MaisonBisson.com » bsuite

Wufoo Forms WordPress Embed Shortcode

Casey Bisson — Mon, 23 Mar 2009 16:35:30 +0000

I tossed this together a while ago, and it even made it in to bSuite for a time, but I don’t have a need for it anymore, and I’m cleaning house.

function shortcode_wufoo( $arg ){
 // [wufoo id=z7x4m0 domain=place.wufoo.com]

 $arg = shortcode_atts( array(
 'id' => FALSE,
 'domain' => FALSE,
 'height' => 500,
 ), $arg );

 if( !$arg['id'] || !$arg['domain'] )
 return( FALSE );

 return( str_replace( array( '%%id%%','%%domain%%','%%height%%' ), array( $arg['id'], $arg['domain'], $arg['height'] ), 'Fill out my Wufoo form!' ));
}
add_shortcode( 'wufoo', 'shortcode_wufoo' );

Download the simple plugin here: wufoo_shortcode.php. Save it as wufoo_shortcode.php, upload it to your WordPress’ wp-content/plugins/ directory, then activate it.

To use it you’ll have to have a Wufoo account and forms. Then simple put in a shortcode like this [wufoo id=z7x4m0 domain=place.wufoo.com] in one of your posts or pages. The result will look like this.

Slideshare WordPress Embed Shortcode

Casey Bisson — Mon, 16 Mar 2009 16:30:13 +0000

I’m cleaning house in bSuite, and I’ve decided that this shortcode function for embedding Slideshare items in WordPress needs to go. Rather than totally toss it away, however, I’m posting it here in case somebody else finds it useful.

	function shortcode_slideshare( $arg ){
		// [slideshare id=211578&doc=misty-holland-1198496990903941-2&w=425]
 
		$arg = shortcode_atts( array(
			'id' =&gt; FALSE,
		), $arg );
 
		if( ! $arg['id'] )
			return( FALSE );
 
		return( str_replace( '%%id%%', $arg['id'], '

' ));
	}
 
	add_shortcode('slideshare', array(&amp;$this, 'shortcode_slideshare'));

Tricky Uses of bSuite

Casey Bisson — Tue, 18 Nov 2008 16:55:14 +0000

After writing the project page for wpSMS I didn’t have much more to say in a blog post announcing it. The cool thing about writing Pages in WordPress is that I can create a taxonomy like /projects/wpsms/ to place them in. The downside is that new pages never appear in the RSS feed.

So I need both the page and a blog post to announce it. I could have simply copied the content from the wpSMS page into a blog post, but that creates confusion and splits the audience between the two pages. Instead, I’m using two bSuite features: the [include] shortcode and the post redirection support.

Create the page.
Start a new post.
1. In the post body put the include shortcode like this: [include post_id="123" field="post_content"].
2. In the custom fields put an entry with the key: “redirect” and the full URL to to your page.
Relax, you’re done.

The include shortcode will copy all the content from the page (so you don’t have to manage it twice), and the redirect custom field will tell bSuite to redirect anybody trying to read that post to your page.

Do WordPress Pages Better With bSuite

Casey — Wed, 24 Sep 2008 19:27:14 +0000

WordPress‘ Pages feature makes the popular blogging platform a sophisticated CMS. bSuite adds a few features to make it even better.

Write excerpts, tag, and categorize your pages

WordPress excerpts are an underused but powerful feature that allow you to explain to your readers why they should read the page you wrote. Tagging and categorization of pages help improve the findability of those pages, especially in search engines. Native WordPress doesn’t support excerpts, tags, or categories for pages, but bSuite does. Whenever you edit a page you’ll see the same tools that you do when writing posts.

Automatically insert anchors in your page

There’s nothing wrong with long pages, but you can make it easier for your readers to navigate them by if you break it up into sections. When you use the innerindex shortcode, bSuite will insert an automatically index of all the headings (the h1 through h6 tags) in your page. This also works in regular blog posts.

Automatically list sub-pages

You can easily organize pages into any structure that suits your content, but having to manually manage all the links into that hierarchy can be tiresome. The list_pages shortcode solves that in a jiffy. Options to the shortcode allow you to set how deep the list is and other features.

Automatically list sub-pages with excerpts

One especially useful feature of the list_pages shortcode is the ability to include the excerpt from each of the listed pages. You can even put the innerindex shortcode in the excerpt (see that at work here).

bSuite 4 beta 2

Casey Bisson — Wed, 11 Jun 2008 19:19:40 +0000

I announced the bSuite 4 public beta not long ago, now I’ve just posted a new version to SVN that addresses some of the bugs and fleshes out some of the features. I have yet to update the bSuite page, but here’s a preview of what’s new or changed:

Additional stats reports
WP2.5-style tag input tools on the Page edit screen*
WP2.5-style category selector on the Page edit screen*
WP2.5-style excerpt input on the Page edit screen*
For multi-author sites: ability to grant edit permissions by role for each page (with a configurable default)
An “include” shortcode that makes it easy to show content from one post or page on another.

About the new shortcode, use it like this:
[include post_id=“1234” url=“a url to a post or page in your blog” field=“post_excerpt”]

One of post_id or url is required; field is optional and defaults to post_excerpt first, then to post_content if there is no excerpt.

*Why would you want to input tags, set categories, or add an excerpt to a Page? They help readers find and explore our content. What’s so wrong with that?

bSuite 4 Public Beta

Casey Bisson — Sun, 01 Jun 2008 22:00:00 +0000

I’ve had a lot of features on the table for bSuite for a while, but this recently discovered comment from John Pratt (whose Smorgasboard.net is a lot of fun), kicked me into gear to actually get working on it again. The result is bSuite 4, which is probably what bSuite 3 should have been all along.

