scot hacker's scripts and utils

WordPress Mass Management Tools is a small collection of tools for managing multiple WordPress installations on a Unix/Linux/Mac server (or perhaps a Windows server with Cygwin (untested)).

Yes, users can often self-install via Fantastico or similar programs, but what guarantee do you have that they’ll upgrade as soon as new releases become available? Letting users run old versions of web software is a great way to get hacked. This kit lets you take control of users’ installations by checking them out via svn and upgrading them en masse.

At Birdhouse Hosting we use WordPress Mass Management Tools to create all new installations. When WP updates are released, we’re able to upgrade more than 100 WP installations belonging to 80+ users in a few minutes flat.

The kit is designed to be run by root – these are not tools for WordPress end users. The kit assumes basic knowledge of the bash shell.

This kit replaces the old wp-create and wp-mass-upgrade scripts which were distributed separately and are no longer supported. Includes:

wp-create.sh: Super fast way to install WordPress for clients, via subversion. Performs the following tasks:

• Gather installation info
• Create install dir and check out a copy of WordPress
• Create database, db user, set db privs via external .sql file
• Create WP config file
• Create upload dir and set filesystem permissions
• Generate array line for wp-sites.sh

Final setup is done via browser.

wp-mass-upgrade.sh: Iterates through all sites listed in wp-sites.sh, backs up the site’s database, upgrades to a specified version of WordPress, and sends the site owner email announcing the upgrade.

wp-mass-plugins.sh: Generates a list of all active plugins used by all sites on the server. The list can be compared to lists of known-incompatible plugins to help you make decisions about whether to skip any sites on the list.

Download wp-mass-tools 1.1

See the included readme.txt for documentation.

This is a very crude mass category deletion script for WordPress. I recently inherited a WordPress site with more than 6000 categories. After deleting a ton of old posts, we were left with more than 4000 unused categories, and I needed a way to remove them quickly. Couldn’t find a plugin up to the task, so wrote this. Very crude, but effective. Not a plugin, but a small WP companion script. See instructions in the comment at top of script.

Download Cleancats

WP-Create has been folded into the WordPress Mass Management Tools kit.

A dirt-simple WordPress plugin that lets you provide workflow docs to your authors and editors from within the WP admin interface.

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A WordPress plugin aimed primarily at events sites, where you want to be able to timestamp posts in the future but have them appear immediately (by default, WordPress will not display a future timestamped post until its go-live date rolls around). This plugin sets the post_status field to “publish” rather than “future” when publishing a post, even if its timestamp is in the future. Written by Ryan Boren – I’m just hosting it.

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Designed for hosts with lots of individual WordPress blogs to manage. If all blogs are managed via subversion, this script can iterate through all of them and upgrade each to the latest version in seconds.

WP-Mass-Upgrade has been folded into the WordPress Mass Management Tools kit.

Sends periodic email notifications of new WordPress blog entries (in either plain text or HTML mode) to a separate subscribers mailing list. Maintains cache file recording ID of last-sent post. On subsequent runs, sends all posts created since the previous run.

Currently driving weekly email updates from birdhouse.org and other sites.

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WPBlogMail is now deprecated. Please use WP-Digest instead.