Call for Beta Testers: New VIP-Hosted Search Add-On

Exciting news! Based on your feedback, we are currently in the process of launching a new paid Search Add-On that replaces WordPress’s core search functionality with a more powerful one, hosted and supported by our VIP team, and powered by the popular elasticsearch project.

Features include:

• More sophisticated search results ordering, such as ordering by relevance instead of date, for example.
• Refinement of search results by category, tag, post type, author, and more (often referred to as filtering or faceted search).

You can see it in action on vip.wordpress.com (check out the sidebar) — give it a try!

If you’re interested in free beta testing, we’d love to have you try it out and provide feedback. Please get in touch!

The menu placement for Polls and Ratings have been moved to under the “Feedbacks” menu.

WordPress.com News

We’ve made a minor change to the dashboard menu to help tidy things up a little.

We figured that the Polls and Ratings menus were taking up too much space as top-level menu options. So we decided to move both Polls and Ratings under Feedbacks to minimise the amount of dashboard space these options take.

Poll settings are now under Settings->Polls.

Rating settings are now under Settings->Ratings.

Custom poll styles are now accessed via the poll editor.

We hope this update will make the dashboard a little more streamlined for you this summer.

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Enable Pre-Approved Plugins From Your Dashboard

Starting today, administrators (specifically anyone with the manage_options capability) can enable any of our pre-approved plugins directly from the administration area of your site. No longer do you need to get your developer involved simply to enable a new plugin on your site — you can do it yourself by visiting the “Plugins & Services” menu found in the VIP section of your WordPress dashboard.

However developers can still forcibly enable a plugin for all sites using that theme with the wpcom_vip_load_plugin() helper function. Plugins loaded using this method cannot be disabled from the administration area of the site.

Prefer not to have administrators enabling new plugins on your site? Have your developer add wpcom_vip_plugins_ui_disable_activation(); to your theme’s functions.php file and the plugin activation links will be disabled.

You can also use this functionality in your development environment if you’d like by adding the following code to your theme:

if ( ! function_exists( 'wpcom_is_vip' ) ) {
	require_once( WP_CONTENT_DIR . '/themes/vip/plugins/vip-do-not-include-on-wpcom/wpcom-vip-plugins-ui/wpcom-vip-plugins-ui.php' );
}

It will add a new menu item to the “Plugins” menu.

Automatic Deploys For CSS and Images

For all themes running on WordPress.com VIP, we review changes for performance, security, and best practices to make sure your sites are the best they can be. We have an internal goal to deploy all commits within two hours and our track record is pretty good. Roughly 90% of commits are deployed within that two-hour time frame and we think we can do even better.

Last Wednesday, as one of our meetup projects, we enabled auto-deploy for commits that consist entirely of static CSS or image files. If there are no other pending deploys for your theme, your CSS design changes and image commits will now be deployed almost immediately.   No more waiting for us to review and deploy for you.

We hope that you and your designers enjoy these speedier deploys.  We are looking into ways of expanding this “auto-deploy” functionality to other file types in the future without compromising security, performance, or functionality of your site. Let us know what you think about this feature by leaving a comment on this post.

New Plugin: Thumbnail Editor

We’re happy to announce the release of a new plugin that we have written to assist WordPress.com VIPs in customizing their thumbnail images.

Previously thumbnail images would be cropped from the center of the fullsize image. This was not always ideal because sometimes the important part of the image would be located somewhere other than the center. Now with this new plugin, you can optionally manually select what portion of an image is used for each thumbnail size.

Details on how to enable this plugin can be found here or you can just contact us and we’ll take care of it for you.

Special thanks goes to Imran Nathani of Metro News Canada for inspiring this plugin.

New WP.com VIP Plugins Dashboard Menu

Available under the “VIP” menu item in your administration area there is now Plugins. The Plugins Page lists all of the approved plugins that are available for you to use, as well as what plugins are already in use by your theme.

A few notes: this feature requires that your theme is using our wpcom_vip_load_plugin() helper function to load the approved plugins; it will not display or highlight plugins loaded directly using include() or require() in your theme; and this list will also not include any plugins that are within the theme (custom plugins).

Post Comments Using Twitter and Facebook

Today we launched a new commenting feature available for all of WordPress.com — users can now comment using their Facebook and Twitter accounts as well as their WordPress.com account or other guest account.

We can’t wait for all our WordPress.com VIPs to start using this feature, but we want to make sure it properly meshes with your VIP theme’s design before it is enabled.

First, you need to make sure your theme is using the core WordPress comment_form() function to output its comment form as opposed to legacy-style hard-coded HTML input fields. Once that’s in place, you can temporarily enable the new comment form for testing by adding ?highlander=1 to the URL in your address bar when visiting a singular post.

To tweak your site’s look and feel to accommodate the new comment box, we recommend using the Web Developer addon for Firefox and Chrome to allow you to easily live preview edited CSS on your site. The changes will only appear for you, but it will allow you to test any needed CSS changes to your site without having to commit them first.

Once you’re happy with the new comment box integration, contact us and we will selectively enable it for your theme. Soon we will be enabling it for all VIP themes, but we wanted to give you a chance first to ensure you’re happy with its appearance.

Note that sites that use IntenseDebate and Disqus will be unaffected by this new feature as both have their own commenting form.

Advanced Excerpt Plugin Updated

The shared VIP plugin Advanced Excerpt has been updated to a version based on the latest development version (r291840).

All themes using this plugin were automatically updated to the new version.

The most important change is Advanced Excerpt now correctly strips shortcodes. There are additional performance improvements, and new features, including the ability to add a clickable read-more link.

More information about the plugin can be found at http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/advanced-excerpt/.

wpcom_vip_file_get_contents() Now Obeys The Cache-Control Header

We’ve made a small change to our wpcom_vip_file_get_contents() function which is used for assisting in fetching remote data.

If the remote server sends a cache-control header with a max-age value for how long to cache the response for and if this value is larger than the cache time value passed to the function (defaulting to 900 seconds), then the value provided by the remote server will be used instead. For example if the remote server sends a header of max-age=604800 (a week), then it’s assumed that the data will not be changing any time soon and that there’s no need to fetch a fresh copy of the data every 15 minutes.

By caching the response for an even longer period of time, your site will perform even better and not get slowed down by making more remote requests.

If you wish to disable this new functionality and ignore any header sent by the remote server, than see our full documentation on the function. You may also contact us for any help you need.

vip_wp_file_get_content() Has Been Deprecated

We have deprecated our vip_wp_file_get_content() helper function in favor of our newer and better wpcom_vip_file_get_contents() function. Please start using the newer function instead of the old deprecated function. Will we not be removing the old function, but please don’t use it anymore in any new code you write.

The new function has different parameters and returns instead of echo’ing, so make sure to familiarize yourself via our in-depth Fetching Remote Data documentation.