Only Skin Deep

I reported a problem that I found in their Simple Press theme that I found upon updating WordPress to 3.3.1.  It was a problem with their dropdown menu.  Not a major problem – one that only occurs when logged into the WordPress admin.  I was just reporting it for the most part, and pointed out that someone whose site has significant logged-in user functionality could find this to be a real problem.

The forum staffer asked for a link, which I provided.  In the meantime, others chimed in with the same problem.  Days later, the tech said that she looked at my site, and that it worked fine.  I guess she didn’t read my post, unless she somehow psychically ascertained my log-in credentials.

Elegant Themes Support Trending Downwards?

Does Anybody Really Know What Time It Is?  Does Anybody Really Care?

Throughout the thread, I’ve tried to be polite and patient, while trying to convey that it would be nice to get a status on the problem, and that users may not be happy if they are ignored.  I’d link to the thread to show you, except that it’s paid members-only – you have to log in with their somewhat awkward forum interface.   So much time has passed with nothing that I decided to write this.

So the problem will apparently languish, with no follow-up or status.  And I will question whether or not to renew my membership.

Does It Hurt If You Do That?  Then Don’t Do That

I had asked a question about a problem before, and did get an answer that worked, but it was a hack solution, not a code fix, and they made it clear that they didn’t consider it important enough to fix the script.  I actually found another way to fix the problem myself in the end.

Paid support is an interesting phenomenon.  I’ve found that it’s often brusque but responsive, and usually effective.  Forums for scripts having only free support seem more chatty and friendly.  I chalk that up to small paid support staffs who need to move as fast as they can.  But I think Elegant’s support staff may be too small to handle all the themes they must support.  And if Nick is the only coder, I could be waiting for a very long time for a fix, it it happens at all.

Waiting For Codeau

Maybe they’d disagree, or maybe not.  Or maybe something else is wrong.  Maybe other Elegant themes have really serious problems, and they’re going cuckoo.  I wouldn’t know, because they aren’t saying anything.

On their Support and Updates page, there are a couple of notable lines:

• Always Up To Date
• Timely Support

O…….K.

Update, 1/28/12

I finally got another reply after a few days.  They asked for log-in credentials.  I responded that I’d rather not give those out unless absolutely necessary, but that maybe someone else in the thread might want to.  I added that if I were on tech support, I’d try replicating the problem on my own system.  They didn’t take the broad, obvious hint.  Another reply came, saying, ‘OK, can I have a screenshot?’  Pretty funny, as a screenshot of a dropdown doesn’t show that clicking on a menu item does nothing.  I almost wonder if the tech is not a native English speaker, as communication is definitely not happening here.  That said, of course plenty of non-native English speakers do fantastically well in every phase of communication.  Apparently not in this case.  It almost sounds like an autoresponder.  I finally gave up trying to explain, and didn’t reply.  To them, I’m guessing that this means “yay, done, move on to the next problem”.  Oh well.

Today I did notice that there was an update to my theme!  And when I went to find the changelog, I saw that one item was a change to the Superfish delay, which sounded like it could relate to my dropdown issue.  I installed the theme update.  At first, my dropdowns were entirely removed, even though the Elegant Theme setting said that they were on.  A few re-saves and refreshes later, my dropdowns returned.  At first, they were clickable while logged into admin.  But then upon trying several links, the problem of “unclickableness” returned.  So no real fix.  BUZZKILL!  I have seen similar problems with other dropdown menus, where if you try to look at many dropdown links in quick succession, they just stop working.  It’s as if the menu runs out of gas, and I’m thinking that it’s a JQuery memory leak or something like that.

Note to Self

From the outside, based on my experience, Elegant Themes doesn’t view tech support as a big priority.  Theme updates do occur, but slowly, as they have many themes to support, and not enough coders.  If a change is made, no blog announcement or anything like that (maybe they think it’s bad publicity).  At least there was a notice in WordPress admin, but you won’t know that unless you log into admin.

On the forum, if they do post a fix, it’s often a code hack you can do, but may not  fix the underlying problem.  I ding them for this, too.  I’ve already removed the link to Elegant Themes from the footer of one site I built.

But I’m pretty sure that suddenly I will actually hear from them when it comes time to renew my membership!  They’re pretty funny! I should point out that any system or business can have problems like this.  And if they had communicated with me effectively, I would have been more tolerant, and wouldn’t have bothered writing all this.  Communication may be their downfall.  At least they look extremely cute!

