Stephan Muller

I’m not supporting my forum plugins anymore

Stephan — Thu, 22 Dec 2011 20:23:53 +0000

Hey folks who came here from Google, looking for my phpBB and bbPress plugins. Sorry, I currently do NOT support these plugins.

They are still up for download, and there’s plenty of comments on the posts to help you out with the basic problems. I do know that they are both flawed, but I’m not able to support them at the moment. First of all, I simply don’t have the time to spend on this blog and the plugins. Second, I don’t run any forums anymore so I don’t use either phpBB or bbPress anymore. Third, I’m not a PHP developer and I just don’t know how to fix them, and I lack the motivation (see the previous points) to delve into it.

I might start blogging again in the future, and I won’t delete this site because there’s still people coming in here that can use my plugins. If anyone manages to fix them though, please do let me know and I’ll upload the new version and give due credits

That’s all folks!

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I’m not supporting my forum plugins anymore is an article by Stephan Muller

Using rel=”author” on Google+

Stephan — Sat, 23 Jul 2011 16:47:01 +0000

I’ve been trying out Google+ for almost three weeks now, and so far I kind of like it. I don’t see it replacing Facebook or Twitter just yet, but overall it seems like it could be here to stay.

One interesting thing I stumbled across today is the possibility to link your Google+ account to certain search results by making use of the rel=”author” and rel=”me” attributes on links. Here’s the article that explains it all:

How to implement rel=”author”

I tried implementing this myself, and this post will hopefully be my first to show up in Google with my avatar next to it. I used the rel=”author” link both on my username above a post (it should say ‘posted by Stephan’ below the title of this pot) and in the sidebar, so let’s see how quick Google picks it up.

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Using rel=”author” on Google+ is an article by Stephan Muller

KittenAuth extension for MediaWiki

Stephan — Mon, 14 Mar 2011 12:22:04 +0000

The Marilyn Manson wiki I’ve been running for a couple of years now recently suffered from massive attacks of spam. We’ve had those before, but previously we’ve always been able to stop those with plugins like ConfirmEdit. This time however, both ConfirmEdit and SimpleAntiSpam were no match for the spammers.

It was time to come up with something new, and I don’t mean making the CAPTCHA extremely hard. Because to be honest, Captcha’s Suck.

A while ago I stumbled across a website called KittenAuth, a CAPTCHA-like plugin that asks visitors to select three kittens from an array of 9 images. I immediately liked the concept, and I’m actually surprised I haven’t seen it used that much yet.

One thing I didn’t like though was the size of the block of images. The website itself doesn’t have any screenshots (strange), but you can see plenty of examples at Google images. Also, as easy as it is for us humans to identify a cat, I think the 3×3 grid makes it pretty tough to identify all the kittens at a glance. And then we’re back at why CAPTCHA’s suck: it takes several seconds to figure out the correct answer.

Anyway, my idea was to develop a KittenAuth plugin for MediaWiki that is strong enough to stop the spam flood, but easy enough for humans not to take several seconds to solve. And so I did:

A screenshot of the plugin with default settings

What I also did was add the option to upload custom images. Kittens are cute and all, but sometimes it’s much more fun to have your users pick something that is related to the site they’re on. Like in my case, Marilyn Manson.

MansonAuth: pick the photo of Marilyn Manson

Apart from being able to customize the images there’s also a range of options for which visitors actually see the KittenAuth, when it is triggered, and what IP’s and URL’s are disregarded. These are mostly taken from ConfirmEdit, so due credit goes to it’s developers.

Anyway, if you want to give it a try you can download KittenAuth for Mediawiki (.zip) and visit the KittenAuth MediaWiki extension page for more information and the installation instructions.

Feel free to leave a comment on the plugin’s talk page, here on this blog or on Twitter (@stephan_muller) if you have any questions or remarks. If you’re a PHP developer and you think you can improve the plugin or help out with the To-Do items, feel free to edit the code and send me an update!

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KittenAuth extension for MediaWiki is an article by Stephan Muller

Restricted forums for bbPress

Stephan — Sun, 06 Mar 2011 14:30:08 +0000

After my recent adventures with phpBB I’ve decided to switch to bbPress. phpBB has served me well for a while, but there are two major downsides: you can’t use custom PHP inside your template, and to install plugins you have to edit a lot of the core files. The latter especially sucks, so I went looking around for a better piece of forum software.

bbPress

bbPress seemed like a good choice: small, easily customizable and a very usable admin panel. Unfortunately development has been rather slow lately and some basic functions you’d expect on a forum are still missing. Fortunately though, it’s so easily customizable and looks a lot like WordPress (which I have plenty experience with) that I was able to write some plugins of my own.

