One note about adding domains…. the box to add a new domain already has “www.” at the beginning, but you do in fact enter the entire domain name into that box, even if you will never use “www.” on the domain. For instance, here I added “blogs.tropo.com”:

I am guessing that the creators of the plugin added “www.” to the beginning of the field so that novices to DNS wouldn’t enter in “www.example.com” if they really wanted “example.com”. I don’t really know why they did it… the key point is that you enter into that box the domain name you want to point to this specific blog.

With the new domain added, here is what the page now looks like – note the link to delete a secondary domain if I wanted to:

That’s it… with these five steps you are done. Your blog will now answer to a different domain name and, with a different theme, can appear to be a completely different site.

DOMAIN MAPPING AND WPMU SITE-WIDE FEATURES

There is one caveat to all this… if you go back to the beginning of this post, I suggested you go to the blogs.voxeo.com portal and click on a Tropo link, which brought you over to a blog.tropo.com post with a different look and feel. There is also one big gotcha here:

There is no way to get back to the Voxeo blog portal from the Tropo blog.

There you are, on the Voxeo blog portal… as you go through the posts for the various (non-Tropo) blogs, they all have the same look and feel and you can easily navigate back to the blog portal or to other Voxeo blogs. Then you click on a Tropo blog link and… ta da… you’re on some other site with no way to get back.

Now this was a deliberate design choice on our part. We want the Tropo blog to be a completely separate site. That’s our choice. And yes, we’ve thought of adding a link to “Other Voxeo blogs” and we may well do that… but for the moment the sites are separate.

My point is that the “blogs.voxeo.com” portal page uses a plugin to display the last 5 entries across ALL blogs hosted on the site.

That plugin doesn’t differentiate between “blogs hosted on the site that answer to ‘blogs.voxeo.com’” and “blogs hosted on the site that answer to other domains“. It just displays the last five posts across ALL hosted blogs.

In our case, I’m okay with it displaying all posts. I want the portal to be an aggregation of all Voxeo content posted out to the web. I’m okay with the user experience of dropping someone into a different site and requiring them to use the Back button on their browser to return to the blog portal.

I’m personally okay with that – but you may not be when you do your own domain mapping…

You need to think about how “site-wide” features will interact with blogs hosted on different domains. If you have a “portal page” like we do that displays the last X posts, will you have it include those from other domains (as I do)? If you use the “site-wide tags” plugin, will you include all posts from all blogs in those lists?

If you do NOT want to include posts from those other domains, you’ll have to muck around with your site-wide plugins to figure out how to constrain the blogs that are included in those plugins. I don’t have any answers here on how easy or not it is to do. I can imagine what I would probably have to do with the site-wide listing I use for our portal page… but again, I don’t have an issue with the current setup. Anyway, you need to think about this.

WHY AM I DOING ALL THIS?

You may be wondering why I went through all this with the domain mapping. The answer is really this:

I want to simplify the amount of system administration we have to do.

With separate WordPress installs, you have to administer each one individually. Separate WordPress upgrades… separate plugin upgrades… separate backups… etc., etc., etc.

I don’t want that. I want to run our sites on one server that I can then centrally administer, backup, etc. I can also easily add or change plugins and make those new features rapidly available across our blogs. If it’s easy to administer, it’s also easy to backup and restore… and I’d rather be writing content than doing sysadmin.

From the Voxeo perspective, setting up “blog.tropo.com” was the first step. We also just moved “labs.voxeo.com” from a static site to one based on the blog server. In the future we’re going to look at moving blog.imified.com over onto this server and maybe even the VoiceObjects developer portal (we’ll see on that one). We also have some older sites like RocketSource.org that we may bring over to host on the site and give them an update in the process.

All in all this ability to do domain mapping is just another example of the power that WordPress gives you to create a blog site for your company or organization.

I hope this post helps with setting this up… feel free to leave comments or questions, although I will say that I have no affiliation with the domain mapping plugin beyond simply using it, so while I can answer questions about what we did, I may or may not be able to answer broader questions about the plugin.

©2010 Behind The Blog. All Rights Reserved.

Yes, indeed, with WordPress 3.0 the separate “WordPress MU” will go away and “WPMU” will simply become another mode of the main WordPress stream. Per the beta instructions on configuring multi-site capability, it appears that all we’ll have to do is set a WP config variable:

define (‘WP_ALLOW_MULTISITE’, true ) ;

I say “it appears” because I’m admittedly too chicken to try out the WP 3.0 Beta 1 on this production site. After all, the blog post is very clear that 3.0 Beta 1 is an “early” beta. However, I may certainly try it out on one of my staging/testing servers. I’m looking forward to continuing to watch the evolution and to eventually running it here.

P.S. Since this “Behind The Blog” site seems to often be read by people investigating WPMU, let me explain the issue a bit more. Right now, WordPress MU is a separate installation from regular, plain-old WordPress. However the main development and evolution of WordPress happens on the regular WordPress code base and then is ported over to the WPMU code base. As a result, when a new version of regular WP is released there is a time delay before when the corresponding version of WPMU is available. Sometimes this isn’t a big deal… but sometimes you might want a specific WP fix or feature in WPMU sooner than the team is able to port it. Also, there are two places to report bugs (WP and WPMU) and also submit fixes, etc.

With WordPress 3.0, the two code bases will be merged so that there is only one stream of code going forward. This should make it much simpler for site administrators overall – and ensure that WPMU sites can always be up-to-date with the latest “regular” WP fixes and features.

©2010 Behind The Blog. All Rights Reserved.

