function interBlock($content, $ad=null, $element="</h3>", $afterElement=3, $minElements=5) {
    // block to be inserted here
    if (!$ad) $ad ='<h1>Your block here</h1>';

    // split content
    $parts = explode($element, $content);

    // count element occurrences
    $count = count($parts);

    // check if the minimum required elements are found
    if(($count-1)<$minElements) return $content;
    
    $output='';
    for($i=0; $i<$count; $i++) {
        // this is the core part that puts all the content together
       $output .= $parts[$i-1] . $element .  (($i==$afterElement) ? $ad : ''); // this will insert after

echo interBlock($my_content, $myAd, '</h2>', 4, 8);

Insert block before HTML tag occurrence

$output .=  (($i==$afterElement) ? $ad : '') .($i==1 ? $parts[0]:'') . $element . $parts[$i]; //this win insert before

Insert block before or after an alternative tag

// check if the minimum required elements are found
    if(($count-1)<$minElements) {
        $parts = explode($altElement, $content); // check for the alternative tag
        $count = count($parts);
        if(($count-1)<$minElements) return $content; // you can give up here and just return the original content
        $element = $altElement; // continue by using alternative tag instead of the primary one
    }

And the final mixed function

function interBlock($content, $ad=null, $element="<h3>", $altElement='<h3>', $afterElement=1, $minElements=5) {
    // Ser your block to be inserted here
    if (!$ad) $ad ='<h1>Your block here</h1>';

    // split content
    $parts = explode($element, $content);

    // count element ocurrencies 
    $count = count($parts);

    // check if the minimum required elements are found
    if(($count-1)<$minElements) {
        $parts = explode($altElement, $content); // check for the alternative tag
        $count = count($parts);
        if(($count-1)<$minElements) return $content; // you can give up here and just return the original content
        $element = $altElement; // continue by using alternative tag instead of the primary one
    }
    
    $output='';
    for($i=1; $i<$count; $i++) {
        // this is the core part that puts all the content together
        //$output .= $parts[$i-1] . $element .  (($i==$afterElement) ? $ad : ''); // this win insert after
        $output .=  ($i==1 ? $parts[0]:'') . (($i==$afterElement) ? $ad : '')  . $element . $parts[$i]; //this win insert before
    }
    return $output;
}

echo interBlock($my_content, $myAd, '<h2>', '<h3>', 4, 8);

echo interBlock($my_content);

The flow is quite simple. The application redirects the user to the authorization server >> the user will then be asked to log in to the authorization server and >> approve access to his data. And if the user approves the application  >> he will be redirected back to the application.

So let’s start preparing the authorization code grant example.

We are using PHP v5.6.32 and cURL enabled extension on a Windows localhost machine. If you are using XAMPP you normally just have to uncomment this line to have cURL enabled.

;extension=php_curl.dll

you can find it in xampp\apache\bin\php.ini  or  xampp\php\php.ini , depending on your XAMPP version and then restart Apache service.

So first you will need to collect your data and prepare some vars:

define("CALLBACK_URL", "http://localhost/oauth2client.php");
define("AUTH_URL", "https://example.com/oauth2/authorize");
define("ACCESS_TOKEN_URL", "https://example/oauth2/token");
define("CLIENT_ID", "1yLCsmAfDF49nGmJLgDbHvB6bSca");
define("CLIENT_SECRET", "g2OKQ9isj2pcaextQdjx5xW3KoAa");
define("SCOPE", ""); // optional

Now build your first URL to call. Normally you will want to call this URL in a popup window like old school times. You can also try a modern modal and use an iFrame but that didn’t work for me.

$url = AUTH_URL."?"
   ."response_type=code"
   ."&client_id=". urlencode(CLIENT_ID)
   ."&scope=". urlencode(SCOPE)
   ."&redirect_uri=". urlencode(CALLBACK_URL)
;

After the user enters his credentials and gives application access the Identity provider will redirect to the CALLBACK_URL with a “code”.