One of the most important missing pieces to me was the ability to hide a section of the forums from certain usergroups. As an admin, I want to have a place where I can discuss ongoing projects and other administrative activities with my fellow admins without everyone reading along. So I made a plugin that allows me to hide forums from usergroups I specifiy in the admin panel.

(if you don’t care about this story just jump to the )

What does it do?

After looking around in the bbPress plugin repository I found a plugin that basically does what I was looking for (Private Forums). Unfortunately, this one was broken (no wonder, last updated in 2007) so I just went ahead and re-wrote it. My plugin basically does the same:

Adds a page to the admin panel in which you can change your settings
Allows you to restrict forums to only registered users, moderators or admins
Filters restricted forums and posts from the front page, search results, tags, rss feed and user history
Throws an error if a user tries to manually visit a forum or thread that’s restricted to him

Installation

Download restricted-forums-for-bbpress.zip
Extract restricted-forums.php and upload it to your /my-plugins/ folder
Go to “Plugins” in your admin panel and activate Restricted Forums
Go to the “Restricted Forums” page and set which forums are restricted and who is allowed to see them
Optionally, add a custom error message in the text box.

To do

The following functions have not been added yet, but I might add them in future versions:

Add “Key masters” as a separate usergroup from Administrators
Recursive restrictions (restricting a forum category automatically sets those rights to it’s child forums, except when specified otherwise)
(…Request a feature)

Changelog

1.0.1: Fixed non-existing array on first use (March 25, 2011)
1.0.0: Initial version (March 6, 2011)

Restricted forums for bbPress is an article by Stephan Muller

SFC plugin addition: Disable Password Nagging

Stephan — Wed, 23 Feb 2011 15:07:09 +0000

If you use the Simple Facebook Connect plugin for WordPress (and I really do recommend using it), you might have noticed that you will get an error message each time you login to the admin panel.

Notice: you're using the auto-generated password for your account. Would you like to change it to something you'll remember easier?

This is not just something admins see: every user can access certain parts of the WP admin panel, for instance when they want to change their settings. Usually this warning would be pretty useful too, but if you use Facebook Connect to login you will never ever use or have to change your password. This means the warning is totally useless, and should just be hidden.

I wrote a small plugin that does just that: hide the generated password error for users that login using Facebook (or as WordPress itself calls it, “default password nagging”).

Code

The code for the plugin is in fact so small I’ll just post it here. In fact, half of the code is comments that WordPress uses to load the plugin in the admin panel and add some info. Here it is:

ID, 'fbuid', true);

  if($fbuid) {
    remove_action('admin_notices', 'default_password_nag');
  }
}
?>

Installation

Just download sfc-disable-password-nagging.zip and upload it to the /wp-content/plugins/ folder of your WordPress blog. Or if you prefer you can upload it into the simple-facebook-connect folder in the plugins folder to keep it together with it’s SFC friends.

Then just go to your plugins settings panel (/wp-admin/plugins.php) and activate the plugin called SFC – Disable Password Nagging.

Enjoy!

SFC plugin addition: Disable Password Nagging is an article by Stephan Muller

Facebook connect for phpBB

Stephan — Sun, 20 Feb 2011 15:23:12 +0000

As I mentioned in a previous post, I’m trying to get a phpBB forum to allow user registrations using Facebook Connect. So far all looks good, so I’ll explain how I managed to do this.

Disclaimer: I did not develop this plugin and cannot guarantuee that it’s safe.

Having said that, if you’re as stubborn (or desperate for a Facebook plugin for phpBB) as I am, keep on reading. (Note: I’ll just assume you have already installed the latest version of phpBB. If not, you may want to go here first: Download phpBB.)

Getting a Facebook API key

To be able to even connect to Facebook you will need to create an application. Unfortunately, this means you’ll have to verify your Facebook account by filling in a cellphone number or credit-card. This sucks, but it’s necessary. Once you’ve created an app and filled in all the right information, you’ll have some info that you can use to verify yourself as the creator of the app. For the plugin we’re installing you will need you Application ID and your Application Secret Key.

