Sephy’s Platzish

I got a message from Snoskred not too long ago asking if I could see a certain page - it was a page that I had recognized from a while ago as having been something that I’d seen when trying to download a plugin for WordPress one time. If you’re curious, the page is visible by clicking here. However, I wouldn’t bother because it’s just a page advertising some bogus bollocks that this guy has a direct interest in.

The big thing isn’t the fact that she was asking me about this page, it was the reasoning behind her asking. I’ll got into it a bit more, but if you’re short for time, you can read Snoskred’s post about it on the Aussie Bloggers Forums.

Basically, one of the plugins that is used on blogs that she sets up is one called Different Posts Per Page. The function of it is pretty obvious - it allows you to set the number of posts you want to appear on archive pages, along with the number you want on the front page. Up until the most recent update, it would install perfectly fine. However, the latest version of the plugin now has a registration procedure, which is completely ridiculous.

So, who is this guy?

The author of this particular plugin is a gentleman in Nepal who specializes in writing WordPress plugins which, to be completely honest, are some of the most annoying out there - for example, one that creates, as he says, an “Attention Grabbing Unblockable Popup in Wordpress”. The hilarious thing is that he claims that this plugin will have these “instant benefits” -

• More blog subscribers
• More RSS feeds subscriptions
• Direct people to special offers
• Provide effective updates
• Increase sales
• Increase Leads

Personally? If it were me who had to face this popup on my window that is “unblockable”, my first instinct would be to close the tab and not bother. I suspect that there are a lot of people who would fall in that same boat. By the way, it’s in Javascript, so if you’re running NoScript, then you won’t see the popup.

Anyway, a few months ago, I was searching for a plugin that would do what DPPP does, and that was about the only one that I had found. The problem at the time was that I searched using Google, and wound up at his page for the plugin. As you can see at the bottom of the page, there is a huge DOWNLOAD NOW link, and at the time I first even tried to download it, I got redirected. Thanks to that redirection, there is an email account which has gotten emails from this guy somewhere around twice a week; it’s not consistent, but if it were my main account, I’d find it quite annoying.

In fact, when I went through this arduous process, and wound up at the page listed at the top, I sent this message to Snoskred on Skype -

i hate to take you away from your focus, but the link that i was given to get the plugin, it’s a fucking ad! - http://www.maxblogpress.com/oto/index.php?p=dppp

Then the next, as it might seem, knife was stuck into my back - I found that it was available on the WordPress Plugin Directory. When I found that out, I emailed the bloke who did this. This is what I wrote

Dear sir,

I am extremely displeased at the amount of red tape that I was forced to go through in order to download a plugin that isn’t even hosted on your server. In fact, if I had known that it was listed on the WP plugin page, I would have never bothered giving you my email address, signing up for a newsletter I’m not interested in receiving, and wasting my valuable time scrolling through a page of worthless junk that I’m not interested in buying, just to be directed to a download hosted on WordPress’s servers.

Regards,
Sephyroth

Oddly enough, he never replied to me. The story would have ended there with me finding it on the WordPress site, but things changed.

A new release

About a month ago, a new version of this plugin was released, version 1.7. With it came a sign that maybe Pawan didn’t like people being able to use his plugin like any other plugin out there (aside from Akismet and wordpress.com stats, which require a WordPress API key to work, and for which there is a purpose for doing that) without him getting some cut of the action.

For anyone wanting to download and use the plugin, you wouldn’t know anything was unusual until you would install it on WordPress and activate it. At that point, you’re told that you are now required to register to use this plugin. This time, however, you don’t have a choice as to the email address you subject to the onslaught of spam - it’s the address listed as the admin for the site!

As with any of this guy’s other products, in order to complete this process, you have to visit that ad page linked at the top of the page.

If you read the documentation for this product, which is nearly non-existent (simply because any of the functions you’d expect in a readme are just links to his site!), you would find this as the changes for the most recent version. Most people would consider the addition of a registration requirement important enough to mention, but here’s what you get -

= Version 1.7 (02-21-2008) =
* Updated: Some minor improvements.

Not much information there, eh?

Also, none of the information pages that show how to use this plugin mention a single thing about registration - basically what this guy is doing is bait and switch.

What you can do

If you’re a user of the Different Posts Per Page plugin, the simplest thing that you can do is not upgrade your version to the latest. Also, you can take a read of a thread on the WordPress Support forums for a couple of alternatives, including a database edit that you can do - however, that is something you should only do if you know what you are doing - if you make only one wrong move, you can kill your blog!

If you don’t use the plugin, and were intending to - don’t use it. Not surprisingly, old versions are not available for downloading from the WordPress repository, so unless you do have a copy of an old version kicking around, you’re SOL (unless you have connections, and I’m sure some will materialize ).

If you don’t fall into either of those categories, then there are a couple of things you can do - first, and this is something that I don’t usually recommend, but this guy’s antics are beyond unreasonable that he needs to hear the community’s input on the situation, you can leave him a comment on the page for comments, and let him know what you think. Also, feel free to write a post about this; I don’t use the plugin, but hearing the crap that he’s doing spurred me to write this post.

Lastly, if you’re so inclined, use the power of social networking sites to get the word out about these actions.