The big news is that I’ve finally revamped stats tracking to work with caching mechanisms like WP Cache, WP Super Cache, Varnish, or whatever else. I’ve also got the search word highlighting working again, and that’s cache-friendly too. Yay for javascript, I say.

And in addition to making the stats cache-friendly, I’ve made them a little smarter, faster, and more useful. bSuite now tracks sessions, and reports both the number of page loads and the number of visitors to your site. To improve performance, stats are first recorded to a small table for incoming hits, then periodically processed (“migrated”) into the tables used to report stats. This reduces contention and improves write speeds for incoming stats hits.

The stats report now gets graphs for both the previous 24 hours and 30 days of activity. And because unlike external stats solutions, bSuite is integrated into your site, it can also report on your most popular tags and categories based on traffic.

I’ve also implemented a large number of improvements, bug fixes from the previous versions. Big thanks go to Matthew Batchelder (who helped with the javascript code), Jon Link (who both pointed out a lot of bugs in bSuite 3 and helped answer questions in the forums), Zach Tirrell (who helped develop migration strategy ages ago), and to everybody who’s posted a comment or review related to bSuite.

This is beta software, and some things definitely don’t work. The stats are working solidly, the other features appear free of catastrophic bugs, and I’ve had it running (in various stages of development) here at MaisonBisson for a month now. Still, read the warranty (there is none) and don’t blame me if Boba Fett jumps out of your server after installing it.

Get the details at the bSuite page, download bSuite 4beta1 here.

Language Translation Icon

Casey Bisson — Thu, 13 Dec 2007 17:41:53 +0000

We all need a recognized icon to represent “translate this.” We’ve got one for feeds and social bookmarking, but where’s our translate icon? A lot of folks simply use flags, but that’s a bad idea because they’re “nationalistic, and represent ideals, boundaries, and political beliefs, but do not represent a language.”

Joe Lee has developed a few icons for use in the OLPC project, and they look good. The only problem I have with them is in trying to make them work at 16×16 pixels. I developed the icon above (and the 16×16 version) to support the new Bookmark Share (& Translate) feature in bSuite (see it at work). It’s simply a mashup of Joe’s work (this) with the feed icon (there’s an Adobe Illustrator version in the developer pack).

This particular icon has a few problems (it could easily be confused with “reload”), and I’d love to see something better. Any suggestions (that fit a 16 x 16 square)?

bSuite 3 Released

Casey Bisson — Mon, 26 Nov 2007 17:45:33 +0000

Features

Tracking of page loads for each post and page.
Popular posts/pages widget and function to surface the posts your readers most, well, read.
Reports on top stories, climbing and falling stories, and referrers.
A related posts widget, function, and page to help readers find more posts in your blog.
A share links widget, function, and page to help readers bookmark, share, translate, and get feeds to your posts.
Innerindex to provide structure to long posts and pages.
Includes a generic tag importer that will convert tags from previous versions of bSuite as well as from a number of other recognized formats.

CMS enabling goodies

Adds excerpt field to the page editing screen.
Adds category selector to the page editing screen.
A pagemenu thingie (token) to list the child pages of the current page.

Hacking goodies

Tokens are thingies you put in the post of page content that get replaced with the results of a PHP function. A number of tokens are built in, but they’re extendable; bSuite Slideshow offers one example of how another plugin could leverage tokens.

Widgets

Recognition

Zach, Matt, and Cliff have all offered more than their share of help throughout the development process.

bsuite Bug Fixes (release b2v7)

Casey Bisson — Mon, 16 Apr 2007 13:14:17 +0000

Work on bsuite3 is progressing well, thanks to help from Zach and Matt, who are collaborating with me on completely rearchitecting how stats are collected and reported. This, however, is not bs3. It’s a transitional release intended to fix some bugs in b2 and make upgrading easier. This upgrade is recommended for all current bsuite users and new users.

bsuite Features

Tracks page loads (hits)
Tracks search terms used by visitors ariving at your site via search engines
Reports top-performing stories via a function that can be included in the sidebar
Reports recent comments via a function that can be included in the sidebar
Reports top search terms via a function that can be included in the sidebar
Outputs a pulse graph of activity on your site or specific stories
Lists related posts at the bottom of the current post’s content
Suggests posts that closely match the search criteria for visitors who arrive via search engines
Integrates bsuite_speedcache
Does some stuff with tags

Fixed/Changed/Added

As mentioned above, a huge-but-invisible feature here is that this version includes some pieces that will make it easy to transition to the new plugin.
MySQL errors while creating the tables should now be fixed. It’s my shame that these have persisted so long.
The plugin now “rebuilds the tags table” as soon as you activate it. This is a good thing, but if you’ve got a huge number of posts (or a really short max execution time) it might cause a problem (please leave a comment if it does).
The related posts feature now works even if you aren’t tagging your posts. If there are no tags, the post’s title is used as a search string.
This list is probably incomplete and in some other way inaccurate. It’s not intentional, I’m just sloppy. Please leave comments with bug reports or corrections, I’ll do what I can to fix them.
Finally, I’m now hosting the download on a new server, so it won’t be subject to .Mac’s bandwidth consumption limits.

Installation

Download and unzip bsuite.zip
Place bsuite.php in you wp-content/plugins directory
Place spacer.gif in your wp-content directory
Log in to your WordPress admin panel and activate the plugin, then visit the new bsuite submenu of the options tab. This will allow bsuite to create its database tables.
Stats collection will start automatically; you can see the results in the new bsuite Reports submenu of your Dashboard
Once installed, be sure to enable the options and consider customizing the look by adding the bsuite CSS to your theme’s CSS (sample CSS here).
In order to view the stats reports reports on your public pages, you’ll need to add the display functions to your pages.