You will see the code in the URL, so this is the GET method.

http://localhost/oauth2client.php?code=be0d0cb3-63ac-394a-a2a7-7365ddbbab7d&session_state=59de172acce92f220baff0433ebe629ea4981e544e406ba718ad76ea122bbb69.fPJIegSopJKfshsjNrxq9A

So just use GET to retrieve the code param. Like this:  $code = $_GET['code'];

This code is only valid for a short period of time and you will have to exchange the code for a token so you can make API calls. Here is the curl POST for receiving the token key:

function getToken(){
  $curl = curl_init();

  $params = array(
    CURLOPT_URL =>  ACCESS_TOKEN_URL."?"
    				."code=".$code
    				."&grant_type=authorization_code"
    				."&client_id=". CLIENT_ID
    				."&client_secret=". CLIENT_SECRET
    				."&redirect_uri=". CALLBACK_URL,
    CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER => true,
    CURLOPT_MAXREDIRS => 10,
    CURLOPT_TIMEOUT => 30,
    CURLOPT_HTTP_VERSION => CURL_HTTP_VERSION_1_1,
    CURLOPT_CUSTOMREQUEST => "POST",
    CURLOPT_NOBODY => false, 
    CURLOPT_HTTPHEADER => array(
      "cache-control: no-cache",
      "content-type: application/x-www-form-urlencoded",
      "accept: *",
      "accept-encoding: gzip, deflate",
    ),
  );

  curl_setopt_array($curl, $params);

  $response = curl_exec($curl);
  $err = curl_error($curl);

  curl_close($curl);

  if ($err) {
    echo "cURL Error #01: " . $err;
  } else {
    $response = json_decode($response, true);    
    if(array_key_exists("access_token", $response)) return $response;
    if(array_key_exists("error", $response)) echo $response["error_description"];
    echo "cURL Error #02: Something went wrong! Please contact admin.";
  }
}

If everything goes fine, you should get a JSON response similar to this one:

{
  "access_token": "bd9abc28-f91c-313f-a953-32eba3db159x",
  "refresh_token": "730785c3-447b-31c2-9280-129dee19f789",
  "scope": "openid",
  "id_token": "very-long-id-token-here",
  "token_type": "Bearer",
  "expires_in": 35159
}

You can now use this token to make API calls and retrieve the info you’re after. You normally do a request to your endpoint using the token like this:

CURLOPT_HTTPHEADER => array(
   "authorization: Bearer ".TOKEN,
   "cache-control: no-cache",
)

Just a small note here: token is normally valid for a short-to-medium period of time. When the token expires you can use the refresh token to request a new token. The refresh token should always be kept a secret on the server side, but this is subject of a new tutorial.

Still here?? Let me know your experience and maybe I can help you out there.

So here is a list for the results when evaluating the expressions in PHP. I am sure that this can be applied to a bunch of other languages. (I think it is a little bit superficial to say that it apply to all programming language since I only know some of them).

Logical operator AND  ( && )

false and false => false

false and true => false

true and false => false

true and true => true

Logical operator OR  ( || )

false or false => false

false or true => true

true or false => true

true or true => true

Logical operator NOT  ( ! )

!false => true

!true => false

On the other hand this was forcing me to chmod wp-content/uploads  folder with 777 permissions. I am not a heavy image uploader, so when I was in need of updating I was just chmod to 777 and then, after uploading my stuff, get back to 755.

I am not a Linux lover, geek, guru (or how they call it) so I had no clue about why this happened on my VPS or how to fix that. But as a respectable “self-directed learner” as I am, I had to dig into the situation.

So this was my task list:

1. Make a list of errors and possible relationship between them – others then the obvious permissions issue
2. Gather some documentation on this and understand why it is happening in the first place
3. See how other solved the errors and how can I apply it to my case.
4.  Actually solve it on my Linux installation with Parallels Plesk  – and not die trying.