After evaluating a good number of WordPress plugins that provide this functionality, I wound up choosing Michael Erlewine’s Yet Another Related Posts Plugin (YARPP), based primarily on the number of recommendations I saw for it, the extensibility that it has (although I’m admittedly using hardly any of its power right now), and also the fact that it put relevant posts out to both the web page and the RSS feed. Here’s a view of what the RSS feed looks like for the same post as shown in the image to the right:

Now, I set the plugin to only show 3 related posts in RSS and 5 for the web site. ALL of that is configurable, including the text that appears above the related posts, the HTML used, styles, etc. There are so many options, in fact, that I could easily see burning up a chunk of time just experimenting with it all. Me? I’m using mostly the default settings right now and it’s working fine.

WordPress MU Issues

I installed the YARPP plugin in the “plugins” directory and then activated it site-wide. I chose “plugins” vs “mu-plugins” purely because I wanted the option to not use it on some blogs… I don’t actually know if it would work in mu-plugins. It all worked fine.

There are just two issues from a WPMU point-of-view:

• Related posts only from the SINGLE blog – The YARPP plugin works with only a single blog, which is probably what you want 99% of the time. However, in a tightly controlled WPMU environment like this corporate blog portal, it would be interesting to try seeing related posts from across ALL blogs on this site. I could see that helping send traffic across the different blogs.
• Related posts NOT appearing in the all-blogs RSS feed – As I mentioned earlier, YARPP nicely puts related posts into the RSS blog for each individual blog. However, we’re generating an “All Voxeo Blogs” RSS feed to which the majority of people subscribe. That feed also goes out to our Facebook page and is delivered by email to subscribers. YARPP does not add posts to this AllVoxeoBlogs feed, largely because we’re generating this feed using another WPMU plugin. At some point I need to look into how I can add in hooks or somehow get related posts there.

Given that YARPP isn’t targeted at WPMU, I wouldn’t expect it to do these things, but they would be wonderful enhancements… or a reason to have a YARPP-MU plugin.

Those issues aside, I’ve been very pleased with the plugin thus far and have to really applaud Michael Erlewine for his great work and for making the plugin available.

Have any of you reading this tried other “related posts” plugins with WPMU?

©2010 Behind The Blog. All Rights Reserved.

Over the weekend I saw the recent post on the WordPress.com blog about posting source code which pointed me to the excellent “SyntaxHighlighter Evolved” plugin from “Alex / Viper007Bond” (view his plugin page) that is in turned based on the JavaScript SyntaxHighlighter package from Alex Gorbatchev. I installed it in WordPress MU, tested it out on an experimental blog I use for testing and then activated it sitewide.

Now, when I simply bracket VoiceXML code with “[ xml ]” and “[ /xml ]” (without the spaces), it comes out looking great. Here is an example:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<vxml version = "2.1" >

  <form>
    <block>
    <prompt>
      Hello World. This is my first telephone application.
    </prompt>
    </block>
  </form>
</vxml>

It is, of course, not limited to merely XML. There are 20+ languages listed on the SyntaxHighlighter ’syntax files’ page. I expect that we’ll be using it now to be able to better write about the Tropo.com languages over on the Tropo blog.

One aspect I quite like about the plugin is the menu you get when you move your mouse over the source code. As shown in the image to right, you can easily:

• view the source code in a pop-up window
• copy the code to your clipboard
• print the code

Given that we’re planning to make more tutorials available, having the ability to copy and paste the code easily directly from the blog post is a great feature.

Many kudos to the two Alex’s for making both the underlying JavaScript library and also the WordPress plugin. And if you run a WordPress or WordPress MU site, you can download the SyntaxHighlighter plugin and install it in your site, too.

P.S. I should in fairness point out that a couple of colleagues have mentioned SyntaxHighlighter to me over the past few months… I just never had a chance to check it out until now.

I had to go back into the WPMU editor on the website and paste in the correct VoiceXML code.

I’m not sure if the issue is with MarsEdit, my WPMU config or the SyntaxHighlighter plugin… but obviously I can’t really write posts with code in them offline until I figure it out…

©2010 Behind The Blog. All Rights Reserved.

All I want to do is publish new tweets… I don’t want to create blog posts with tweets. So I’ve known for quite some time that I’ve been using the wrong plugin for the job… but it’s worked okay, so I continued. I tried a different plugin over on the VoiceObjects Developer Blog, but I haven’t been as happy with it because it tended to shorten the titles of blog posts too much when posting to Twitter.

However, recently my colleague Ron Blaisdell pointed me to WordTwit from BraveNewCode and I have to say that it is outstanding at what I need it to do. Once you install the plugin, there is a very simple configuration screen where you enter your username, password and can change the format of what gets tweeted out:

In our case, I chose to edit the message to be “[title] - [link]” so that there is no prefix on any of the tweets.

You then can choose which URL shortener you want to use – I chose bit.ly:

After you save the configuration options, you then can go back in and enter your Bit.ly login and API key:

This makes it so that all of your shortened URLs then show up in your bit.ly account where you can see statistics around who has clicked on them, etc.

Because we use Google Analytics, I also checked off an option to add UTM tracking codes to URLs so that I can find any inbound traffic in GA easily.

I’ve been using WordTwit here on blogs.voxeo.com for a bit now and have been very pleased with how well it works. I haven’t yet installed it on the VO Developer Blog but will be doing so soon. Kudos (and thanks!) to the folks at BraveNewCode for developing such a great plugin.

Have you tried WordTwit? Or what plugin do you use for updating Twitter?

©2010 Behind The Blog. All Rights Reserved.