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blog.aeolusproject.org playbook
The Aeolus Project blog is hosted on OpenShift. This is meant as a quick overview of its care and feeding.
$USER and $PASSWORD are used in this guide to reference our OpenShift username and password. For obvious reasons, please do not put them on this public wiki page…
You can use rhc-app snapshot to make a backup of the OpenShift
instance. Out of paranoia, it’s a good idea to do this before pushing
big changes or anything. Obviously, feel free to change the filename
below:
rhc-app snapshot save -a blog -l $USER --filepath ~/tmp/blog.aeolusproject.4sept2012.tgz
NOTE: A snapshot will briefly pause the application.
Put them in php/wp-content/plugins/, git add them, and git push
which will redeploy the app.
NOTE: Don’t add plugins through the web interface. They will work fine until the next git push, when they will be overwritten.
For some reason, WP Super Cache doesn’t persist our settings. So when you re-deploy the app, it gets disabled and needs to be reactivated. It’s not essential to have enabled, but it makes the site much faster, by saving an HTML cache of rendered pages for logged-out users, and just invalidating them when the page changes.
If you view the Plugins page in the admin section, it will give you a red/pink notice that it’s disabled. Click the link, and hop right on over to the Advanced tab, because that’s how we roll. Then, do the following :
- Check “Cache hits to this website for quick access.”
- Move the radio button to “Use mod_rewrite to serve cache files.” The
.htaccessfile for that is already in place. - Check “Compress pages so they’re served more quickly to visitors.”
- Check the “Don’t cache pages for known users”
- “Don’t cache pages with GET parameters” is optional. I like it because it prevents a theoretical attack in which someone could hit the page over and over with different params and cause a mess of files to be created.
Then, check “Update Status.” Good job!
We keep a static XML sitemap for some SEO loving. But since it’s written by Apache, it’s not persisted on application restart. This one’s even easier, though:
- Click “Settings” in the admin section, then the “XML-Sitemap” entry at the bottom.
- See a red warning that the last build succeeded but the file went missing.
- Click “rebuild the sitemap” which is a few lines down from the red warning text.
- Ignore the warning about Ask.com. Wonder, “Are they still around?”
Good job!
This is a bit buried in the admin console. Take a look at Appearance> Widgets. The right margin lists “Main Sidebar” which is what you want.
“Text: Information” is the freeform text I show. “Links” above it is a list of links, those are edited under the main “Links” bit of the admin section.
These are under the “Syndication” section. There’s a cronjob that checks for updates hourly.
There’s a setting somewhere in there to allow us to have to review posts before they’re published. That’s tempting for some authors who don’t have an Aeolus-specific category, which causes us to syndicate what is sometimes fairly irrelevant content. But right now I’ve just let it go.
We don’t run Akismet right now since it’s non-free for non-personal blogs, and I’ve been reluctant to try to get funding for it until comment spam becomes a real problem.
If you click the “Comments” link in the admin section, you can view all comments, and approve/deny them. Note that some spammers are clever and will have a worthless “I agree and this post is so inspirational you are my hero!" comment, but their username is something like "Buy Viagra online!” with a link to their “Canadian pharmacy” website. That’s spam. Mark it as such.
Under Settings -> Discussion, you can tweak how comments are held in moderation. Right now, comments from new authors are always held for moderation. You can also define blacklist phrases. I put “lista de email” there, since we were getting a bombardment of spam about that.