Tag: wordpressplugin

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How To Waste AdWords Budget: Postie Plugin Edition

Some time ago I was looking for ways to send in posts to my WordPress blog via email, and I found a reference to a WordPress plugin called “Postie.” So I popped that into Google search and what did I get?

The correct answer to this search would be the Postie WordPress plugin hosted here. But apparently there is another company named Postie which manages enterprise mail (hosted at postie.com) which is a completely separate entity to the WordPress plugin (hosted at postieplugin.com). As you can see from the screenshot, my search resulted in an ad for the enterprise company.

But I have no interest in enterprise mail. That ad is effectively wasted. Worse yet, the CTR (clickthrough rate, the number of times the ad is clicked on divided by the number of times the ad is shown) of the ad goes down through no fault of the ad itself. But you can see why the ad was shown – the ad’s creator placed ads on the word “postie” and didn’t realize there might be other organizations with the same name.

This is a good example of where negative keywords are used. In short negative keywords are used to find searches to NOT show ads to. In this case, Postie (the enterprise company) should have used negative keywords to exclude the word “plugin” so they’re not confused with Postie Plugin (the WordPress plugin).

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WordPress Annoyances

I haven’t been posting as much as I want to lately – I’ve been fiddling with some WordPress issues and a lot of work from my day job.

Here’s some minor thoughts that don’t deserve a post by themselves:

Routing

{
  "code":"rest_no_route",
  "message":"No route was found matching the URL and request method",
  "data": {"status":404}
}

I wrote a custom WP plugin which accepts requests from an App Engine application and returns some custom data. Unfortunately, my app on GAE was returning the above error whenever it tried to make a HTTP request to the WordPress app.

Long story short, the register_rest_route() on my plugin only declared a GET endpoint, and my GAE application was trying to use POST. Make sure you’re using the same HTTP type if you get this error.

WPEngine Firewalls

By default, WPEngine has a firewall that blocks GAE-originated requests from hitting WP plugins – fortunately, if you need GAE to WPEngine-hosted WP communications, you can email WPEngine through their contact form to remove the firewall on a per-blog basis.

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Querying For Previous Published WordPress Posts

The following code example pulls out the last 5 published WordPress posts by their ID, extracts the first ID (which is the last published post ID) and then extracts the post’s tags into an array.

$return_tag_array is a list of the last published post’s tags. 

  //Get list of past published posts, up to 5
  $args = array(
	'numberposts' => 5,
	'offset' => 0,
	'category' => 0,
	'orderby' => 'post_date',
	'order' => 'DESC',
	'include' => '',
	'exclude' => '',
	'meta_key' => '',
	'meta_value' =>'',
	'post_type' => 'post',
	'post_status' => 'publish',
	'suppress_filters' => true
);
	
  $published_posts = wp_get_recent_posts( $args, ARRAY_A );

  //Pull off the top most post, & retrieve the ID
  $last_published_post = reset($published_posts);
  $last_published_post_id = $last_published_post["ID"];

  //TAGS	
  //Use the post ID to pull off tags
  $tags = wp_get_post_tags($last_published_post_id);
  $return_tag_array = array();	
  foreach ($tags as $tag) {
	  $tag_name = $tag->name;
	  array_push($return_tag_array, $tag_name);
  }

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Adding Categories To A WordPress Post

I’ve been writing a custom WordPress plugin to accept emailed posts and insert them into a WordPress blog. One of the difficult issues I’ve encountered is that WordPress deals with tags and categories in different ways: it’s relatively easy to add and remove tags. It takes a bit of roundabout work to do the same with categories.

The below code fragment takes a string array of categories ( $to_post_categories ) and sets them onto a post (the ID of the post is in $created_post_id ).

	//Set post categories
	/**
	 * WP doesn't allow us to set categories as easily as tags. With tags we can simply declare 
	 * the names of the tags and be done with it. WP requires that we pass in the ID of the category, 
	 * and if the category doesn't exist, we need to create it. So we loop through the array of 
	 * category names, see if they exist (and if so, collect the ID) and if they don't exist, 
	 * create the category and map the ID to the post.
	 **/
	 foreach ($to_post_categories as $category_name) {
		 $category_id = get_category_by_slug($category_name);
		 if ($category_id == false) {
			 //Category doesn't exist, create it
			 $category_id = wp_create_category($category_name);
		 }
		 
		 //category_id now holds ID of right category or recently created category.
		 //Add category to post
		 wp_set_post_categories($created_post_id, array($category_id), true);
	 }//end looping through post categories sent to us