 This is one of those simple how-tos for WordPress, but I was asked on how it worked, so here ya go.

Why would you want to do this?

Sometimes you have that post you want to publish, say on a testing blog, that you don’t want all and sundry to read. Of course, you might also have a post on your blog that you only want your close friends to see, and not the whole world. Either way, it is useful to know how it works so that if you need to use it, you have an understanding.

Setting a password

As usual, for the purposes of this demo, I’ll be using my test blog which has the slow TinyMCE editor which lags behind my typing. It’s fun to type the letters then see them about 20 seconds later, but I digress. When you’re writing a post and want to put in a password, all you have to do is look to the right of the editor for the Post Password box in the right-hand column of options.

To set the password, all you need to do is type it in.

From there, just publish the post like normal. When you and your visitors go to your blog, they will see this -

How this works for the user

In the last shot, you’ll see that I have included the next post, which is also password-protected. I did this for a reason - it has a different password to the first post. I’ll explain that a little bit later. However, to get the post to show, all you and those you’ve given the password to will need to do is just put in the password and click submit. If you use Firefox, you may be asked to save the password; I’d just go with Not Now. And now, you can see the protected post -

Now, we reach the sticky wicket and the time when I should advise anyone who is averse to technical explanations to tune out for a moment.

You’ll notice that the second post has gone back to protected status. There is a simple reason for this - cookies. When you have a protected post and a user enters the password for that post, that password gets stored as a cookie for ten days. This means that any protected post with that password will be visible by anyone who knows the password for one of the posts.

If you use multiple passwords, however, you can only see the posts protected by one password because the cookie that is set has the same name, but the value changes to match the last password you put into the form. If you’re making a lot of protected posts, I personally think that it’s unlikely that you’ll be making separate posts for separate groups of people thus requiring separate passwords, so you’re probably fine using one password for all protected posts.

This ends the technical explanation for those who had tuned out.

The simple explanation is that if you have two posts with two separate passwords, visitors will only be able to see one post at a time, even if they know the passwords to both. If they have the same password, visitors will be able to see both posts if the know the password.

I should also mention that if you have a password-protected post, this is what readers will see in the RSS feed -

There is no excerpt because this is a protected post.

Other things to note

I did a little bit of testing to see what did and what didn’t work with regards to the password protection. Simply put, if you protect a post, all that will be seen is the prompt. After entering the password, the post acts like normal. If there’s a more tag in there, you will have to click to read more of the post. Also, if you read the site’s feed using something like IE7’s built-in feed reader, you will be able to see unlocked posts in the RSS feed. Other online or offline readers will require you to visit the site to see the post.  Also, if the reader accepts it (like Firefox livemarks), the excerpt will show if you have unlocked the post.

All in all, password protecting a post in WordPress isn’t that hard, but if you choose to do it, you should be sure that you trust those you give the password out to, depending on the content you put in the locked posts. As always, if you have something you’d like explained, feel free to drop me a line, and I’ll go through it and learn how to do it, then write a post about it.

This is something that was asked on the Aussie Bloggers forums, and has been sitting on my to-do list for a couple of days now. It’s a short post, geared to users of the WP-Polls plugin for WordPress.

Basically, there are two ways you can show your polls - in your sidebar via the widget (or by manually editing the sidebar to add some PHP code), or within a post. Depending on the context in which you want your poll, you might want to have it within a post. Here’s how you do it.

First off, if you are wanting it to be a new poll, then you’ll need to make a new poll in the Polls section of your admin panel. For the purposes of this post, I’ve made a timely cricket-related question -

 Loading …

So, now you can see the poll within the post (RSS readers, you may have to visit the site to see the poll). But how did it get there?

A simple bit of coding, but you don’t need to know anything other than the poll number, as there is a button on your toolbar to insert a poll. Depending on the editor you use, the button itself will vary.

For Advanced TinyMCE users, the button looks like this, on the top row of buttons -

And, if you have opted to stick with the original TinyMCE editor, this is what the button will look like (yeah, it’s a bit spiffier ) -

All you have to do is click on that button, and a dialog will come up, which looks like this (obviously, the address of the site will be your address) -

Now, you just have to put in the number of the poll you want to insert. In this case, it was number 2, but if you check out the list of polls on the main Polls page in your administration panel, you will see the Poll ID in the left column -

Simply put that number into the dialog box, and it will insert the code to show that poll. If you’re curious, the code that it will insert is this (broken apart so that it doesn’t show the poll again )

[ poll = {PollID} ]

I made a mention about RSS readers needing to come to the site to view the poll because how WP-Polls works is that it’s actually all run from within the page, with the votes all being logged by the plugin. These are functions that just can’t be replicated in an RSS feed (for the most part). In fact, I did some checking now, and this is the message you will see in place of the poll -

Note: There is a poll embedded within this post, please visit the site to participate in this post’s poll.

There are plugins which will allow you to put a poll in an RSS Feed - Democracy should be able to, according to a reply by Sueblimely in the thread, but I have not personally tested it to verify it. If anyone wants to test it and see if it works on their own blog, or if you use a different plugin for your polls which allows this, feel free to drop a comment.