Download the plugin

Once upon a time some guy called Skinny Vinny developed a plugin to add Facebook Connect to phpBB. Unfortunately, he disappeared off of the face of the internet, taking his website svmods.com along with him. Developing of the mod was discontinued, the original file was nowhere to be found anymore and nobody else came up with the idea to pick it up again. I would have loved to start the development of a new plugin, but unfortunately I’m not familiar enough with PHP to start something like that from scratch. Instead, I managed to find the zip-file with the plugin by Skinny Vinny somewhere in an archived page, which I’m going to use.

Note: as the plugin page states this plugin was not completed, not has it been tested for security flaws. Use it at your own risk.

Download the Facebook Connect for phpBB plugin here: svmods_facebook_connect_for_phpbb.zip

Installation

One thing I hate about phpBB is the way you have to actually edit the core files if you want to use a plugin. Decent software like vBulletin or MediaWiki has plenty of hooks which you can use to launch a plugin with, without having to modify the system files. To make this a little easier, a plugin was developed for phpBB called Automod, which installs a plugin automatically for you, saving you the trouble of having to edit the files manually. For some reason however, the Facebook plugin does not work with Automod. This means we have to install it manually after all. Fortunately though, the amount of edits is relatively low (compared to some other plugins) so it shouldn’t be too much of a pain.

Make backups

First of all, backup your forum files and database. If you don’t know how to backup your database, see this tutorial: Backing up your phpBB database.

Backing up your files is as easy as connecting to your server with an FTP-client and downloading the entire /forums/ (or whatever you have called it) folder to your PC.

Upload files

After you’ve backed up your forums, you can start uploading the plugin. In the plugin’s zip-file you just downloaded there’s a folder called /root/. Open it, and upload the contents into the folder on your server that has the forums in it.

Copy the contents of the /root/ folder into the /forums/ folder

Probably you will get a prompt asking you if you want to overwrite the /includes/ and /languages/ folders. This means you’re uploading into the right directory. Just click ‘yes’.

Adding the plugin code to phpBB

This is where the fun part starts: you will have to make some changes to the phpBB core files. In the downloaded zip there’s an install_mod.xml file. Open it, and follow the instructions. It’s not that hard, and if you mess it up just restore your foums by uploading your backed-up files to the server again and try over.

Activating the plugin

Finally, to activate the plugin you’ll have to log in to the Administration Control Panel of your forums. Purge the cache, and then go to the Board Settings page. Here you’ll find a section where you can add your Facebook Application ID and secret (the ones you saved from before when you made a Facebook Application). Hit the submit button, and you should be done!

Questions, etc.

As always, if you have any questions, remarks or feedback just let me know in the comments below or tweet me at @stephan_muller. I’m seriously interested in getting this plugin to an official status, so if you’re a PHP developer and you want to help me out making this plugin better, let me know! I think there’s a lot of people wanting to use this plugin, so let’s give them something good!

If you want to test out this plugin before installing it yourself, just see if you can login on the MansonWiki forums!

Facebook connect for phpBB is an article by Stephan Muller

My web developing toolset

Stephan — Thu, 17 Feb 2011 09:04:30 +0000

Recently a question on Pro Webmasters was posed regarding people’s toolsets when webdeveloping. Unfortunately, that site is still relatively quiet (compared to it’s sisters StackOverflow, SuperUser, etc.) so there has not been a lot discussion. I figured it might be interesting to post my toolset here as well. So, here is what I ideally have at hand when I try to make a website:

Developing:

Software:

Zend Development Environment
FileZilla
EditPlus if needed
Photoshop

Front-end frameworks/etc:

Browsers:

Chrome + EyeDropper (colorpicker) plugin
FireFox + FireBug + YSlow
FireFox second install emulating iPad
IE8 and IE9beta
Opera
Safari

Sites:

SEO:

Comic relief and other distractions

(VERY important to get your mind off of the code once in a while)

CSSsquirrel
Dilbert
Cyanide & Happiness
a movie trivia quiz

Anything you feel I missed? Tools or software that you think are better than what I use now? Let me know in the comments, or at @stephan_muller!

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My web developing toolset is an article by Stephan Muller

Download svmods_facebook_connect_for_phpbb.zip

Stephan — Mon, 14 Feb 2011 16:23:28 +0000

Update: I’ve written a tutorial for installing Facebook Connect for phpBB: Facebook Connect for phpBB.