Upgrading

Upgrades from earlier versions of bsuite are easy, just replace the old bsuite.php file with the new one.
Don’t forget to visit the bsuite submenu of the options tab so you can setup any new features.

Commands

The bsuite submenu of the options has a few command buttons:

Clear bsuite_speedcache

The cache improves performance, but can sometimes get stale before its time. This command clears it.
Rebuild bsuite tag index

bsuite maintains its tag index with every story edit. Use this command to bring old-content into the index or if you’ve edited the content in way WP doesn’t know about.

Options

The bstat submenu of the options tab has a few configurable settings:

Minimum userlevel to view bsuite reports

The options are restricted to administrators, but you can choose who can view the reports.
Output default CSS

Some of the bsuite functions require CSS styles not found in the average style sheet. This will output default styles.
Default pulse graph style

This sets how values are interpolated in drawing the pulse graph. Experiment with the options to see how they work.
Suggest related entries in post

This will insert a block of links at the tail of each (tagged) post’s content with links to related posts at your site.
Tag input format

Name your style: square brackets or angle brackets / or [tags].
Highlight search words and offer search help

The first part of this should be obvious, but the real trick here is using those search words to offer other related content from your site to visitors. It works (and looks) a lot like the option above, but the suggestions only appear when search words are detected.
Filter incoming search terms using comment moderation and blacklist words

Referrer spam is as much of a problem as trackback spam. There are a few tricks in bstat to prevent the problem, but here’s one you can configure. Selecting this option tells bstat to not display search terms that contain words in your moderation list or blacklist.
Ignore hits from registered users at or above userlevel

No author wants to skew their stats just by poking around their own site.
Ignore hits from these IP numbers

Sites with low traffic may find that activity by authors severely skews the stats tracking. Enter an IP address here to ignore it.

Tag Support

Until WordPress adopts a standardized way to manage tags, we’ll have to deal with things like this.

bsuite recognizes tags in three forms:

Any link with a rel=“tag” attribute
Any number of single tags like this: tag name
A block of comma-delimited tags like this: WordPress, WordPress Plugin

This appears to make it compatible with a number of existing tag management strategies now in use — including those used by Ecto and SimpleTags.

Tags are mapped to Technorati, but a future version will include an option to set other tag resolvers.

Using bsuite Functions

Function usage is unchanged from the last version. Among the things at the top of the list for bs3: widgets.

Known Bugs

None yet, but I’m sure I’m forgetting something. Report what you find in the comments below.

Money Grubbing

bsuite is GPL-licensed free software, but after some urging by friends, I’m opening the tip jar. If you use it and like it, let me know. And if you feel moved, leave a tip in the jar.

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bsuite Bug Fixes (release b2v6)

Casey Bisson — Mon, 24 Jul 2006 16:39:28 +0000

bsuite Features

Tracks page loads (hits)
Tracks search terms used by visitors ariving at your site via search engines
Reports top-performing stories via a function that can be included in the sidebar
Reports recent comments via a function that can be included in the sidebar
Reports top search terms via a function that can be included in the sidebar
Outputs a pulse graph of activity on your site or specific stories
Highlights search words used by visitors ariving at your site via search engines
Lists related posts at the bottom of the current post’s content
Suggests posts that closely match the search criteria for visitors who arrive via search engines
Integrates bsuite_speedcache
Does some stuff with tags

Fixed/Changed/Added

The bsuite report consolidates the two uselessly differentiated top stories lists and adds a top movers list.
The report also includes a hugely updated Quick Stats section listing today’s current tally and a prediction of the day’s total along with other goodies.
The table definitions have been updated and optimized for better performance. Zach contributed some optimizations to the bstat_hitit() function and underlying MySQL queries, and you’ll also find a number of small code optimizations scattered throughout.
This version finally creates and configures it’s tables automatically upon activation. You no longer need to visit the plugin’s option screen for this to happen.
A fix to address a MySQL error for users running MySQL 5 has been long overdue. It’s in here.
Numbers in the reports are now formatted with commas or whatever local format you’ve set MySQL for, using MySQL’s FORMAT() function.
As requested, I’ve added a function — bstat_hits() — return just the hit count for a story or for the whole blog.
As requested, you can now manually clear the bsuite_speedcache.
As prompted, prodded, and cajoled, I’ve finally made a change to report hits to the front page (and other pages without post IDs).
I did a bunch of thinking about tags a while ago, and bsuite now keeps an index of tags in a separate table. I’ve got plans to use this for later features, but for now it’s just a curiosity that shouldn’t cause any problems.
You can now switch between or [tags] for compatibility with other plugins (such as noted here) and with WP2’s WYSIWYG editor.
The code now properly calls get_settings(’siteurl’) instead of get_settings(’home’) to build the URL for the spacer.gif that builds the pulse graph, fixing the problem where the graph wouldn’t display for some users.
Not changed, but at least answered: Eddie commented to explain that ‘–disable-bcmath’ can cause the undefined function errors some people were getting. A later release may incorporate Pramudita’s fix.
Also not in this version are the user-contributed tag features I’d gotten so excited about. These just aren’t ready for primetime, but people who want to hack about in alpha-ville will find all the supporting code in there.
This list is probably incomplete and in some other way inaccurate. It’s not intentional, I’m just sloppy. Please leave comments with bug reports or corrections, I’ll do what I can to fix them.
Finally, I’m now hosting the download on a new server, so it won’t be subject to .Mac’s bandwidth consumption limits.

Installation

Update: bugfix release b2v7 available.