This are my issues

1. WordPress asks for FTP username and password while it’s uploading/upgrading a plugin, a theme or WP himself.
2. The 777 permissions are needed when I upload images (or any other media  files) to my uploads directory.
3. My mortgage is really expensive. (Later I have found out that this has nothing to do with the Apache permissions problem).

I was unable to upload images nor any other files using the WordPress Media Uploader. Could not upload plugins or themes via the WordPress automatic updater.

You don’t have to be a genius to know that images are uploaded via PHP and PHP is running on apache, so apache does not have permission to upload files. I seems that apache is a service and also a user in Linux. So after all, this it is a simple user permission.

Bottom line: Apache can not write to my WordPress folders

This is why all this happened in the first place

When mod_php is used to execute PHP scripts on a web server it does not have permission to write to the file system if it does not own it. I uploaded files via FTP. So the files were assigned to the ftp user and the Apache user does not have permission to edit them. This is really a common problem when working with a CMS like WordPress.

On the other hand, this also happen if a php process creates a file. This can not be later edited by the FTP user.

I had to set up PHP to run as FastCGI as it allows FTP and PHP scripts equal access, meaning file upload and edit functionality within the CMS works like a charm without any other special file permission configuration.

set up PHP to run as FastCGI

To do this in Plesk you will have to go to your domain Hosting Settings under the Websites & Domains tab.

Under the Web scripting and statistics secction you will se the PHP support option and you will have to change the Run PHP as part to the FastCGI Option.

Here is a complete explanation of all options available here with the pros and con that each one of them has a cording to the official Plesk Documentation and Help Portal. (https://docs.plesk.com/en-US/12.5/administrator-guide/web-hosting/php-management/php-handler-types.75145/)

This may also help. There is a special directive for wordpress for not to ask to FTP credentials. For this you can add the following line to your wp-config.php after define('WP_DEBUG', false); line.

define('FS_METHOD', direct);

Hope this helped you trow all the process. Please let me know if you think I have omitted something, or how it worked on your specific server configuration.

I have recently had to detect duplicated/missing files comparing two directories in a set of 80.000 files and I used the PHP glob() function. 80k is a reasonable number for a local machine. But later I had to deal with 800k and that is really a lot if you don’t do things the right way. So I had to try some other alternatives.

I had to do some benchmarking in the area and I used a set of 25.000 images and another folder with 10.000 random duplicates. I think this is a reasonable number to see any differences in the final result.

Here are my approaches in my intent of testing the duplicate file detection

So for first test I runned the function as it is. You can see the entire function n my previous article:

$files = glob( $dir[1]."/*".$ext);

Processing took 6.76 seconds and 5 mb of memory.

Second I used the GLOB_NOSORT . This can make a significant improvement if you do not care about the file order. GLOB_NOSORT param returns files as they appear in the directory which means no sorting. When this flag is not used, the path names are sorted alphabetically

$files = glob( $dir[1]."/*".$ext, GLOB_NOSORT );

Processing took 6.37 seconds 5 mb of memory.

I have done this tests using the function I described in the previous article and the concept is quite simple. Buid an array of all files in folder dir1 and see if the files exists in dir2. Note that time may vary depending of the CPU usage at the moment of the test an that it is exponential depending of the files quantity. You can take a look at the function here. I had commented out tbe part that renames or delete the files and felt just the on-screen messaging.

Of course I can always search dir2 instead of dir1 . It is a good point if you know what folder will have less files, you can choose to start from there. It is very logical that if the folder will have less file, the function will spend less time to build the array in memory. But this is not of my interest right now in the process that I am doing, since dir2 will have more and more images as opposite as dir1 .

So for now I don’t think there is much I can do. glob()  function builds an array with all files that are in the specified folder and it has to do it no matter what.

It could be a lot faster if it didn’t try to build the array and just check for the duplicated files on the fly. This could be a good approach, so let’s look in the PHP arsenal and see what else we can find.

