Could not copy file.: /public_html/wp-admin/css/theme-editor.dev.css
Installation Failed

 

The error message was quite frustrating.. We tried different FTP users, changed (chmod) permissions and still no dice.  Finally I decided to check out the server FTP configuration and compare it against our shared hosting environment and WALA!  On our shared servers we use ProFTP and on this dedicated server we were using Pure-FTP.  For what ever reason, Pure-FTP doesn’t sit well with Fantastico installations of WordPress..

I changed the ftp server over to ProFTP and boom, upgrade was successful!

Happy Coding!

So if you’re uploading or download to a Unix machine from a Windows (DOS based) machine the FTP client should auto-detect everything nicely and convert.  But for those developers out there whom wind up transferring massive projects, lets face it, you can’t simply download 100,000 files when you want to.  So, like many of us, we will zip up (or tar) an entire site and download it as 1 file, then upload to server and uncompress.

However, because we’re simply transferring a compressed file, the FTP client will never convert all of those awesome files formatted with DOS style line endings.  So I bet your next question is “so how can I fix all of these files without editing each by hand?”…

No fear this isn’t that hard  :-)

The Solution

The solution is fairly simple, use dos2unix, or fromdos depending on which flavor of linux you’re running.  But if you’re wanting to convert more than 5 files, this starts to be time consuming again.

So, if you would like to recursively find all files which have offending line endings, and pass those along to be converted we need to grep for those files, and then pipe the results to xargs so that for each file found we can mimic a call to dos2unix for us.

egrep -Ilr $’\r\n’ * | xargs -p dos2unix

Explain it please…

For the lovers of all things linux, you’re probably familiar with egrep and grep, they are outstanding search tools.  I have added to my egrep a couple arguments.  The lowercase L (-l) tells grep to print each file out with it’s path.  The capital “I” (-I) tells egrep to IGNORE all binary files… Because after all if you have 20,000 images out of the 30,000 files why waste your day having egrep search against those files.  Lastly we have the lowercase “r” (-r)” which tells egrep to search RECURSIVELY through all sub directories.

The output of this search is then passed (PIPED) to xargs.  If you’re not familiar with xargs, essentially it will take each line of output from this (each file name and path) and pass that to another command for you.  So if egrep finds 10 files that matches the search, xargs will combine those file names into a command for you.

xargs -p dos2unix then is essentially just replacing man for machine

The -p tells xargs to prompt you before executing each command, which I high suggest if you’ve never done this before.. Don’t get your self into a mess.. and ALWAYS BACKUPS FILES FIRST!

Here is a list of 7 Online Resources that you (and I) can’t live without”

1. Web Templates:  Theme Forest
   Theme Forest is a young site, but is my number 1 source when I need a new fresh template.  They offer a pretty good selection between PSD, HTML, and pre-made themes for CMS’s like Joomla, Drupal, and WordPress.  The prices are cheaper then the famed competitor Template Monster and the designed (in my opinion) tend to be more Web 2.0 and trendy.  Also, because you’re technically buying the theme from a fellow designer/developer, they become a resource for updates, bugs, etc.
2. Small Apps: Code Canyon
   Code Canyon, also very young still (just a couple months) is already starting to dominate the market and take traffic from sites like Hot Scripts.  The reason?  Their stuff is much better, better organized, more useful, and less oriented at selling “premium listings”.  Because they make money on every thing bought from their site they don’t offer specialized listings, or push you junky apps first, they really allow you to find what you wanted in the first place.    Much like Theme Forest, once you purchase something, the developer who created the small is usually pretty easy to get a hold of, and have changes made.  This is not a “must see” site, but it’s very useful and I can’t live without it.
3. Flash Apps: Active Den
   Active Den as you can imagine after checking it out for 5 minutes, is the best place to get Flash Apps.  I have in the past outsource projects on sites like oDesk, Elance, etc, but the problem is, I’m never happy with their work.  For literally hundreds less you can usually find a pre-made app that does exactly what you need and the developer is usually more then happy to customize it for you if you would like for a small fee.  Also, it’s more of a community with discussions and ways to chat with other users and collaborate.  I’ve used a couple things from their site, MP3 players, banner rotators, etc and all of them worked great and the source code was actually very neat and clean with comments on most of them.  Of course this is up to the individual developer/designer but the ones’ who succeed on these type of sites are the ones who go the extra mile.
4. Graphics: Graphic River
   Graphic River is a great resource to add to your stock photo site bookmarks.  I can’t say it fills ALL of my needs but I can usually find stuff here, and cheaper then more expensive stock sites.  I still wind up using other sites here and there, and that’s okay with me, but Graphic River has quickly became priceless for me.  Also, the competition of photographers really helps keep the photo’s top notch!