Download and unzip bsuite.zip
Place bsuite.php in you wp-content/plugins directory
Place spacer.gif in your wp-content directory
Log in to your WordPress admin panel and activate the plugin, then visit the new bsuite submenu of the options tab. This will allow bsuite to create its database tables.
Stats collection will start automatically; you can see the results in the new bsuite Reports submenu of your Dashboard
Once installed, be sure to enable the options and consider customizing the look by adding the bsuite CSS to your theme’s CSS (sample CSS here).

In order to view the stats reports reports on your public pages, you’ll need to add the display functions to your pages.

Upgrading

Upgrades from earlier versions of bsuite are easy, just replace the old bsuite.php file with the new one.

If you’re upgrading from bstat (which is so old I was tempted to remove this part of the docs), be sure to delete or deactivate the old plugin before activating the new one. Don’t forget to visit the bsuite submenu of the options tab so you can setup all the new features.

Commands

The bstat submenu of the options has a few command buttons:

Clear bsuite_speedcache

The cache improves performance, but can sometimes get stale before its time. This command clears it.
Rebuild bsuite tag index
bsuite maintains its tag index with every story edit. Use this command to bring old-content into the index or if you’ve edited the content in way WP doesn’t know about.

Options

The bstat submenu of the options tab has a few configurable settings:

Minimum userlevel to view bsuite reports

The options are restricted to users at userlevel 8 or above, but you can choose who can view the reports.

Output default CSS

Some of the bsuite functions require CSS styles not found in the average style sheet. This will output default styles.

Default pulse graph style

This sets how values are interpolated in drawing the pulse graph. Experiment with the options to see how they work.

Suggest related entries in post

This will insert a block of links at the tail of each (tagged) post’s content with links to related posts at your site.

Tag input format

Name your style: square brackets or angle brackets / or [tags].

Highlight search words and offer search help

The first part of this should be obvious, but the real trick here is using those search words to offer other related content from your site to visitors. It works (and looks) a lot like the option above, but the suggestions only appear when search words are detected.
Filter incoming search terms using comment moderation and blacklist words.
Referrer spam is as much of a problem as trackback spam. There are a few tricks in bstat to prevent the problem, but here’s one you can configure. Selecting this option tells bstat to not display search terms that contain words in your moderation list or blacklist.

Ignore hits from registered users at or above userlevel

No author wants to skew their stats just by poking around their own site.
Ignore hits from these IP numbers.
Sites with low traffic may find that activity by authors severely skews the stats tracking. Enter an IP address here to ignore it.

Tag Support

Until WordPress adopts a standardized way to manage tags, we’ll have to deal with things like this.

bsuite recognizes tags in three forms:

Any link with a rel=“tag” attribute
Any number of single tags like this: tag name
A block of comma-delimited tags like this: WordPress, WordPress Plugin

This appears to make it compatible with a number of existing tag management strategies now in use — including those used by Ecto and SimpleTags.

Tags in and tags are mapped to Technorati, but a future version will include an option to set other tag resolvers.

Using bsuite Functions

Though many bsuite features require no coding or modifications to theme files, there are a number of public functions available to display lists of top stories, recently commented stories, recent comments, recent incoming search terms, etc. Most of these functions take similar arguments and output their results in similar ways.

Today’s Stats

bstat_todaypop

displays top stories for today only.
bstat_todayrefs
displays top incoming search terms for today only.

The functions bstat_todaypop and bstat_todayrefs each take the same arguments.

Usage:
bstat_todaypop({count}, “{before}”, “{after}”);

count is the total number of results to output
before is a string to output before each result
after is a string to output after each result

Example:

Today's Most Popular
”, “\n”); ?>

Recent Stats

bstat_recentpop

displays top stories for the past x days. This function reveals more useful data on sites with low traffic, but is somewhat slower than bstat_todaypop.
bstat_recentrefs
displays top incoming search terms for the past x days. This function reveals more useful data on sites with low traffic, but is somewhat slower than bstat_todayrefs.

The functions bstat_recentpop and bstat_recentrefs each take the same arguments.

Usage:
bstat_recentrefs({count}, “{days}”, “{before}”, “{after}”);

count is the total number of results to output
days is the number of days back to look
before is a string to output before each result
after is a string to output after each result

Example:

Incoming Search Terms This Week
”, “\n”); ?>

Recent Discussion

bstat_discussionbypost

displays recently commented posts. Each post will appear only once.
bstat_discussionbycomment
displays recent comments (and commenter). Better on sites with lots of community interaction.

The functions bstat_discussionbypost and bstat_discussionbycomment each take the same arguments.

Usage:
bstat_discussionbypost({count}, “{before}”, “{after}”);

count is the total number of results to output
before is a string to output before each result
after is a string to output after each result

Example:

Incoming Search Terms This Week
”, “\n”); ?>

Special Functions

bstat_hits

displays the current and average daily page loads.

Usage:
bstat_hits([{template}, [{post_id}, [{today_only}]]]);

template will be filled in with the appropriate values for %%hits%% and/or %%avg%%. If left blank, the default template is %%hits%% hits, about %%avg%% daily
post_id over-rides the detected post ID. Common values for this may include “0” to show stats for index pages, or “-1” to show stats for the entire blog (note that %%avg%% reports inaccurately with a “-1” value here)
today_only returns the count for today (note that %%avg%% doesn’t make much sense here)

Example:

prints something like “791 hits, about 10 daily”

prints something like “5,950 page loads today”

bstat_pulse

displays the “pulse” graph of hits over time.