Stacked, But All Looks and Few Brains

My client wanted me to move her MODx site from a Stackable test server to Namecheap to go live.  Stackable strikes me as decent hosting, with reservations.  I’ve not experienced downtime there yet, and the couple times I’ve used their chat tech support went just fine.  I’m not crazy about their admin interface, though.  It’s cute and Ajax-y, and appears to have been designed for looks more than everyday use by developers.  It’s the classic right-brain “designing for the 30 thousand inch monitor”, so when your screen is a little smaller, suddenly you can’t find things without fiddling.  There’s also some non-traditional navigation that they must have found to be tragically hip.   Anyway, it works mostly OK, but it takes me about 1/3 longer than doing similar stuff on a normal admin interface (and time is money).

Your Party Package, Buy Now! Operators Are Standing By! Cheap, Cheap, oh, and Cheap!

Much of Namecheap’s web hosting is quite standard, with the familiar CPanel interface.  So I was able to move my stuff over very quickly, and I got the site running.

Magic Quotes Innie, But No Outie

Then the fun began.  I wanted to edit a MODx snippet because it required an exact file path on the new site for a 3rd party script.  Then I was surprised to find extra backslashes saved in my edited code, so I realized that Magic Quotes was turned on.  Come on, Namecheap! Magic Quotes are SO 1995, having been un-recommended for years now.  So I tried a couple normal methods of turning that off via .htaccess and php.ini.  Ouch, errors relating to using PHP 5.3!  And then code to fix the errors also errored.  MODx forum offered a couple more suggestions, but although they may work on some hosts, they didn’t on this one.

I asked tech support to turn off Magic Quotes.  They would not, and suggested some of the stuff I’d already done.  To be thorough, I tried again to make sure I hadn’t made typos.  Same result.  They at least gave some .htaccess code for changing PHP back to version 5.2, which did work.

They Didn’t Come Cheap, So I Was Left to Plug the Hole

Annoyed, I took a different route.  Since nothing was working on the server end, I decided to write a plugin to handle the editing.  I cadged some nice code from php.net for this purpose:

if (get_magic_quotes_gpc()) {
    $process = array(&$_GET, &$_POST, &$_COOKIE, &$_REQUEST);
    while (list($key, $val) = each($process)) {
        foreach ($val as $k => $v) {
            unset($process[$key][$k]);
            if (is_array($v)) {
                $process[$key][stripslashes($k)] = $v;
                $process[] = &$process[$key][stripslashes($k)];
            } else {
                $process[$key][stripslashes($k)] = stripslashes($v);
            }
        }
    }
    unset($process);
}

Notice how there are no opening and closing PHP tags like you’d find on a normal PHP script.  This is how MODx Evo wants its plugin code, and I forgot that at first (these days I spend much more time working with WordPress).  I set the script to fire on the OnSnipFormSave event.

That did it!  Suddenly my code edits worked fine with no cruft left over.  The site ran without errors, and the 3rd party script (Machform) worked beautifully.  It turned out reverting to PHP 5.2 was key; my code above did not work in PHP 5.3, although one of you expert coders out there could probably hook that up.

A Tiny Bit Awesome, Kinda

So the moral is…. Namecheap hosting does not like MODx Evo all that much, but it will reluctantly accept it. A similar strategy could be used for Revo, I think.  While investigating this problem I found some related MODx forum posts, and I see that Revo may also have problems with PHP 5.3 on some hosts, so a fix similar to mine may work for that release, too.

I’m not especially impressed with Namecheap tech support, although at least they did respond, and were part of the solution.  The dopeyness of having Magic Quotes on should be noted, as well as their unwillingness to turn that off at the server level.  For now, keep using them for domains – for hosting, they’re still working that out.

For some time now I’ve been really enjoying the excellent StudioPress Genesis Theme Framework.  (In fact, I like it enough that I also became an affiliate)  Developing WordPress themes is easier and more organized than ever.  While learning the framework, I made use of their helpful hook reference, which offers easy access to Genesis features.

While working with a new theme, I wanted to include a custom field that would attach to a Post (or Page).  Then this field would be displayed in the sidebar when viewing that Post – essentially showing some unique content for the Post that would not be displayed in the Post’s body.

I looked through the Genesis hook reference for something relating to custom fields, and I was surprised not to find one, given that there are helpful hooks for almost any purpose you can think of.  After searching further through forum posts and tutorial articles, I found what I was looking for: the hook is (surprise!) genesis_custom_field.

So say you want to be able to display a slogan (or some other bit of user-entered content) displayed just above your sidebar content.  Edit a Post, and look near the bottom of the page.  You should see an area for Custom Fields.  (If not, go to the upper right, click Screen Options, and be sure that Custom Fields is checked).  Click Enter New, put in the Name and Value, and click Add Custom Field.  In my case, I named the field “slogan”.