Well there you have it, that is my list of awesome resources…  That you or I shouldn’t live without and you should learn and love them.

I have compile a list of my top 10 favorite dotCMS features in 1.9, enjoy, and feel free to share you’re in the comments.

1) Brand New UI –  This might not seem like a new “feature” but trust me it is.  The old UI, was a bit clunky and unfamiliar, however, the new interface is very intuitive and easy to use.  Also, the inline editor makes best use of the power presented with dotCMS, I couldn’t be happier with the new UI, and I definitely think the designers should get some props!  The new layout uses Dojo AJAX Toolkit for almost everything.

2)  Multi-Site/Tenant Management – This feature speaks for it’s self, but until you really see the interface and see the power it’s hard to see the benefit.  I have attached a small screencast below to show you the power in the multi-site management system.

In the words of dotCMS them selves:
With dotCMS 1.9 multi-tenant capabilities, whole sites can be quickly created, shared and even be copied from existing web properties to help speed your “time to live”.  With our new host manager, administrators can provision hosts globally, changing permissions, themes, analytic code, able to make host-wide changes from a single friendly interface.

3) WebServices and JSON API – This feature is huge for all of your developers out there who need to built onto dotCMS and make a more robust and custom solution.  This will allow you to access data from the site, manipulate your data and create your own tooling.  Need to create your own iPhone or Android app to interface with a site built on dotCMS 1.9?  If so, this feature is perfect for getting and passing data back and forth.

4) Internationalization – dotCMS 1.9 is now fully nationalized.  The product takes use of best practices and even allows localization of the administration panel.  dotCMS 1.9 will ship with English, Spanish, Romanian and German translations, but more will be coming soon and you can also create your own if need be.

5) Integrated Form Builder – This is another huge feature that frankly I’m surprised to see in this release.  With the amount of new features slated to be released in the new 1.9 version, it’s hard to believe that they found the time to integrate a new form builder product.  The Form Builder, does precisely what it sounds like; allows you to create your own forms using a GUI interface in the admin panel and then stores and reports the data back to you, the user.  This is very useful for large data collection projects, or anyone who ever uses forms.. Ever.. For any reason!  I’ve used Form Builders with previous CMS’ like Joomla but this implementation blows them all away.

6)  SUDO Logon Power – If you’re hosting multiple websites on this system, and for multiple owners/users this feature is a must.  I’m excited to get this feature in place, but basically this will allow you, the admin, to login as if you’re the other user.  You’ll see what they see, get restricted to what ever they’re restricted to, and you’ll really get a good feel for what your client is seeing.  Before, working in such environments you were forced to memorize or collect passwords while you were testing and tinkering around, but fumble with passwords no more, this feature will grow on you.

7) PHP – Ruby – Python – Groovy Plugin – Given the wide range of developers who use dotCMS I’m inclined to believe that this new plugin will be very popular.  This plugin will allow a developer to create code in PHP, Ruby, Python, or Groovy and integrate it into content.  This works similar to integrating JavaScript into HTML.

Because of the nature of Social Networks traffic tends to have huge spikes and then very low bandwidth usage during the night.  Up until a couple years ago this was just a thorn in the side of web developers across the world.  However, with the onslaught of Cloud Hosting companies coming to the forefront of the hosting arena, we have seen a huge problem solved!

Going with a cloud setup allows us to only pay for what we use.  This means we can expand the servers needed when we need, and then scale back when traffic dies down at night.  The move will take sometime but be worth every penny.  This summer we are hoping to release the new site which was built using Spring MVC 3.0 and Java to replace our current PHP/Joomla setup.  The advantage with Java is that we will be working with a pre-compiled language finally.  Doing away with the many many layers of code caching and “accelerators” that have plagued us since 2005.

The new hosting platform will be Linux still (CentOS or RedHat) and will utilize GlassFish v3 web server.  This setup allows us to cluster the site much easier and setup load balancing in a much more seamless solution which can be controlled from the world class GlassFish administration panel.

The site will likely still run on MySQL for the time being however, we plan a move to Postgres (Enterprise DB) to give us better scalability and speed for transactional data.

We will also be installing a new Apache Solr server which will handle all of our search needs.  Currently we are utilizing full text searches in MySQL, and not only is this slow but severely crippled.  Solr was a project started by CNET for search on their tens of thousands of articles and utilizes Apache Lucene for it’s searching algorithms.

Have any questions about how or what we’re doing?  Post a comment!