Fireside Media Development Blog

This tutorial will guide you step by step on how to setup your server so you can install new plugins and upgrade existing plugins using an SSH2 layer in PHP and WordPress.

What is WordPress?
WordPress started in 2003 with a single bit of code to enhance the typography of everyday writing and with fewer users than you can count on your fingers and toes. Since then it has grown to be the largest self-hosted blogging tool in the world, used on hundreds of thousands of sites and seen by tens of millions of people every day.

What is SSH[2]?
SSH (Secure Shell) is a protocol allowing a secure channel to be established between a web server and a client’s local machine. Many web hosting companies now offer SSH for greater security.
Read more »

What is Openx

OpenX is, in my opinion, the most efficient and hands-free open source ad server on the web today. It’s flexible, easy to use, and best of all, free.

What is WordPress

WordPress is one of the leading platforms in blogging on the web today. Whether you are self-hosted (using wordpress.org) or being hosted on Automattic servers (using wordpress.com), WordPress is an amazing blogging platform which makes blogging easy and fun.

This OpenX and WordPress tutorial will outline how to more effectively use the targeting features of OpenX utilizing the built-in features of WordPress. It will explain how to do this by using WordPress tags and OpenX source parameters, both built-in features to WordPress and OpenX, respectively.

OpenX Solution Used: Hosted OpenX (http://hosted.openx.org/)
WordPress Version: 2.6.2

For this tutorial, I will be using tags are the “source” for OpenX.

Step 1: Setup tags so OpenX can view them as a “source.”

<?php
        while ( have_posts() ) : the_post();
                $fsm_oxtags = get_the_tags();
                if ($fsm_oxtags) { foreach ($fsm_oxtags as $tag) {
                        $taglist .= $tag->name . '|';
                }
                $taglist = rtrim($taglist, '|');
                $oxtags = rawurlencode($taglist);
                }
        endwhile;
?>

I have these in the top of my single.php file within WordPress. This only creates the variable of $oxtags so it can be echo’d elsewhere.

Details of Step 1: The first bit of code will create the loop. then it will go through each tag and set it as “tag |” because I am using pipes to separate each tag for OpenX. Next, it will trim off the last pipe because it’s not needed, creating something like… “tag 1|tag 2|tag 3|tag 4″ … and like I just mentioned, it will strip off the last pipe. Lastly, it will put that string, “tag 1|tag 2|tag 3|tag 4″ … into a raw encoded URL string which we will be able to echo later in the page. Note: this is only being set at $oxtags so it can be used elsewhere, nothing is echo’d in this part of the script.
Read more »