How to use readdir() to search for duplicate files in distinct folders

The PHP readdir()  function returns the name of the next entry in a given directory. The entries are returned in the order in which they are stored by the filesystem. This seems to be very similar to glob() , but it doesn’t store the filenames in memory as an array.

So let’s build a little function using readdir()  to search through the folders for duplicated files.

function simple_compare_folders($dir)
{

    echo "<pre>";

    if ($handle = opendir($dir))
    {
        while (false !== ($file_name = readdir($handle)))
        {
                        
            echo "$file_name<br />";

        }

        closedir($handle);
    }

    echo "</pre>";

}

And let’s do some benchmark on it

Waw…god damned…this is awesome. If you blink you won’t see it. This is f*** real speed. But hey, this only prints the files, and not comparing them to come up with the duplicated ones. Well, let’s add the fancy stuff from our first function and see how it does. Hands on work:

/**
 * @param array $dir: this is an array with your custom paths
 * @param string $ext: File extension
 * @param boleean $action: flase, move of delete. If false no action will be taken and files will be printed on screen.
 * @param boleean $output: If false, no message will be output to screen.
 * @return string
 */
function compare_two_directories_readdir($dir, $ext="jpg", $action = false, $output=true)
{

if($output) echo "<pre>I found this duplicate files:<br />";

    if ($handle = opendir($dir[1]))
    {
        while (false !== ($file_name = readdir($handle)))
        {
            $ext = strtolower(end(explode('.', $file_name)));

            // Check for extension
            if ($ext == $ext_ck) 
            {

                // check if file exists in the second directory
                if(!file_exists($dir[2]."/".$file_name))
                {
                      
                            
                    if($output) echo "$file_name";

                    if($action == 'move') {
                        rename($file, $dir[3]."/".$file_name); // move the image to folder 3. 
                        if($output) echo " <span style='color:green'>moved</span> to ".basename($dir[3])."<br />";
                    }
                    elseif ($action == 'delete')  {
                        unlink($file); // just delete the image
                        if($output) echo " <span style='color:red'>deleted</span><br />";
                    }
                    else {
                        if($output)  echo  '<br />'; 
                    }
                    
                }
                
            }
        }

        closedir($handle);
    }

    if($output) echo "</pre>";

}

And here it is. Nice and clean. Let’s do some benchmark on it and hope for the best.

2.72 seconds …well how about that? I saved more than half of the time just using readdir() function. That’s more like it. And take a look at the memory usage! It dropped down from 5MB to 256Kb, isn’t that great or what? Try to apply this algorithm to 800k instead ok 25k of files…This is really a significant improvement.

At this point I think there is no need to do further testing on this 2 functions although I agree that depending on the case, there is not possible to user readdir() and that glob() could be your only approach.

Conclusion: readdir() … you rock!!

We have speed up the process a lot but I would like to try some other things and see if there are ways to make the code a little bit faster. After a little more testing and after introducing some break points I have noticed that the slower part, is the one that checking  if  the  file_exists in the second folder and it eats up more than 2 seconds. This is like 90% of time is used here. How can we speed this up?

How to speed up the PHP file_exists() function …dead-end?

This is quite a rough road. There are lots of people saying that there is not much you can do about it. But some say that thinks speed up if you use is_file()  instead of file_exists() . Well maybe on millions of files or on different folder structure. I’ve seen no change on my 25k set of JPEG images.

I have also tried using clearstatcache()  with no better result in my case.

But then I found this so called stream_resolve_include_path() . In the PHP manual they say it resolve the filename against the include path according to the same rules as fopen()/include . The value returned by stream_resolve_include_path() is a string containing the resolved absolute filename, or FALSE on failure.

Could  stream_resolve_include_path() function , be the holy grail?

So everything should work just fine. In case it finds the file, will return a string. A string is always evaluated to TRUE  by the if statement, so we’re good on this. An in case the file is not found will return FALSE  witch is OK.

Let’s do some benchmark testing with stream_resolve_include_path() and see if we can replace file_exists()  with it.