Usage:
bstat_pulse([{post_id}, [{max_width}, [{display_text}, [{display_credit}, [{graph_accurate}]]]]]);

post_id is the post_id for the story, usually provided by a WP variable
max_width is the maximum width the graph maw run
display_text (acceptable values: 0 or 1), switch to display stats for total views and average views per day
display_credit (acceptable values: 0 or 1), switch to display “powered by bstat” credit
graph_accurate (acceptable values: 0 or 1), make smooth, accurate graphs or fuzzy (but not inaccurate) graphs

Example:

Story pulse

bstat_hitit

The hamster on a wheel that makes it all work. It records hits for each page load, and hits for each incoming search term.

This function is no longer necessary, as it is executed automatically via a plugin hook that runs every time the footer is called. Still, it’s around if you have content that you want to track outside that scope.

Example:

note: (be careful of any “curly quotes” that might have been accidentally/automagically inserted in code samples)

Known Bugs

None yet, but I’m sure I’m forgetting something. Report what you find in the comments below.

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More bsuite Hacking

Casey Bisson — Wed, 05 Apr 2006 16:41:13 +0000

Update: bugfix release b2v6 available.

Some conversations with Chow Kah Soon, who’s site is full of diversions from work , finally ~~convinced~~ encouraged me to solve some small problems that were giving him big trouble. Chow Kah Soon is in the lucky, but rare, position of having over 20,000 unique daily visitors to his site, so he’s sort of my designated stress-tester.

After looking at the logs he shared with me, the table structure, and the queries in bsuite, it was pretty clear that I needed to make some changes to the indexes.

Optimizing the indexes was easy, but how can I make bsuite update those indexes on existing installs? That’s where these docs explaining WordPress’ rather unique dbDelta function come in:

Instead of using a normal $wpdb query to make our table, there is a special function in WordPress that we’ll use that can create a table if it isn’t there, or change the structure if it doesn’t match the current table. This will come in very handy if we ever need to make changes to the MySQL structure in the future.

The function’s a little finicky, and it took me a couple minutes to realize that it was tripping up on the backtick quotes (`) I had wrapped around my table and field names. But with that out of the way, it solves the big problem of how to easily add indexes to existing tables. What it doesn’t solve, sadly, is how to delete existing indexes that aren’t in the new table definition.

With the dbDelta function implemented, I also finally got around to implementing an auto-install hook that creates or re-configs the tables upon plugin activation. Here’s the example from the docs:

add_action('activate_pluginurl','jal_install');

But I had to Google for this support forum post to understand what the “pluginurl” should be.

…you simply have to use the path of your plugin relative to /wp-content/plugins. Eg: you have a plugin in /wp-content/plugins/wp-spamfilter/wp-spamfilter.php then you have to call add_action as following:

add_action(‘activate_wp-spamfilter/wp-spamfilter.php’, ’somefunction’);

Yes, all of these updates will be released soon. I promise.

bstat, bsuite, Chow Kah Soon, documentation, KahSoon.com, mysql, optimization, update, wordpress

bsuite Feature: User Contributed Tags

Casey Bisson — Mon, 13 Mar 2006 00:44:18 +0000

Ross Singer gets the prize for submitting the first reader contributed tag, the latest feature in bsuite.

There are arguments about whether user-contributed tags are useful or even valid, or whether they should be stored in my site or aggregated at places like del.ici.ous. But who’s to worry about such questions? Who’s to worry when you can put together the work already done to support author’s tags with WordPress’s pretty good comment system and get user contributed tag support with just a few extra lines of code? Who’s to worry when we can try it and see what comes of it?

It’s all managed using the same tools we use to approve, moderate, and edit comments, which also means the spam filtering that works for comments works for contributed tags too. And because bsuite is already part of WPopac, that means it gains the new tagging features too (well, it will soon).

bsuite, collabulary, folksonomy, tag, tagging, tags, user contributed, wisdom of the crowd, wpopac

WordPress 2.0 & bsuite

Casey Bisson — Sat, 31 Dec 2005 15:24:00 +0000

Update: bugfix release b2v6 available.

WordPress 2.0 is out and available for download now. I don’t know how the development team did it — I mean with the holidays and all — but here it is. And now I have to admit that I haven’t even played with the betas, so I’ve got no clue how bsuite works with the big 2.0. For all I know it works just fine, or it drops all your tables and sends your browser history to your mother, so please take caution.

But WP2 has a lot of things I want too, so I’ll be checking things out and making any necessary changes to bsuite as soon as possible.

wordpress, wordpress 2.0, wp20, wp2, bsuite, beta, bstat, wordpress20, plugin, caution

bsuite Bug Fixes (release b2v3)

Casey Bisson — Thu, 15 Dec 2005 01:56:13 +0000

Fixed

Previous versions would throw errors at the bottom of the page when the http referrer info included search words from a recognized search engine.

Installation

Follow the directions for the bsuite b2 release. The download link there will always fetch the current version.

Upgrades from earlier versions of bsuite are easy, just replace the old bsuite.php file with the new one. Upgrades from bstat follow the same directions as before.

bsuite Features

Tracks page loads (hits)
Tracks search terms used by visitors ariving at your site via search engines
Reports top-performing stories via a function that can be included in the sidebar
Reports recent comments via a function that can be included in the sidebar
Reports top search terms via a function that can be included in the sidebar
Outputs a pulse graph of activity on your site or specific stories
Highlights search words used by visitors ariving at your site via search engines NEW!
Lists related posts at the bottom of the current post’s content NEW!
Suggests posts that closely match the search criteria for visitors who arrive via search engines NEW!
Integrates bsuite_speedcache NEW!
Does some stuff with tags NEW!

search term highlighting, search engine highlighting, sehl, bsuggestive, recommendations, recommender, recommending, recommendation system, related content, tag, tags, tag management, tag relationships, beta, blog pulse, bsuite, bstat, bstats, graph, plugin, pulse, referrer, search term, statistics, stats, stats tracking, usage, wordpress, wordpress plugin, bug fix, fix, fixes, bug, bugs, beta, bug fixes

bsuite Bug Fixes (release b2b)

Casey Bisson — Sat, 03 Dec 2005 16:17:38 +0000

Fixes

A bug with search word highlighting that caused it to litter the display in some cases.
A silly mistake of mine that cause a mysql error for some users.

