Ruslan's Blog : Wordpress

New release of Silverlight Player for WordPress

RuslanY Blog — Sat, 15 Aug 2009 22:11:56 GMT

Today I have published a new release of the WP Silverlight Media Player plugin for WordPress. In addition to a few important improvements and optimizations, it contains a new feature that allows to track the number of times the video files have been watched and how many of those have been watched until the end. Once you install or upgrade to this version of the plugin you should see a new menu group in the WordPress Dashboard: From that menu you can get to the Statistics page where you can see how many times your site visitors watched your video files: The implementation idea for the statistics page was re-used from the WP-Postratings , which is a very popular plugin written by Lester ‘GaMerZ’ Chan. Other improvements in this version...(read more)

Upgrade to WordPress 2.8 and PHP 5.3 on IIS 7

RuslanY Blog — Fri, 12 Jun 2009 06:46:56 GMT

Today I have upgraded my blog to the recently released WordPress 2.8 and to PHP 5.3 RC3 (VC9 Non Thread Safe build). If you are running WordPress (or any other PHP application) on IIS 7, then there are several reasons why it may be beneficial for you to upgrade: PHP 5.3 has a number of Windows-specific bug fixes and improvements that address stability and functionality problems which existed before when running PHP on Windows. For detailed list of all the changes and fixes, refer to the news.txt file included within the PHP zip file. PHP 5.3 has been compiled with the latest version of C compiler (VC9), which makes it run faster on Windows than any previous versions of PHP (which were compiled with VC6). WordPress 2.8 has built-in support for...(read more)

IIS 7 URL Rewrite Module support in WordPress 2.8

RuslanY Blog — Sat, 16 May 2009 07:41:00 GMT

I am pleased to let everyone know that WordPress development community has added a built-in support for IIS 7 URL Rewrite Module in the upcoming WordPress 2.8 release. Starting with version 2.8 the Permalink Settings page will allow you to easily configure “ pretty permalinks ” URL structure when WordPress is running on IIS 7 with URL Rewrite Module v1.1 installed. Here is how the process of updating Permalinks structure will look like in WordPress 2.8 on IIS 7: Go to Settings –> Permalinks page and choose the permalink structure that you prefer: After clicking on “Save Changes” button the generated rewrite rule will be displayed with the instructions on how to update the web.config file manually: Now you can copy the the given XML and put...(read more)

Silverlight Media Player for WordPress – Update

RuslanY Blog — Sun, 26 Apr 2009 06:33:00 GMT

Since the Silverlight Media Player plugin for WordPress was published in January 2009, it has been downloaded more than 900 times . It is being used in many web sites all over the world – here are just a couple of examples: Tribord Amure par Matthieu and Os Taekwon-do Klubb . Today, a new update of the plugin has been released. This update makes it even easier to add video content to your blog posts and pages. Download the latest version of the plugin from here: WP Media Player . The biggest improvement in this version of the plugin is the addition of the user interface for uploading video content and for insertion of the media player into blog posts and pages. Here is how it looks like. Add a media player to a blog post or a page by clicking...(read more)

How to secure WordPress admin directory on IIS 7.0

RuslanY Blog — Sat, 07 Feb 2009 01:00:36 GMT

Recently I was told about Smashing Magazine , which turned out to be a pretty useful site. It is targeted for web developers and web designers and it contains tons of information, tools and freebies for web developers. One of the article on that site was about 10 Steps To Protect The Admin Area in WordPress . In that article step #7 described how to use web server’s built-in authentication to provide an extra protection layer for wp-admin directory, where all WordPress admin scripts are located. The article described how to do that in Apache by using .htaccess file. In this post I will explain how to protect WordPress wp-admin directory on IIS 7.0 by using IIS built-in Forms Authentication. Prerequisites First thing to make sure is to confirm...(read more)

Silverlight Media Player plugin for WordPress

RuslanY Blog — Thu, 08 Jan 2009 00:07:00 GMT

At some point I wanted to integrate a Silverlight based player into my blog, so I was looking for a WordPress plugin that would do that. However, I could not find any that was easy enough to use. So I decided to write one myself for self-educational purposes. This post describes and demonstrates the plugin that I wrote and explains how to use it to add Silverlight-based media players to blog posts and pages of a WordPress powered blog. Description and Features The plugin has the following features: Default player configuration settings, such as size, thumbnail, auto load and auto play. Per-instance player configuration settings that can be used to customize each individual player within or across blog posts. Unlimited number of players within...(read more)

Speed up WordPress on IIS 7.0

RuslanY Blog — Wed, 24 Dec 2008 01:46:00 GMT

The performance of WordPress may be sufficient for an average blog that gets a few page hits per minute. However, if your blog post suddenly shows up on digg.com or any other social networking site, it may become challenging for server to handle such huge spike in traffic. A few options exist to help server to cope with flood of requests: IIS Output Caching WP Cache plugin for WordPress WP Super Cache plugin for WordPress In this post I will explain the benefits and drawbacks of each option and walk through the steps for configuring IIS and WordPress to use those options. Prerequisites Before performing the configuration steps described in this post, it is necessary to complete the following prerequisites: Install WordPress (Follow the instructions...(read more)

Enable custom errors in WordPress on IIS 7.0

RuslanY Blog — Fri, 05 Dec 2008 17:05:29 GMT

Recently, I found out that my WordPress powered blog did not correctly handle 404 - File Not Found errors. When a request was made to a non-existent page, then instead of getting nice WordPress based error page, visitors used to get a generic IIS 7.0 404 error page. Somehow, I have missed that part of the configuration when I set up WordPress initially. The fix for that turned out to be very simple, but since it seems to be a very common configuration task when hosting WordPress on IIS 7.0, I decided to explain the necessary configuration steps. By default IIS is configured to return detailed error messages for local requests and custom error messages for remote requests. So when request is made to http://ruslany.net/boguspage , the server returns...(read more)

Update for IIS 7.0 FastCGI module

RuslanY Blog — Wed, 27 Aug 2008 02:10:00 GMT

IIS team has recently released an update for IIS 7.0 FastCGI module that fixes compatibility problems with several popular PHP applications. In particular, the update changes the behavior of FastCGI module in the following ways: REQUEST_URI server variable set by FastCGI module now includes query string and path info. Previously, lack of the query string in this server variable caused the popular CMS application Drupal to not work with FastCGI on IIS 7.0 REQUEST_URI server variable now contains the originally requested URL path before any URL rewriting was performed. Prior to this fix, the server variable used to contain a final rewritten URL, which caused problems when using URL rewriting to enable “pretty permalinks” for popular blog engine...(read more)