// just replace this next line
if(file_exists(($dir[2]."/".$file_name))


// with this next line. Simple as that
if(stream_resolve_include_path ($dir[2]."/".$file_name))

And here is the result of testing.

I think there is really no need to tell you that this is quite it for now. We have compared 25k of files against other 10k and all this in 1.35 seconds. This really is speed. Did I told you that images are not quite small? There are 2.61GB of images to compare against other 1.08GB.

1.35 seconds to compare more than 3GB of files is really a good time. It is 6 time faster than the gob() and file_exists() functions.

I have to say that I run this on a local machine, and it is more important to me to get the job done then get a lower loading time. So seconds are ok for me and I am not really interested in microseconds.

File check comparison benchmark testing – the final loop

OK, just for the record and to see some big data processed, I will do some benchmark only on this 3 PHP functions ( is_file(), file_exists() and stream_resolve_include_path() ) and test them on a 1 million loop. I will first test with an existent file and then with a file that doesn’t exists.

Here is my little function that does the testing on this:

function do_benchmark( $file ) {

    $funcs = array('is_file','file_exists', 'stream_resolve_include_path');

    $run = 1000000;

    $stats = '| ';

    foreach ( $funcs as $func ) {

        $go = microtime(true);

        for ( $i = 0; $i < $run; $i++ ) $func($file);            
    
        $stats .= "$func = " . number_format( (microtime(true) - $go), 5) . " | ";

        clearstatcache();
    }

    return $stats;
}

$ok_file = dirname(__FILE__)."/icon.gif";
$no_file = dirname(__FILE__)."/none.png";

echo "<pre>" . do_benchmark($ok_file) . "\n" . do_benchmark($no_file) . "</pre>";

And here are the results on this: It is really surprising. I think this speaks for itself

// this is when file is in place
| is_file =  0.39600 | file_exists = 28.20900 | stream_resolve_include_path =  1.46400 | 

// this is when file is not found
| is_file = 32.74600 | file_exists = 31.56300 | stream_resolve_include_path = 31.15000 |

This explain why my previous test returned better results using  stream_resolve_include_path(). The part that I do not understand is why is_file()  did not make the code faster in the first place. For this test a used a really small image and then I repeat the test using a large image, but it seems that the file size does not influence the final result.

So what do you think? If you know about some other alternatives on this just let me know. I would really die to test them out.

I am trying to pass some image throw a small piece of software for batch processing and I always get timeout due to the big quantity of images. There are around 80.000 images that I am trying to process and the software get stuck to (let say) 10.000 images so I have to start all over again and I have no idea which are the missing files.

So my solution is to take out the images that have been processed from the folder and feed the program with the images that have not been processed.

So to find out this I have to compare the 2 directories for duplicated files. In other words “detect the missing files”

Comparing two directories for missing file is really an easy task. You just have to iterate through the first directory and see if the same file exists in the second. If the file exists, it means it has been processed, so I will move it to a third folder (I prefer this, just in case) or I can just delete it. This way I can detect the files that have been processed and leave untouched the files that have not yet processed.

Detect missing files while compare 2 folders – the php function

So to get the job done, I came up with this function:

/**
 * @param array $dir: this is an array with your custom paths
 * @param string $ext: File extension
 * @param boolean $rename: If false, it will delete the file.
 * @param boolean $output: If false, no message will be output to screen.
 * @return string
 */
function compare_two_directories($dir, $ext=".jpg", $move=true, $output=true){

    $files = glob( $dir[1]."/*".$ext );

    $count = 0;

    if($output) echo "<pre>I found this duplicate files:<br />";

    foreach ($files as $file) {
        
        $file_name = basename($file);

        // check if file exists in the second directory
        if(file_exists($dir[2]."/".$file_name)){
                      
            if($output) echo "$file_name";

            if($move) {
                rename($file, $dir[3]."/".$file_name); // move the image to folder 3. 
                if($output) echo " <span style='color:green'>moved</span> to ".basename($dir[3])."<br />";
            } else {
                unlink($file); // just delete the image
                if($output) echo " <span style='color:red'>deleted</span><br />";
            }

            $count++;
        }
        
    }

    if($output) echo "</pre>";

    return "Done processing and found <span style='color:green'>$count</span> duplicated <span style='color:red; font-weight:bold;'>$ext</span> files ";
}

Use function to compare files inside directories like this

You can call it like this. I like to include also the time that was used, just for statistics purpose, but you can omit it.