Installation

Follow the directions for the bsuite b2 release. The download link there will always fetch the current version.

Upgrades from bsuite b2 are easy, just replace the old bsuite.php file with the new one. Upgrades from bstat follow the same directions as before.

bsuite Features

Tracks page loads (hits)
Tracks search terms used by visitors ariving at your site via search engines
Reports top-performing stories via a function that can be included in the sidebar
Reports recent comments via a function that can be included in the sidebar
Reports top search terms via a function that can be included in the sidebar
Outputs a “pulse” graph of activity on your site or specific stories
Highlights search words used by visitors ariving at your site via search engines NEW!
Lists related posts at the bottom of the current post’s content NEW!
Suggests posts that closely match the search criteria for visitors who arrive via search engines NEW!
Integrates bsuite_speedcache NEW!
Does some stuff with tags NEW!

bsuite Features: The Photo Spread

Casey Bisson — Thu, 01 Dec 2005 10:49:34 +0000

bsuite highlights the search words used to find blog posts in Google and other search engines, and uses those search terms to recommend other related posts at your WordPress site.

— – —

bsuite uses the tags of one post to recommend related posts in your WordPress blog.

— – —

bsuite includes an easy to use statistics engine that tracks the daily hits to every post and page.

beta, blog pulse, bstat, bstats, bsuggestive, bsuite, graph, plugin, pulse, recommendation system, recommendations, recommender, recommending, referrer, related content, search engine highlighting, search term, sehl, statistics, stats, stats tracking, tag, tag management, tag relationships, tags, usage, wordpress, wordpress plugin, search term highlighting

bsuite WordPress Plugin (b2 release)

Casey Bisson — Tue, 29 Nov 2005 01:52:05 +0000

The first thing we all have to agree on is that bsuite is the replacement for bstat. The name change reflects that fact that the plugin is doing a lot more than simply track page loads. The most exciting new feature is a module I can’t help but call bsuggestive. It uses the tags of the current post to suggest related posts to your readers. And when readers arrive at your site via a search engine, it not only highlights the search words they used, but offers a list of other posts matching their search criteria.

Why “b2″? I released b1 privately a while ago, and I’ve been running it here at MaisonBisson since September.

bsuite Features

Tracks page loads (hits)
Tracks search terms used by visitors ariving at your site via search engines
Reports top-performing stories via a function that can be included in the sidebar
Reports recent comments via a function that can be included in the sidebar
Reports top search terms via a function that can be included in the sidebar
Outputs a “pulse” graph of activity on your site or specific stories
Highlights search words used by visitors ariving at your site via search engines NEW!
Lists related posts at the bottom of the current post’s content NEW!
Suggests posts that closely match the search criteria for visitors who arrive via search engines NEW!
Integrates bsuite_speedcache NEW!
Does some stuff with tags NEW!

Changes

This documentation supersedes any previous documentation.

I need to be honest, it’s been too long since the last public release for me to remember all the details. I haven’t really been keeping records on all this, so if you’ve been running the previous version and you discover a problem, please tell me about it.

The first change is that the plugin is now in a file named “bsuite.php”. As you install it you’ll need to deactivate the previous “bstat.php” version to avoid conflicts.

Another big change is that bsuite will now start tracking page loads as soon as it’s activated. You no longer need to put any code in your theme. But if you’re upgrading from a version where you already have that code in your theme, it also includes code to prevent it from double-counting any page loads.

The other functions from bstat b4 are all there, and I don’t believe there are any changes to the way they’re called.

The options submenu is almost entirely redesigned. It should be pretty self explanatory, but there’s documentation below.

Installation

Update: bugfix release b2v7 available.

Download and unzip bsuite.zip
Place bsuite.php in you wp-content/plugins directory
Place spacer.gif in your wp-content directory
Log in to your WordPress admin panel and activate the plugin, then visit the new bsuite submenu of the options tab. This will allow bsuite to create its database tables.
Stats collection will start automatically; you can see the results in the new bsuite Reports submenu of your Dashboard
Once installed, be sure to enable the options and consider customizing the look by adding the bsuite CSS to your theme’s CSS (sample CSS here).

In order to view the stats reports reports on your public pages, you’ll need to add the display functions to your pages.

Upgrading

If you’re upgrading from bstat, be sure to delete or deactivate the old plugin before activating the new one. And don’t forget to visit the bsuite submenu of the options tab so that it can create its new db tables.

Options

The bstat submenu of the options tab has three configurable settings:

Minimum userlevel to view bsuite reports

The options are restricted to users at userlevel 8 or above, but you can choose who can view the reports.

Output default CSS

Some of the bsuite functions require CSS styles not found in the average style sheet. This will output default styles.

Default pulse graph style

This sets how values are interpolated in drawing the pulse graph. Experiment with the options to see how they work.

Suggest related entries in post

This will insert a block of links at the tail of each (tagged) post’s content with links to related posts at your site.

Highlight search words and offer search help

The first part of this should be obvious, but the real trick here is using those search words to offer other related content from your site to visitors. It works (and looks) a lot like the option above, but the suggestions only appear when search words are detected.
Filter incoming search terms using comment moderation and blacklist words.
Referrer spam is as much of a problem as trackback spam. There are a few tricks in bstat to prevent the problem, but here’s one you can configure. Selecting this option tells bstat to not display search terms that contain words in your moderation list or blacklist.

