For the past few weeks I have been trying to modify WordPress so it can be used for generating user profiles and incorporate that with a voting system which will form the base of a new top list. The plugin that allows you to have extra fields is Cimy-User-extra-Fields which allows you to create fields and tag them onto the end of the existing wordpress user edit screen.

The plugin also comes with a couple of functions that allow you to extract data into say a user profile or directory listing page. Unfortunately and most annoyingly these routines do not work properly. What actually happens is that both functions only return 1 field values (the first), rather than in my case all 13 of them. So yes, you can have extra fields, you can edit them but you are screwed if you want to see them whilst not logged in!

What annoys me even more is that I’ve written a gallery manager that works perfectly with wordpress profiles. It works without Cimy but without having the ability of recording extra fields in wordpress then WordPress is no longer a suitable application for hosting user profiles. Oh why can people test their scripts properly is beyond me.

On looking at the website for Cimy it appears that the developer is charging people to fix his own work, which is not very good at all. Overall, WordPress appears to handle the ability of having profiles very poorly indeed. This is a terrible shame!

Those who have met me in real life or on-line may know that I’m not really a graphics person. There was a time I used to mess about with such stuff, but since being afflicted with RSI, it became too uncomfortable using a most pointing devices for any length of time, including the standard mouse. RSI, Repetitive Strain Injury does affect you in many bizarre ways and not being able to draw any more was just one of them.

As such for little graphical tasks I tend to hunt down free tools, gadgets or wizards that I can use to do the job. I always look for something easy as I am a bit lazy and I’m in a rush. Today, I needed to make a “Vote For Me” type button for a new web application. I thought about using Paint shop but then I thought why not Google for something easier instead. I found http://www.makebutton.com/ which simply does the job – It makes basic buttons!

I did look at other sites too and some were a little over engineered for what I wanted to do; ie, create a simple button, to do a simple job. After all, its just a button.

I had a button done in a few clicks and downloaded in a PNG format. This format does work in most modern browsers, but not all. So I started up Paint shop to convert it to an old style GIF and used the “Buttonise” facility to bevel the edges slightly.

The reason I saved it as a GIF rather than a JPG was the simple fact that the button graphic is made up 158 colour and thus the optimal for type for this is a GIF. Any picture with more than 256 colours is more suitable to be saved as a JPG.

A word of caution, if you do intend to do any graphical manipulation in certain server based languages than almost certainly the graphic will have to be in a JPG or PNG format unless your language as programming libraries available for manipulating GIF files. I’m not 100% sure but I don’t think PHP handles GIF files very well and so I’ve always used JPG’s so far!

Christmas out of all the holidays is my favourite. Its a holiday of consumption, though not of materialistic things. I just like to eat and drink good things. The mad buying of presents I can take or leave since that was just an invention by the stores and is nothing to do with Christmas in itself.

I do find it necessary to write and send out Christmas cards to especially those people I don’t see very much or not at all. I guess its a way of saying that I haven’t forgotten about you and that I still ‘love you’ despite not being around much. I think Christmas is important just for that and being happy of course.

Tonight for instance I am enjoying one of the Christmas gifts of wine. That’s the sort of present I life most; something I can eat or drink! And for it to be a surprise. There’s nothing worse than someone asking what I want for Christmas because then I know and where is the fun in that!

Christmas is also a time for me where I feel allot free-er with my emotions and just like a kid in a candy store. Christmas as a child was always a very happy time. I do miss that time of course, but now I’m an uncle to many and I in turn try to make their Christmas as special as mine were in those days past.

Its more difficult now as I find so many Christmas are so wrapped it in expensive toys rather than what Christmas was to me. I guess times change.. (drinks more wine)

I sometimes use Instant Messengers but not as often as I used to. One of the things that used to annoy me are people that run in invisible/block mode. It’s pretty infuriating when you need to ask a guy something who you know is on-line allot of the time, but is skulking in the background.

Since blocked mode is just a flag in a database rather than being physically on-line or off then you can write a script to detect whether someone is truly one of the various messenger platforms. One such an example of a script for MSN is at; http://www.checkmsnstatus.com/msn-block-checker.php

Your software client will mark people as off-line but the script checks for the blocked flag. If its set then it knows you’re on-line as its only set in this situation. Its not exactly rocket science! So yes you can check who is being ignorant using such messenger hacks.

Twitter is a micro-blogging tool that has grown massively over the past 2 years, establishing itself as a tool to use for everyone. Nerds were the only ones that used Twitter and Facebook was the king of the castle, that the rest of the world relied upon.

Using Twitter has many hidden dangers. Its the ultimate tool for any on-line stalker, even if you block or protect your tweets. Protecting tweets is only of limited help when your friends haven’t protected theirs. You can still indirectly follow a person via the tweets of the friends of the target. Its totally possible to do as Twitter users are way to free with their information and behavior.