// this is the path to your script file and your directories are relative to it.
define("MY_PATH", dirname(__FILE__)); 
// define("MY_PATH", "/var/www/my/custom/path/to/my/directories");

// set your custom paths
$dir[1] = MY_PATH."/dir1";
$dir[2] = MY_PATH."/dir2";
$dir[3] = $dir[1]."_processed"; // please note the folder "dir1_processed" must exist if you want to move files to it

// call the function and get the job done
echo compare_two_directories($dir);

// this next line is an example for .png images, DELETE files and output messages will be sent to screen
// echo compare_two_directories($dir, ".png", true, false);

But if you only need to list the different files, just comment the rename function like this and file that are missing will only by displayed on screen.

// rename($file, $dir[3]."/".$file_name);

Get more stats when comparing directories for duplicated files

I like to also know the processing time just for statistics purpose. So to do that you can just wrap the upper code like this:

$time = microtime(true); // Gets microseconds

// the code here

echo "<br />Processing took <span style='color:blue'>".round( (microtime(true) - $time), 2).'</span> seconds';

Note that all directories must be on the same level as the script file if you want your script to work out of the box. But if this is not your case, feel free to edit it so it adapts to your specific file structure or your server configuration.

See memory usage

Speaking about server configuration, you will normally need a lot of memory if you have to compare lots of files. I normally do this kind of jobs on a local machine using XAMPP, but you can also do it on your normal server. You can take a peek at your memory usage by using this little function:

function get_memory()
{
    $size = memory_get_peak_usage (true);
    $unit = array('b','kb','mb','gb','tb','pb');
    return @round($size/pow(1024,($i=floor(log($size,1024)))),2).' '.$unit[$i];
}

echo "<br />".get_memory()." of memory were used wile processing" ;

Just place this at the end of your file to see your memory usage when comparing the 2 folders

Get “compare directories for missing files” script

You can download a full working copy of this script from the Github repository and compare your directories for missing files. Here is a screenshot of it working. I agree with you that it needs some more style

There is also a second choice in which you can store both directories in 2 distinct arrays and then just compare the two arrays. If there is a match, then move the files to a third folder or delete them. I really did not test the two alternatives, but I think the first one is faster than the second because it doesn’t need to iterate the second directory. But I could be wrong since it has to do lots of single-file checks.

Please let me know if you try this second approach and with one worked best for you.

There is a not quite intuitive (for me) option in the Super admin dashboard that allows you to change this. Please note that this does not overwrite your apache or php.ini settings if this last one is smaller. Here you can apply the rule of the most restrictive.

So here are the steps to achieve this:

Here are the steps to change the Maximum upload file size within WP admin:

• Click Network Admin, at the top-left of your WordPress dashboard.
• In the main menu on your left side, just hover over Settings and then click network Settings.
• Scroll to the bottom and almost at the end of the list you will find the Max upload file size. You must specify a value in KB.
• Apply Changes and you are good to go.

Like I said, if your value is bigger than the one you have specified in your /etc/php.ini  or in your .htaccess , it will not been overwritten. You will have to further tweak your server settings to achieve your desired maximum upload file value in your WordPress multisite installation.

This are some value that may help you to get the job done:

post_max_size = 10M

upload_max_filesize = 10M

memory_limit = 64M

max_execution_time = 250

max_input_time = 250

On the other hand WordPress itself has another settings in the wp-config.php  file that may be tweaked.

define('WP_MEMORY_LIMIT', '10M');

So hope this helps you. I will soon post a specific tutorial about how to change the settings via your ini file, htaccess, or even directly in your php scripts. You can subscribe to receive it in your mailbox.