Ignore hits from registered users at or above userlevel

No author wants to skew their stats just by poking around their own site.
Ignore hits from these IP numbers.
Sites with low traffic may find that activity by authors severely skews the stats tracking. Enter an IP address here to ignore it.

Tag Support

Until WordPress adopts a standardized way to manage tags, we’ll have to deal with things like this.

bsuite recognizes tags in three forms:

Any link with a rel=”tag” attribute
Any number of single tags like this: tag name
A block of comma-delimited tags like this: WordPress, WordPress Plugin

This appears to make it compatible with a number of existing tag management strategies now in use — including those used by Ecto and SimpleTags.

Tags in and tags are mapped to Technorati, but a future version will include an option to set other tag resolvers.

Using bsuite Functions

Today’s Stats

bstat_todaypop

displays top stories for today only.
bstat_todayrefs
displays top incoming search terms for today only.

The functions bstat_todaypop and bstat_todayrefs each take the same arguments.

Usage:
bstat_todaypop({count}, "{before}", "{after}");

count is the total number of results to output
before is a string to output before each result
after is a string to output after each result

Example:

Today's Most Popular
", "\n"); ?>

Recent Stats

bstat_recentpop

displays top stories for the past x days. This function reveals more useful data on sites with low traffic, but is somewhat slower than bstat_todaypop.
bstat_recentrefs
displays top incoming search terms for the past x days. This function reveals more useful data on sites with low traffic, but is somewhat slower than bstat_todayrefs.

The functions bstat_recentpop and bstat_recentrefs each take the same arguments.

Usage:
bstat_recentrefs({count}, "{days}", "{before}", "{after}");

count is the total number of results to output
days is the number of days back to look
before is a string to output before each result
after is a string to output after each result

Example:

Incoming Search Terms This Week
", "\n"); ?>

Recent Discussion

bstat_discussionbypost

displays recently commented posts. Each post will appear only once.
bstat_discussionbycomment
displays recent comments (and commenter). Better on sites with lots of community interaction.

The functions bstat_discussionbypost and bstat_discussionbycomment each take the same arguments.

Usage:
bstat_discussionbypost({count}, "{before}", "{after}");

count is the total number of results to output
before is a string to output before each result
after is a string to output after each result

Example:

Incoming Search Terms This Week
", "\n"); ?>

Special Functions

bstat_pulse

displays the "pulse" graph of hits over time.

Usage:
bstat_pulse([{post_id}, [{max_width}, [{display_text}, [{display_credit}, [{graph_accurate}]]]]]);

Example:

Story pulse

bstat_hitit

The hamster on a wheel that makes it all work. It records hits for each page load, and hits for each incoming search term.

Example:

note: (be careful of any "curly quotes" that might have been accidentally/automagically inserted in code samples)

Known Bugs

The search word highlighting routine seems to still be buggy. Expect it to mis-recognize referrers, and one tester reported that it caused content not to display. Go ahead and enable it to see how cool it will be in b3, when it works, but I suggest disabling it for the moment.

Ryan Eby reminded me that I use a whole bunch of short PHP open tags (”

Zach pointed out that I’ve been sort of sloppy about using double-quotes where I should use single quotes and not single-quoting my array indices. All of this can add up to an unnecessary performance hit for high traffic sites (30,000 + daily page loads).

beta, blog pulse, bstat, bstats, bsuggestive, bsuite, graph, plugin, pulse, recommendation system, recommendations, recommender, recommending, referrer, related content, search engine highlighting, search term, search term highlighting, sehl, statistics, stats, stats tracking, tag, tag management, tag relationships, tags, usage, wordpress, wordpress plugin

bsuggestive and bsuite Tag Support

Casey Bisson — Mon, 28 Nov 2005 00:45:02 +0000

bsuite, the follow-up to bstat, now includes a module called “bsuggestive” that recommends related posts based on the current post’s tags or alternate posts based on your search words when you arrive from a recognized search engine.

That is, bsuggestive does two neat things:

First, visitors will see a section in each post with links to other posts on your site that have similar content. The “similarity” is judged by comparing the current posts tags against the content and titles of all other posts in the database. This requires tags, and I’ll explain that later.

Second: visitors who arrive at your site from a search engine will see a list of other posts that closely match the original search words used at that search engine. This is especially helpful when people arrive at your front page or an archive page that may include a number of posts not related to the search query.
The big downside to all of this is that it (at least part of it) requires tags, and there’s no standardized support for tags in WordPress.

What to do? Easy: bsuite automatically recognizes any links with a rel=“tag” attribute as a tag. A little iffy: bsuite has adopted the simpletags approach to tagging. This is “iffy” because you should disable the simpletags plugin if you’re already using it (running both will needlessly increase CPU usage, but won’t do anything “bad”).

tags: bstat, bsuite, content tagging, plugin, related content, tag, tag management, tagging, tags, wordpress, wordpress plugin

Introducing bsuite_speedcache

Casey Bisson — Mon, 03 Oct 2005 05:06:11 +0000

I wrote bsuite_speedcache to reduce the number of database queries I was executing per page load. By implementing it on some of the content in my sidebar, I dropped 35 queries for each cache hit. That might not seem like much, but it should average about 525 queries per minute that that my host server won’t need to process.

Now that I’m looking seriously at optimizing my queries, I’ve also cut the monthly archives links from the sidebar. The SELECT DISTINCT query it relies on hits MySQL hard. It wouldn’t be so bad if the get_archives function could be set to return the results (and my attempts at output buffering seemed to conflict with something else within WP), but it can’t and without being able to feed the results into the cache it has to be re-queried with every page load.