You can quickly start to build up a profile of friends that are related to each other and cross reference information which each of the friends have shared. In the way users behave you can easily identify; girl/boyfriends, family members and real time friends. Now an obsessed fan can follow you and also no doubt socially engineering a relationship with your nearest and dearest.

Its possible to get allot of information out of twitter on anyone, though it would take a determined since the information is spread out and requires an data analyst  or accountant type of brain. They probably would be search power users that have used the internet for research before, rather than the average person.

Twitter, out of all the social platforms is the most easily accessible, information rich and ultimately dangerous in terms of privacy. I personally find Twitter very scary.

Like with all knowledge you can use it for good or bad. Bad is a subjective term as apart of marketing is making your competition look worse than you. Its a little known fact that even the most ‘church of England’ companies tend to take part of negative marketing activities to make their competition look like a poor choice for customers.

There are a number of direct and indirect strategies that can be employed including the use of false customer reviews, in appropriate return linking, anti-blogging and what I call Mr angry web sites. I have used some of these strategies myself many in retaliation for things individuals or companies have done to me. For example, when a certain company decided to steal money from my bank account for 6 months and refused all other means of resolving the issue. Sometimes the only way to get ones point across over to them is public humiliation.

I never use these activities as apart of any main stream marketing effort as morally its tacky and wrong. It’s only knowledge I’ve used for revenge purposes and with a co-ordinate assault by a team of people then a business can be seriously damaged, beyond repair.

Google at the moment expanding in supplying reviews/customer comments by the side of web site listings. This can be a very positive thing, but also can be used by the competition or anyone you might upset to undermine your web site. Customer comments, whether real or not is actually the most powerful negative marketing technique that a person can use. Marketers will use this by picking up on any negative aspect of a competitor and making a big thing of it, then real customer will often have that in mind and make similar supportive comments, turning the review/comments system into a wave of negativity driving customers away from visiting your web site.

There is a lot of talk on the internet about Google Comments being a bad thing and they are on the whole completely correct. Many good businesses are going to fall victim of negative marketing. For the enterprising and those void of morals there will be opportunities too. These are what I regard as black hat activities and its not a good thing for a CV in my opinion but anyone who markets any sort of website can so easily turn to the dark side.

Anti-blogging is really about setting up multiple blogs under different names, talking about a subject perhaps isn’t directly related to the product or service (it could be a personal blog) and then post a number of articles about the product, complaining and undermining them. If you use the major blogging networks who automatically categorise, list and distribute your articles via RSS feeds then this can be an excellent way of spreading further negative publicity.

Using in appropriate linking can be a powerful tool since Google will adjust your page ranking depending on what other websites are linking to yours. So if you happen to have a vanilla site but then later find that 50 rather inappropriate adult sites are linking back to yours then Google will think you are spamming and your vanilla sites ranking will collapse within 6 months, naturally negatively affecting income for that business. Some marketing companies already offer this service to established clients that have signed confidentiality agreements.

Lastly there’s the Mr Angry websites. This is where a disgruntled customer is often so annoyed that they actually set up a single page or entire website with a forum where others can get together and slag off the target. Allot of large companies have Mr Angry sites and their domain names usually go along the lines of; (company-name)sucks.com or (company-name)scam.com etc.

Having a domain name with your company name and either Sucks or Scam in them is very damaging in itself as not only is it embarrassing but also shows prospective customers that there are problems with resolving of customer complaints. People take allot of notice of Mr angry web sites as its perceived that no one that is sane is going to go to all that effort unless they are really annoyed or just completely insane!

I suppose that a sophisticated on-line stalker could use the guise of a ‘fan site’ turned bad into a site that can negatively affect your business. In this situation, you can often turn this in to a positive (if you know how) and actually increase your popularity and making the stalker look like a complete mad man. I wouldn’t advise doing this as stalker behaviour can be un-predictable and it can be dangerous in terms of personal safety. Its just not worth the hassle!

I think I must be mentally ill as I started wanting a Mac having I saw the product “Model Baker” advertised on Mac World. I wasn’t looking for anything Mac related but instead I was looking for a rapid development platform to handle user management type tasks.

Model Baker is a nifty like product that allows you to build simple database driven applications without any coding. Instead you create models, views, set relationships between them and also assign attributes. As apart of the process you can assign a theme to it and just click a button to build the entire application; add, edit, delete, view records.

Then from this you can add your own custom code to further develop the application. Having the advantage of being able to utilize a rapid development application such as Model Bakers turns a 1 week job into 20 minutes. Excellent stuff.