Then under Appearance… Edit, I added this code to my Theme Functions script (functions.php):

add_action( 'genesis_before_sidebar_widget_area', 'slogan_meta' );

function slogan_meta() {
  genesis_custom_field('slogan');
}

The names of things make it more-or-less self-explanatory.  Essentially, I set up a function that will place an item at the top of the sidebar widget.  This function consists of our new field, “slogan”.   Then when you view a Post on your site, its slogan will appear at the top of the sidebar.  (or you can choose not to have any slogan value for a particular Post, so none will display).  That’s the simplest implementation of the custom field; you could add additional HTML code to the field for styling purposes, but this illustrates the general idea.

You can, to be sure, use regular WordPress functions and code to implement Custom Fields, but Genesis allows you to do this sort of task more elegantly, with very little code.  I hope you found this helpful.  Let me know in the Comments if you have a question.

A Pie Made Entirely of Smartphones. Mmm, just like Mom's!

According to Pew Research, texting is overwhelmingly the preferred method of communication for teens.  Anecdotally, that seems pretty obvious, but I was not aware of the numbers involved, and how much other methods have waned.  The teens and people under 25 that I know certainly are emblematic of this trend.  If I send one of them an email, I get either no response at all, or maybe one that arrives in a month or two.  Email is just so last century!  Of course it’s possible that they just find me totally boring. 

It occurred to me that this will have implications for those of us doing web development.  If you’ve worked with clients, you know that communication is critical for having a job go well.  Recently I am seeing more clients who will communicate via texting, and if it’s a simple answer to a short question, that’s perfectly fine, but if you have more than one question, or require significant input from the client, texting and smartphones are deadly.  So projects take longer, and misunderstandings proliferate.  Quality vanishes.  I’ve written before about one client I had who steadfastly refused to ever talk on the phone, have an online chat, or Skype.  Projects with him did eventually get done, but were irritating and always very slow, with so many corrections needed.  I believe this trend will only increase – people are so addicted to their phones that they will continue working this way even if advised of the pitfalls.  This is not good news.  You get communication like this, but without the humor.

Communication Breakdown – OMG, It’s a Good Thing

But I did see an upside.  As brand new web developers are minted, they will also want to do everything possible via their phone, thumb-typing on their tiny screens.  That means that if a client emails one of these developers, they may get no answer at all, or maybe a one-word answer to a 5-part question.  This client will not be pleased about that, and may fire the developer.  And the developer may not even know he’s fired if it occurred via email.  It would also be interesting to see the numbers of people trying to do web development or other business solely through Facebook.  TMI taken in a special new direction.

Hey! I'm totally updating my website now. If I get run over, at least my shoes look awesome! lol

So those of us who are willing to use multiple communication methods will have a distinct advantage.  Not because we’re smarter or better, but simply because we answer requests, provide timely information, and facilitate communication.

This post is intended for MODx developers.  I did a post awhile ago on getting RSS feeds working in MODx Evo, the legacy version.  I also tried doing it in Revo (the latest version) at that time, but when using GetFeed, the most widely known Revo RSS snippet, I could only get Twitter working, and Atom format didn’t seem to work at all.  The developer of that snippet, while a great programmer, is probably too busy working with the core of Revo to play around more with it.

Enter SpieFeed

So I decided to find something else, and SpieFeed fit the bill, and worked great! (link to its documentation)  I was able to test successfully with both RSS and Atom feeds.  In this example, I changed it to a US-friendly date format, used my template chunk instead of the default (see &tpl), set it to display 5 items, and used Lady Gaga’s twitter feed.  Here’s the snippet call that could be used on a page or in a template:

[[!spieFeed? &dateFormat=`M d, Y` &tpl=`DaveSpieFeedTpl` &setItemLimit=`5` &setFeedUrl=`http://twitter.com/statuses/user_timeline/ladygaga.rss`]]

If you don’t specify a template, it uses the default, which is a chunk that is automagically installed when you load the package. It contains a huge amount of fields, seemingly everything possible in a feed, and you’ll likely want to use your own template so that it looks good and is easy to style.  The first time you test it, though, try it without any &tpl so that you can pick and choose from what’s available – it’s a lot of goodies!  Here’s my chunk:

<div class="feedRow [[+feedClass]]">
    <div class="feedLink">
        <img src="[[+favicon]]" alt="" />
        <a href="[[+link]]" target="_blank">[[+content]]</a>
    </div>

    <div class="feedDate">
      [[+date]]
    </div>
</div>

Simple as Pie

The developer of SpieFeed, goldsky, used Simple Pie as the basis for this snippet, thus the name.   I must say it works very well!  I didn’t test exhaustively, so if you have many different types of feeds, test accordingly.  I hope you enjoy using SpieFeed, and that this helps you with your RSS feeds in MODx!