Between removing the archives links and bsuite_speedcache, I’ve gone from 136 to 99 queries for the front page and my story pages went from 65 to 28.

Where is it?

I’m going to ask my pal Zach (who knows a lot more about MySQL optimization than I do) to take a look at it with an eye toward making sure I’m not missing any easy optimization opportunities (and that I’m not causing trouble in one area I’ve got a question about).

With that done, and after I add some code to create the DB table and such, I’ll try to release it sometime this week.

tags: bsuite_speedcache, bsuite, cache, cache hit, codex, database, database caching, database optimization, database performance, database queries, mysql, mysql caching, mysql optimization, mysql performance, mysql queries, wordpress, wordpress optimization, wordpress performance, wordpress performance optimization, wordpress plugin

bsuite_innerindex WordPress Plugin

Casey Bisson — Thu, 29 Sep 2005 11:10:39 +0000

[[pageindex]]

About

“Blogging” typically connotes short-form writing that needs little internal structure, but that’s no reason to cramp your style. As people start to explore WordPress’s Pages feature, it seems likely that we’ll need a way to structure content within posts or pages sooner or later. That’s why I’m working on bsuite_innerindex.

It’s a WordPress Plugin that puts named anchors on all of the

,
, -tagged content, and builds a list of links to those anchors that can be inserted anywhere on the page. An example can be seen in this post, and in the old bstat Beta 4 announcement.

Usage

Step 1
Write a post or page as usual, inserting tags where you normally would.

Step 2
Add this token somewhere in your page or post: `[[pageindex]]` That token will be replaced with the generated index. Why not just insert the index at the top of the page? Because it’s your document and you might want to put it elsewhere, like after the introduction or executive summary. But just remember to insert the token, because it won’t put the index anywhere if you don’t.

Installation

Step 1
Download: bsuite_innerindex.zip

Step 2
place unzipped “ bsuite_innerindex.php” file in your wp-content/plugins folder and activate it via the WP control panel. See the WordPress Codex for more detail.

Notes & Caveats

This is the first beta release of this plugin. I don’t see how it could break anything, but what do I know. Don’t blame me for loss, damage, or bad presidents. Please report bugs and/or suggestions in the comments.

anchors, blogging, bsuite, bsuite plugins, bsuite_innerindex, document structure, hack, innerindex, named anchor, page anchor, plugin, structured content, wordpress, wordpress plugin, wp, wp plugin

bstat Japan!

Casey Bisson — Mon, 19 Sep 2005 22:08:22 +0000

It looks like bstat has been localized for Japan! With that in mind, I’d love to hear from international users about what I can do to make localization easier. There will be some big changes in the transition to bsuite, and it might be a good time to make sure I’m properly supporting WP’s translation tables and localization features.

tags: bstat, bsuite, japanese localization, language, language translation, localization, localization features, plugin, translation tables, wordpress, wordpress plugin

bsuite Development

Casey Bisson — Sun, 28 Aug 2005 15:44:27 +0000

bstat has become bsuite. The name change reflects the fact that I want the plugin to do a lot more than track usage stats. One of the first features to enter testing here is the “related” section below. I’m calling it “bsuggestive,” but that may turn out to be too cute a name to tolerate for long. The results are based on the tags for the post, so it doesn’t work with old posts that haven’t been tagged, and it sometimes returns some weird matches, but it’s still alpha, so what can we ask for. Though, if you arrive at MaisonBisson via a search on one of the recognized search engines, the related posts will actually be based on the search terms used. The results in those cases seem to work better, which probably says a lot about the quality of my tagging efforts.

I hope to release a public beta of bsuite in the next couple weeks, but expect to see continued development of the bsuite features here.

tags: alpha, alpha testing, bstat, bsuggestive, bsuite, name change, related content, related posts, suggested posts, suggested content

MaisonBisson.com » bsuite

Wufoo Forms WordPress Embed Shortcode

Slideshare WordPress Embed Shortcode

Tricky Uses of bSuite

Do WordPress Pages Better With bSuite

Contents

Write excerpts, tag, and categorize your pages

Automatically insert anchors in your page

Automatically list sub-pages

Automatically list sub-pages with excerpts

bSuite 4 beta 2

bSuite 4 Public Beta

Language Translation Icon

bSuite 3 Released

Contents:

Features

CMS enabling goodies

Hacking goodies

Widgets

Recognition

bsuite Bug Fixes (release b2v7)

Contents:

bsuite Features

Fixed/Changed/Added

Installation

Upgrading

Commands

Clear bsuite_speedcache

Rebuild bsuite tag index

Options

Minimum userlevel to view bsuite reports

Output default CSS

Default pulse graph style

Suggest related entries in post

Tag input format

Highlight search words and offer search help

Filter incoming search terms using comment moderation and blacklist words

Ignore hits from registered users at or above userlevel

Ignore hits from these IP numbers

Tag Support

Using bsuite Functions

Known Bugs

Money Grubbing

bsuite Bug Fixes (release b2v6)

Contents:

bsuite Features

Fixed/Changed/Added

Installation

Upgrading

Commands

Options

Tag Support

Using bsuite Functions

Today's Most Popular

Incoming Search Terms This Week

Incoming Search Terms This Week

Story pulse

Known Bugs

More bsuite Hacking

bsuite Feature: User Contributed Tags

WordPress 2.0 & bsuite

bsuite Bug Fixes (release b2v3)

Contents:

Fixed

Installation

bsuite Features

bsuite Bug Fixes (release b2b)

Contents:

Fixes

Installation

bsuite Features

bsuite Features: The Photo Spread

bsuite WordPress Plugin (b2 release)

Contents:

bsuite Features

Changes

Installation

Options

Tag Support

Using bsuite Functions