Model Baker like with all Mac based applications is really expensive. A single user license is $399 which is rather excessive in my opinion and of course you have to have a Mac with an intel processor. Anyone care to give me a Mac?

I just noticed that there is yet another location in the Buddy Press core where blogging functions are used and that is in the search bar type box:

Since on this platform there is only going to be the 1 blog which controlled entirely by admin then there’s no need to offer the function of searching for all blogs on the platform. To remove this code then we need to open the file; “wp-content/plugins/buddypress/bp-core/bp-core-templatetags.php” and remove the following block of code:

This bit of code simply adds the “Blogs” option to the drop down menu if the BB Blogs is installed. So deleting this code removes the option from the menu. If you prefer you can put a ‘#’ symbol to the left of “$Selection_box” which will comment this line out so its not executed but it still remains in the source code for any future use or just for reference purposes. Many programmers like to leave original code in place, which is fine. Whatever!

This social networking software sits on a wordpress platform then it inherits all its blogging functionality. For me personally I don’t want people to have their own blogs as it makes it too difficult to monitor content and to ensure the audience is looking at the advertising spots. With the blogging functions enabled then users can use their own templetes and widgets which could be used to block content that we want people to see.

I wanted a platform that has one central blog that is controlled by admin (me) that can be used to public content with the extra benefits a social networking activities around it, thus; groups, internal messages, friend lists, activity streams and detailed user profiles. I don’t particularly want users to have their own blogs. Additionally, after further testing I found BBPress integration doesn’t actually work that well; it doesn’t actually display posts which is a bit of a fundamental issue!

Unfortunately to make this happen then some low level code edits to remove “forum” and “blogs” items from pages as well as menus. Firstly, to get rid of the two tabs for forum and blogs then we need to edit the theme file; wp-content/themes/bp-sn-parent/header.php and remove the following block of code:

And also the following block needs to be removed:

(If you don’t want to delete the bits of code, comment them out instead)

The next few steps involves actually editing some files. within the wordpress admin screen under the Buddypress menu select the component set-up option. From here turn off the Forum component and save the settings. You can also now delete the BBPress folder from your ‘wp/’ directory as well as the ‘BBPress Integration’ Plugin as its pointless.

Next we need to remove the ‘Random blogs’ element from the menu at the top of the page. We need to open the file called ‘/wp/wp-content/plugins/buddypress/bp-core/bp-core-adminbar.php’ and remove the following bits of code:

Within the same file we want to change the name of the “My Blogs” menu item to “News” too. So to do this look for this piece of code:

Just change ‘My Blogs’ to ‘News’ and that should do it. You might notice the code below it refers to creating and editing an existing blog. We can leave this code since we are going to switch off new blog registrations within wordpress itself. Thus this code will never be executed any way.

Next remove the Blog items off the profile page users see on logging in and the My account menu at the top of the screen, which can be done with a single edit. Open the file ‘/wp/wp-content/plugins/buddypress/bp-blogs.php’

Remove the following bit of code:

What the code above does is to add an item to an array which is later used for Buddypress in several places. So, obviously removing the code means that the Blog items won’t be used any where.

Finally, log into WordPress MU as admin and from the menu on the left select “Site Admin > Options” and set “Allow new Registrations” to “Only user account can be created” – This should stop new blogs being created when new users register on the site. When users do sign up though, they will automatically become subscribers of the main sites (ie admin) blog and be subscribed to that content.

In the following posts I will be discussing future tweaks plus also looking at changing colours, font and other styling issues.

In wordpress MU the theme editor is switched off since there’s a security flaw in its design whereby any user is able to change the current theme/template with it. This is a bit of a pain when building a new site as during testing I often want to change a tiny thing or to try something out. Having to log in via FTP, download the file, change it and re-loading it back again is rather inconvenient, making a simple 1 minute job into 5 minutes. So I looked around for a solution to get the theme-editor.php back onto the admin menu.

I discovered that what I had to do was to create a new PHP file inside the mu-plugin folder called "theme-opts.php" (for example) and fill it with the code below:

<?
add_action( ‘admin_init’, create_function(‘$pages’, ‘if(is_site_admin()) return remove_action("admin_init","disable_some_pages");’),1);
add_action( ‘_admin_menu’, create_function(‘$theme_menu’, ‘return add_theme_page( "Editor", "Editor", "edit_themes", "theme-editor.php");’ ));
add_action( ‘_admin_menu’, create_function(‘$plugin_menu’, ‘return add_submenu_page( "plugins.php", "Editor", "Editor", "edit_plugins", "plugin-editor.php");’ ));
?>

This code re-adds some of the options that are available in the single user wordpress software but is missing from the multi-user platform. It’s not really a good idea to leave these options online when the site is open to the public, but for testing/development purposes it is completely fine.