Jay Versluis I’ve just realised how (relatively) easy it is to make PHP create a ZIP Archive from a directory and its sub directories. Previously I had relied on the Linux Shell Command zip or tar to do this which is a convenient one liner. I had assumed that in PHP we had to go through each … Read more
I’ve just released Version 1.3 of ZEN DASH and thought a quick video demonstration is in order – and here it is: In this podcast I will show you how to use ZEN DASH for WordPress and explain how you can easily hide menu options, dashboard widgets, admin footer links and suppress Update Notifications (for … Read more
I’ve just finished writing a new WordPress Plugin to help you create Child Themes with a single click, and no need for any external tools. The Child Theme Wizard is a super slim assistant which can be accessed under Tools – Child Theme Wizard. Pick a Parent Theme, enter additional information, click Create Child Theme … Read more
It’s extremely easy to add elements to an existing array in PHP – so easy in fact that I regularly forget how to do it! I’m used to initialising and setting up my variables from Objective C, but PHP is so much easier and deals with it on the fly. Here we do it – … Read more
You may need to know which of your themes are child themes, or in fact if the current theme you’re using is a parent or a child theme. Here’s how you can test both options. The following code snippet will iterate through all themes that are currently installed and displays the title and if it … Read more
Handy Cheat Sheet for PHP File Operations – thanks to @davidwalshblog
In this video I will show you the two ways of installing WordPress in Plesk 11.5: the “one-click” way and the “custom installer” way. Both options have their advantages: the first offers extremely fast deployment, and the other offers very fine grained control, all courtesy of the WordPress APS package. This screencast was inspired by … Read more
Passive FTP connections should work out of the box in Plesk. If no other firewall or NAT is interfering with it.
I’ve recently noticed that when I install Plesk on Amazon EC2 every passive FTP connection fails with an error such as “Server sent passive reply with unroutable address. Passive mode failed.”
The reason for this mishap is twofold:
EC2 instances are behind a NAT, and therefore have an internal (unroutable) IP, and an external (public) IP. When a passive connection request comes in, ProFTP – Plesk’s default FTP Server – tells the connecting client its internal private IP address, and in turn quite rightly fails to connect to it.
On top of that, we need to make sure to open a range of ports we want to use for passive FTP connections and tell ProFTP only to use those.
Let’s do all this this step by step!