So the past days I’ve been trying to get FaceBook Connect working for phpBB 3. I still haven’t got it working, but at least I found a tutorial that is supposed to help me out:

phpBB3 Facebook Connect step by step

Near the end though a zipfile is linked that is supposed to contain the actual plugin. However, the creator of the plugin has disappeared, and so has his website http://svmods.com. Not only is the plugin not supported anymore, the zipfile has gone completely.

Stubborn as I am, I still want to give the plugin a try, even though it’s been abandonded. So, I did some research and found the original zipfile. For anyone who’s interested I uploaded it here: svmods_facebook_connect_for_phpbb.zip

Disclaimer

As I said, the plugin is abandonded. I cannot guarantuee it will work, or if it’s safe to use if it does work. I will post updates here when I find out more, please do let me know what your experience is with this plugin!

Download svmods_facebook_connect_for_phpbb.zip is an article by Stephan Muller

Comment spam irony

Stephan — Fri, 28 Jan 2011 15:22:31 +0000

A comment on my blog today:

Have to say I loved This article. Writing for my own blog when I find the time – It is the comments questions that keep me interested and know that I am reaching someone more than a search spider or someone looking to sell something in the comments.

From someone called ‘Maternity Clothes’ with an obscure emailaddress and a link to a maternity clothes webshop. Oh, the irony.

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Comment spam irony is an article by Stephan Muller

The difference between pseudo-classes and pseudo-elements

Stephan — Wed, 26 Jan 2011 15:07:51 +0000

Today I stumbled upon an article by ImpressiveWebs about the difference between :before and ::before in CSS3. I had wondered about this before, so the article was actually an interesting read.

In summary, the difference is that in CSS 2.1 pseudo-elements and pseudo-classes are both targeted using the single colon (:before). In CSS3 however, a distinction is made between the both, pseudo-elements now being prefixed with two colons (::before).

Why? Not sure, but as Louis points out the rule may have come a little too late anyway. Because a lot of pseudo-elements were already introduced in CSS 2.1, backwards compatibility will have to be ensured by supporting the single-colon version as well. Anyway, more about that in the original post: What’s the Difference Between “:before” and “::before”?

Not surprisingly, one of the comments implied (unless I misunderstood the speaker) not being able to actually tell the difference between a pseudo-class and a pseudo-element. This too is something I’ve been wondering about, but which I found the answer to a couple of weeks back. Here’s my reply to said comment:

I don’t think it’s so strange at all that :first-child is a pseudo-class yet ::first-line and ::first-letter are pseudo-elements.

Think of it this way: a :first-child, :last-of-type or :nth-child() is an entire element, like the first li in an ol, the last p in a div or whatever. Because the entire element is selected by this rule, all that has to be used to style it is a pseudo-class.

::selection, ::before and ::first-line however are not already existing elements by themselves, but rather parts of an element. To give that particular part of the document another style, a pseudo-element is wrapped around it with the proper style. In the case of ::select, think of it as surrounding the selected part with a span and then styling that. It’s a pseudo-element, because there wasn’t a real element available to add the style to.

I hope that makes it a little easier to understand/memorize the difference?

Also interesting, multiple pseudo-classes can be used on the same element. For instance, when using the following rules:

a:hover { color: green }
a:visited { color: red }
a:visited:hover { color: blue }

Visited links will show up red, hovered links will show up green, but when hovering a link that has been visited it actually shows up blue.

This doesn’t (or at least shouldn’t, according to the CSS3 spec) work for pseudo-elements. It’d be cool if the following code:

::selection::first-letter { color: red }

Would make only the first letter of a selected text show up red, but it doesn’t. Luckily, we can still combine pseudo-classes and pseudo-elements, as long as there’s still only one of the latter. Take a look at this example, and see if you can figure out what it will do:

li:nth-child(even){
  color: grey
}
li::selection {
  background: #eee;
}
li:nth-child(even)::selection {
  color: white;
  background: black;
}

That’s right! It alternates the background color if you select the list items, as long as you use a browser that supports :nth-child.

See the working version right here, including the other examples I used in this article. If you use IE, just marvel at the screenshot.

Anyway, that’s all for today. Hope you learned something, and be sure to add a comment or tweet me (@stephan_muller) if you’ve got anything to add!

The difference between pseudo-classes and pseudo-elements is an article by Stephan Muller