JAFDIP

Just another frakkin day in paradise

Archives for November 2018

Google Analytics CMS Dashboard for WordPress

Ok so there are a number of ways to add Google Analytics to your WordPress site and not all of them are created equal. I mean you can follow the instructions on GA when you create a property ID and have that code embedded into the theme but I am STRONGLY advising against this.

There are also a number of plugins on the market to assist with this task and honest you can find them easily enough in the plugin’s directory on WordPress.org. If however you are running a MultiSite cluster then you should seriously consider getting the commercial version of Google Analytics plus from the team at WPMUDev. Yes I know this is a premium plugin and far too many people have an aversion to paying for things. Honestly it’s work the price of admission.

Do yourself and your users a favor by buying network activating the plugin. If you activate is locally on each site then some key features are hidden and worse it will give you headaches down the road when you come to your senses and network activate it.

Activating at the network level of your cluster allows you to set the minimum role accessibility level. It is important to note that granting your site admins the ability override this means that you will need to adjust each site individually. See the above figure for details.

The figure below is the individual site admin screen. Which honestly if you have even a modest network cluster you will want to avoid. You will still authenticate each site to Google Analytics.

Once you have authenticated, you can connect the site to the appropriate property ID and the plugin will start communicating with GA bidirectionally. Assuming that you have setup the access level properly then anyone with meeting the minimum role and above will be able to see the statistics dash board and even drill down into the advanced stats. 

There you have it a concise way to ramp up Google analytics on your site while giving your editorial team a nice dashboard where they can gain insights into what is popular with granting them access to your GA accounts. I particularly find this handy with guest authors and freelancers who usually don’t have a long term interest or investment in the site.

I Want To Attend More Meetings; glorious meetings

…said pretty much no one ever!

However there are a number of meetings that I do want to attend and for some reason all of my attempts to get a handle on these open source project meetings under control have failed. Ok, so at the very least if I do elect not to attend I want to at least know that I am ignoring them.

So I took a step back and looked at what I did when I ran WordCamp NYC where I programmed ALL of the sessions into an iCalendar enable Google Calendar. It certainly made my management of the events a little easier because I included ALL of the information related to the title of the session, the speakers presenting and a 5 minute warning alert.

Then I subscribed to the calendar and my phone lit up every time there was a session change. This really was an invaluable tool for me and my team(s). I even helped out the next year’s team by doing this for them as well.

So great we all know that I am a fan of calendar apps, but exactly how is this going to help me get a handle on these open source meetings. In Google calendar you can easily create a public (or private) calendar and share that out via iCal accessible format. Let’s face it if you don’t have an iCal capable app on your mobile device then you really should go home and rethink what you are doing wrong with your life.

At this point I have created a new calendar and dropped three recurring WordPress meetings as a test. I have programmed these using the relatively new timezone feature. This feature allows you to adjust the timezone of each event separate of the default timezone of your calendar.

For instance the WP CLI meeting recurs every Tuesday at 1700 UTC; thus I created a new calendar that anyone can subscribe to here. The goal is to have these events appear on my device(s) and alert me prior to the meetings. Remember that since I have overridden the default timezone these events will not move around each spring and fall as they would had I set it to my default New York zone.

I am inviting everyone to join in and help test this concept. By using the iCal URL provided above you do not need to have your own Google Calendar account so you do not need to give up any personal information. Unfortunately, anyone wanting to contribute to the calendar directly will need a Google account as well as an invitation to the calendar. I do think that that is a minor caveat given the convenience that this will bring.

Composer and SVN SSL Certificate Verification Failure

Recently I upgrade one of my machines to Mojave and although things are slower probably on account it is an older Mac things are working generally well. As you know I’ve encountered weird SSL phenomena on Macs previously and of course I’ve taken the time to write some notes to hopefully help others but mostly to help me not forget. So when I received the following error I immediately thought hey this is a new one and I’d better write it down.

svn: E230001: Server SSL certificate verification failed: issuer is not trusted

The error came up every time my machine was trying to connect to the WordPress plugins repo via composer. Of course Google being the kind friend helped me eventually find a few ideas and this is ultimately what worked for me. 

$ svn list https://plugins.svn.wordpress.org/
Error validating server certificate for 'https://plugins.svn.wordpress.org:443':
 - The certificate is not issued by a trusted authority. Use the
   fingerprint to validate the certificate manually!
Certificate information:
 - Hostname: *.svn.wordpress.org
 - Valid: from Jun 20 19:25:08 2018 GMT until Jul 15 19:04:26 2020 GMT
 - Issuer: Go Daddy Secure Certificate Authority - G2, http://certs.godaddy.com/repository/, GoDaddy.com, Inc., Scottsdale, Arizona, US
 - Fingerprint: DA:35:18:3F:39:5E:82:36:7D:B3:2D:91:F7:DD:B1:F1:F9:DC:C6:53
(R)eject, accept (t)emporarily or accept (p)ermanently? p

After selecting ‘p’ and hitting enter a whole bunch of plugin repos flew by and not I am not going to count them. Suffice to say that I was able to run composer install and everything started working fine.