This is because WordPress and lots of plugins store data and full URI in the database using wp_serialize function. Here is a little example about what I am talking about:

a:6:s:4:"role";s:5:"admin";s:17:"includes_globally";s:2:"on";s:18:"pages_for_includes";s:0:"";s:12:"js_to_footer";s:2:"on";s:15:"show_dev_export";s:3:"off";s:11:"enable_logs";s:3:"off";}

If you just do a search and replace you will break all this fields and data can not be recovered.

WordPress itself in his Codex Archive about moving WordPress installation files and database recommends that you manually change the URL in the WordPress Control backend.

Doing this, will give you a 404 error page on the old domain, but after you move the files and database on the new server, your WordPress installation should work.

Please note that this process leaves you with lots of database entries containing the old domain URL. Entries like posts, data stored by themes and plugins will not be modified. On the other hand you can do a search and replace on your entire database to change the URLs, but this can cause major issues with serialized data because lots of themes plugins and widgets store values along with their length. This can be a big headache.

I am sure there are lots of tools out there, but today I will be talking about this PHP Search/Replace tool. Note that this tool is not specially designed for WordPress migration, but for any database search and replace process. It works great with WordPress installation and like you can see it has a very friendly interface. After you finish searching and replacing the database you can use the build in cleanup process or delete the files manually.

Please note that I am not related in any way with this guys. I am just happy to use their tool and post about it.

To run the search/replace script you will have to download it and place a copy on your website root folder. So your files will be something like this:

/your-custom-folder-for-search-replace-script
/wp-admin
/wp-content
/wp-includes

It is very important to place the script in his own folder because when it finishes the process it will attempt (give you the option of course) to delete himself. This will delete all files on the same level so if you place all the files directly on the root you will end up deleting all WP installation files. If you do not understand this just ask a geek for a little advice.

Remember that if you had any kind of permalinks rules it is very possible that they will not work properly after the WP migration. So you must disable .htaccess  and reconfigure permalinks.

Resetting the permalinks is quite easy and can be done in two ways:

• The first method is done in the WordPress dashboard. Just go to your WordPress dashboard, click on Settings and go to Permalinks.

Just click Save Settings and you should be good to go. If this does not work try to change to a different option, save and then change back to your desired permalink structure. This will force WordPress to rewrite the .htaccess  file.

• The second option is to manually edit the database. You will have to search your database wp_options table for a special entry called  permalink_structure . After you found it just edit it there.

Note that if you edit your settings via database or even if you are using the dashboard but WordPress does not have permission to write on file. You will have to manually edit your  .htaccess

# BEGIN WordPress
<IfModule mod_rewrite.c>
RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /
RewriteRule ^index\.php$ – [L]
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule . /index.php [L]
</IfModule>

# END WordPress

If all this did not make your site to work properly, try to do a force refresh, clear cache or just use a different browser

Check your php.ini like this:

<?php
   phpinfo();
?>

You should search for this in the list sendmail_path that has the default  value /usr/sbin/sendmail -t -i

You can also try to manual set it to this value by changing the php.ini file. To do this go to  /etc/php5/apache2/php.ini and uncomment the sendmail_path line like this

; For Unix only.  You may supply arguments as well (default: "sendmail -t -i").
; http://php.net/sendmail-path
sendmail_path = "/usr/sbin/sendmail -t -i"

If it did not work for you, try to find out if the function exists in the first place.

<?php
if ( function_exists( 'mail' ) )
{
    echo 'mail() is available';
}
else
{
    echo 'mail() has been disabled';
}
?>

And finally you can test what the php mail() function returns.

