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Introducing Child Theme Wizard for WordPress

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

How to add elements to an array in PHP

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

How to install WordPress in Plesk 11.5

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

How to allow passive FTP connections in Plesk on Amazon EC2

AWS LogoPassive 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!

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The Postfix Cheat Sheet

I recently had some trouble with my postfix mail service. Not knowing where to being looking for log files and restart commands, I thought this quick cheat sheet would come in handy in the future: Starting and Stopping On CentOS we can speak to postfix like this: postfix start postfix stop postfix reload The this … Read more