On December 2nd, 2009, we’ll be launching Referer Guardian, an easy-to-install, easy-to-use WordPress plugin that will enable you to cloak the sources of your traffic. It was developed to be a simple, transparent way to protect your campaigns from the prying eyes of advertisers and others that would rather steal your campaigns than pay you.
Sign-up on the sales page and you will receive a $15.00 discount as well as a launch announcement at launch!
As you can see, we launched the new site. There are bound to be some issues, so please let us know if you find any problems or if something doesn’t look right. You can either comment here or click the little “Questions” tab on the left-hand side of the screen.
We’ll be completely redoing our forums in the near future. New customers will be able to instantly access the product support forum of the product they purchase.
In other news, watch out for a big product launch pre-sale announcement later today!
We’ll be making a big announcement mid-week next week with regard to a new product we think you all will be very excited about. It will work hand-in-hand with WP Guardian, Forum Generator, along with many, many other marketing tools and techniques. I can’t reveal too much right now, but I feel pretty confident in saying that this new product is going to make some waves.
WP Guardian 1.3 has been slated for release on November 28th. We’ll be adding the option to do category-based blocking, assign ads to pages, and increase the amount of time you’re able to delay before popping up the advertisement. It is entirely possible that we’ll be done before the Thanksgiving holiday, but we’re aiming for the 28th.
I’m also going to make a serious attempt to launch the new blackhatzen site this weekend, so there may be some downtime. The forums and support lines will, of course, remain open for customers. I decided to spend time developing our products this weekend rather than launching the new site. The site launch will most likely occur this week.
As always, if you have any questions about this blog post or any of our products, feel free to click the little Questions tab on the left-hand side of your screen and shoot us an email!
Have a great weekend!
Due to some mod_security settings on the HostGator shared hosting environment, some WP Guardian/Referer Guardian users have been experiencing issues with links being forwarded to 404’s. We’ll put together a workaround in the near future, but for the time being, contact HostGator support via Live Chat and ask them to whitelist the following mod_security rules:
340151 340153 1234234
This will most likely take care of the issue. For more information, check out this Google Code thread.
Gotta love shared hosts!
A customer helped us discover some bugs in the Referer Guardian add-on that might cause GET parameters to be dropped from URLs. Slight updates of both the WP Guardian plugin and the Referer Guardian add-on are necessary.
Customers should expect updated downloads of WP Guardian 1.2.1 and Referer Guardian 1.0.1 from E-junkie by the end of the day (EST.)
As of 1:22PM EST, updates for both have been sent out via E-junkie. Let us know if you don’t receive your download links.
Since we released WP Guardian last month, we’ve only had a handful of support issues pop-up. In almost every single case, the issue has been related to the WordPress theme on the site not using the WordPress programming standard to properly call Javascript libraries. Bad designer, bad!
I’m putting together this tutorial to outline the process that I use to fix a theme so that it can be used in tandem with WP Guardian. I am also hopeful that a few theme designers will read this tutorial and learn a thing or two as well, specifically, how to properly use the wp_enqueue_script function.
The theme I’ll be using as an example is the popular MovieSitePress theme. Many of the issues we have discovered with themes have been with similar “movie” themes, but because this is the most commonly requested, this is the one we’ve created a tutorial for.
Note: Don’t steal premium themes or functions. Support the designers, even if they don’t follow standards. 
So, at this point, we’ll assume that you’ve installed and activated the MovieSitePress theme and plugins as well as the WP Guardian plugin and that you’ve assigned an advertisement to a post using WP Guardian.
When you go to the post, you’ll notice that the advertisement is not being displayed. While this it is rarely necessary to use any extra tools, we’re using the Safari browser which has a developer tool that allows us to see the errors that occur on a page. For FireFox, there is the great tool FireBug as well.
The error displayed by Safari says:
TypeError: Result of expression 'jQuery('#blocking-message').jqm' [undefined] is not a function.
This very general error indicates to me that there is another copy of the jQuery library being defined somewhere. This is very, very common in themes whose designers aren’t entirely familiar with all of the pre-defined WordPress actions and functions. One quick “view source” shows the following:
<script src="http://wpguardian.com/test246/wp-content/themes/MovieSitePress/scripts/jquery.js" type="text/javascript"></script> |
We can see that they are including a copy of jQuery, a very popular Javascript library, from within their own plugin folder. Unbeknownst to many WordPress theme designers, jQuery is included with WordPress and can easily be included using wp_enqueue_script will ensure that other plugins that use jQuery only find a single call to include the library.
Fixing this is relatively easy. We see that this Javascript call comes just before the closing tag. This means that we need to find where the tag occurs in the theme’s code and either remove it or replace it with the proper wp_enqueue_script function.
If you open up the header.php file of the theme and do a search for jquery.js, you’ll find that right after the < ?php wp_head(); ?>, the script makes the following call:
<script src="<?php bloginfo('stylesheet_directory'); ?>/scripts/jquery.js" type="text/javascript"></script> |
To fix MovieSitePress, all you have to do is replace that line of code with:
<?php wp_enqueue_script('jquery'); ?> |
A quick save and re-upload and wham:
So, by adding just a single line, we’ve updated MovieSitePress in a way that it won’t conflict with other plugins that also use jQuery, without compromising it’s need for the library. If we wanted to do the theme designers a really big favor, we’d do the same with all of the Javascript libraries and plugins it calls, but our purpose here is merely to get it working with WP Guardian.
If you have any questions, feel free to click the ‘Questions’ tab on the left-hand side of your screen or post a comment and we’ll get back to you!
Update 11:27AM: Just realized that WordPress was converting some of my code improperly. Fixed it. Also, using a newer version of jQuery kills the “slider” on the main page, which is based on antiquated code.