<?php
    /*
     * Enable error reporting
     */
    ini_set( 'display_errors', 1 );
    error_reporting( E_ALL );

    /*
     * Setup email addresses and change it to your own
     */
    $from = "your_email@yourdomain.com";
    $to = "send_to@testdomain.com";
    $subject = "Simple test for mail function";
    $message = "This is a test to check if php mail function sends out the email";
    $headers = "From:" . $from;

    /*
     * Test php mail function to see if it returns "true" or "false"
     * Remember that if mail returns true does not guarantee
     * that you will also receive the email
     */
    if(mail($to,$subject,$message, $headers))
    {
    	echo "Test email send.";
    } 
    else 
    {
    	echo "Failed to send.";
    }
?>

But more important than this is if the email arrives to your inbox (or Spam folder).

I have also find myself in need to check the mail function a WordPress platform. You can do this on WordPress by installing Check Email plugin. Although it has not been updated lately it still works and it does the job that it was installed for.

Like I said, a positive result does not mean that the email will be received. There are much more things to check here.

Hope this helped you. If not please let me know how you finally solve it.

Anyway…let’s continue. I have now separated all images by:

• logo in the center
• multiple logos all over.

I will try to process the images that have the logo in the center. In this group I have little bit over 40.000 images.

I will use for this purpose BatchInpaint which is capable of removing objects of the image and refill the spot after that.

**Please note that I am not an affiliate of this software or related in any way with it.

Anyway, this little piece of software needs all images to have the same size, so I will have to resize all image using some criteria like original size and aspect ratio and group them by the cropped size for further batch processing.

I used a custom php script and the Phil Brown’s ImageManipulator class.

$dirs = scandir($path_to_your_file);

foreach ($dirs as $dir) {
    if ($dir === '.' or $dir === '..') continue;

    if (is_dir($path . '/' . $dir)) {

        $uri = $path . '/' . $dir;

        $files = glob( $uri."/*".IMAGE_EXT );
        
        print_r($files);

    }
}

You can use this to get a nice list of your files which then you can process using the image manipulator class depending of your needs.

I finally get 15 groups of different size of image. So I started creating the layer for the logo to be removed in BatchInpaint.

This took me around 2 hours to complete the 15 size layers and remove the watermark object.

The batch process did a great job, but there were some imperfections. This is no problem since I will put the new watermark on top of the imperfection that BatchInpaint left.

A 50% transparency will do just fine. I used FotoSizer to apply the new watermark but there are lots of software around the web including so.e great classes that you can use.

Now that I have removed all watermark on my images and placed the new one, I have to roll back the folder structure and the image naming. This is easy task. Just get the ID from the database and search for the image with the same name.  When you find the image just use php rename built in function. It will create the image using the original file and folder naming. Remember that I stored the folder structure when I first move the images to one folder.

Next, I used a free php class called php-simple-watermarkto place a semi transparent watermark over all images.

I first used FotoSizer, the profesional edition to do the job. But did not do a good job since the images were different size and orientation. The watermark was always the same size and on some images it was was wider then the image itself.

I looked for an php class that solve this issue in an elegant way and the “php class” did it out of the box. The watermark was resize proportionally to the image width. I really liked it.

rollback folders paragraph

After all this I realize that size in kb of all my images has doubled. I really don’t know why and when this happened, but I more interested in finding a solution to compress all my images then searching for the step that made them explode in size.

I end up testing ImageMagick, but I first glace I did not find the way to do it. So I returned to my good all FotoSizer. I selected “Original Size” for the image size and decreased quality to 90% (you will really not notice any difference in this and you could also try 90% if you concern about space or loading time). I then selected “Same output” and overwrite  the original images (you can make a backup os select a different output folder if you are just testing). This how I reduced by half the image size in kb.

All good now. Time to deliver the images. I hope you like this article. I know there are some better ways to achieve the same result, but this were the best I could find at the moment and given the short time to deliver.

You think you can remove the watermark and replace it in a better and faster manner. Please let me know how, in a comment.

Later edit: Now that I have remove the watermark and delivered the images, the client let’s me know that he has another set of 50.000 images to process. So here we go again