SoCal Websites » Tips and Tricks

Use iframe in WordPress

Alan Hartung — Sat, 20 Dec 2008 01:01:00 +0000

With WordPress’s custom page templates, you can now get iframes to work in the body of your pages.

After searching the internet far and wide for an iframe solution for WordPress, I mostly found uppity comments about how it was not secure, and you just should not use them.

Well, sometimes there are good uses for the iframe. Such as using an iframe for Google Calendar, or if a client uses some other third-party calendar provider and get their content through the use of the html tag iframe.

Remembering what I had to do to extend WordPress to be a more full-featured content management system, I took my cue and created a new page template. You could call it “calendar.php.”

It is in the template where I just chose to place all of my code for that page and pulled the iframe in rather nicely.

I used a PHP include to bring in the actual html, but I’m pretty sure it will work just putting the iframe code directly into the template file (though I have not tested that).

So if you’ve been beating your head against the wall looking for a way to get an iframe into the body of a WordPress page, this is a simple solution. Though one that is more technical than you should have to be for a content management system.

Use sIFR with WordPress dropdown menus

Alan Hartung — Wed, 26 Nov 2008 05:26:24 +0000

After much searching across the webosphere, I decided very few people have shared how to integrate sIFR with dropdown menus.

I found one example, but his solution did not work for me.

Taking his cue, however, I did implement SuperFish as a starting point.

Implementing SuperFish is pretty simple, so I’ll leave their documentation for that part of this “how to.”

After you get the SuperFish plugin working with wp_list_pages in WordPress, you run into a major problem with sIFR and any of the dropdown solutions for Wordpress. The CSS wp_list_pages creates is applied to the

tags, and sIFR will want to replace all of the sub-pages text as well as the text for the top level pages.

To get around this, I installed the plugin List Pages Plus and made a couple modifications.

Once you have the plugin activated, you need to edit the “list-pages-plus.php” file included. Change the following line:

$litem[$k] = "\n\t" . ‘

’.$pre.$text1.$post.’’. "\n\t

’.$spre.$text2.$spost.’’;

to:

$litem[$k] = "\n\t" . ‘
’.$pre.’’.$text1.’’.$post. "\n\t
- ’.$spre.$text2.$spost.’’;
  
  And then change this line:
  
  $litem[$k] = "\n\t" . ‘
- ’.$pre.$text.$post.’’;
  
  endif;
  
  to:
  
  $litem[$k] = "\n\t" . ‘
- ’.$pre.’’.$text.’’.$post;
  
  endif;
  
  Now, if you really wanted to be complete, you should also change the position of the input box in the form for the admin, but it is not a necessary step. The hack will work whether it looks right in the admin form or not.
  
  After you have made the above code changes, go into the settings for List Pages Plus and add
  and
  to the last two input fields for the parent item.
  
  Now, change wp_list_pages to wp_list_pages_plus in your header file (or wherever you are implementing your dropdown menu with sIFR for the top level).
  
  Your last step is to use the span tag as your selector for your sIFR replacements. Using the class example I gave above, your selector would be “.navReplace”
  
  If you do the above, you can get sIFR working on your top level navigation items with dropdown menus.

Use Minefield at the same time as Firefox

Alan Hartung — Sat, 01 Nov 2008 23:28:24 +0000

Using MultiFirefox, you can use Minefield, the new beta version of Firefox, at the same time as Firefox 2 or 3.

You need to rename Firefox to something like Firefox Beta or Firefox Minefield to get MultiFirefox to recognize Minefield as a version of Firefox.

After renaming it and restarting multifirefox, you will be able to load Minefield and any other version of Firefox compatible with multifirefox.

cPanel Set Default Address to :fail: no such address here

Alan Hartung — Fri, 05 Sep 2008 17:20:50 +0000

Spam can cause problems with exim when it is both incoming and outgoing. Recently, we started getting excessive resource usage notices for two different customers. At first, it looked like their mail accounts were being used to spam the server.

After further analysis, we realized it was actually that the domains were being bombarded with spam to their accounts. Exim was raising the server load dramatically, because neither account had the default address set to :fail: no such address here.

By using :fail:, “the email is never accepted into the server. During the initial SMTP negotiation when the senders SMTP server connects to your SMTP server, the sending SMTP server issues a RCPT command notifying your server which email address the email to follow is intended for. Your server then checks whether the recipient email actually exists on your server (a POP3 account, an alias or a catchall alias) and if it does not, it issues an SMTP DENY which terminates the attempt to deliver the email.” (source: ConfigServer)

These two accounts were being bombarded in such a way that they actually brought the server to a crawl by not having the default address set to :fail:.

So in your cPanel installations, you should make sure the default address is set to :fail: for all accounts to ensure a safe, stable hosting environment.

In WHM, if you go to “Tweak Settings” under “Server Configuration,” you can set the default for new accounts to go to :fail: and prevent high server load from mail attacks.

PRM – Keep the server load down

Alan Hartung — Wed, 16 Apr 2008 17:36:30 +0000

Process Resource Monitor

When running a shared server environment, you must be extremely aware of activity which can take down your server. One rogue hosting account can ruin things for everyone.

While you should not allow an account to run poorly written scripts which create server intensive processes, a host should also not leave the server unprotected from scripts which will increase the server load and bog or bring down the server.

Enter PRM. Process Resource Monitor will monitor processes on the server and check it for exceeding resource limits which you set in the config file. To be sure it doesn’t kill legitimate processes, you set the number of times a process must exceed your rules and the number of seconds between checks for a process to be killed.

PRM will keep your shared enviromnent running smoothly and help ensure one account does not bog down the server for everyone.

Firefox Tabs – Drag and Drop

Alan Hartung — Sun, 23 Dec 2007 03:26:01 +0000

I can’t really remember the time before tabbed browsing and Firefox’s session restore feature. On average, I probably have 5-7 tabs open at a time, and I often close Firefox with that many tabs open. It has become part of my workflow.

The other day, I learned – quite by accident – that I can rearrange the tabs on Firefox just by clicking and dragging them to another position. It’s a simple trick, and it has helped with my workflow.

Now, my tabs can reflect groupings in my workflow. When I come back to the tab in the third position, I may want to open additional tabs related to the website contained therein. Rather than just opening new tabs at the end, I can now group them all together and bring a little more organization to my tabbed browsing.