Monthly Archives: January 2014

Using the WordPress Importer From the App Engine Plugin

As we announced recently, the new version of our App Engine WordPress Plugin includes import support for WordPress export files, forked from the popular WordPress importer plugin.
This plugin lets you take content that you’ve exported from another WordPress site, in the form of an .xml file, and import it into your App Engine WordPress site.

This post walks through the process of doing such an import. It assumes that you already have a WordPress installation on App Engine— if not, see these instructions.

If you will be doing an import of a large .xml file, see the section below on “What to Do if You Have a Large Import“.  As described in that section, you should make a temporary configuration change to your app before you do the import, to ensure that it finishes successfully.

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AppEngine WordPress plugin Version 1.3 Released

We’re happy to announce that we’ve just released version 1.3 of the AppEngine WordPress plugin. We encourage all users of WordPress on App Engine to upgrade to this new version as soon as possible.

The new version of the plugin includes the following features and bug fixes.

  • Import support for WordPress export files, forked from the popular WordPress importer plugin.
  • URLFetch support for WordPress versions 3.7 and above, that fixes issues caused by core WordPress changes to the WT_HTTP Class.
  • Bug fix for incorrectly detecting if a Google Cloud Storage bucket was writable by the application during setup.
  • Better logging of plugin errors.

Like always, please report any issues with the plugin in the support forum.

We also gladly accept pull requests – you can find the plugin source on Github.

PHP App Engine Apps and File System Concepts

If you’re new to App Engine, then the file system model may be a bit different from what you might have experienced using other hosts.

With an App Engine application, you cannot write to the file-system where your application is deployed. Your application can read any files from the deployed directory structure, but it can’t write to that file-system. Instead, the application can use Google Cloud Storage (GCS) for both reading and writing files.
To convert an app to use GCS for writable files, here are the primary things that you will typically need to do:

Another implication of the read-only file system is that if your app has a ‘plugin’ model, like WordPress, you can’t install or update plugins from your deployed app. Instead, you will need to install or update any plugins locally, then redeploy the app.

You can find lots more info on all of the following in the documentation for the PHP runtime.

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App Engine WordPress plugin Version 1.2 released

We’re happy to announce that we’ve just released version 1.2 of the App Engine WordPress plugin. The new version includes the following changes

  • Fix for the bug “Uncaught exception ‘InvalidArgumentException’ with message ‘max_bytes_per_blob must be an integer'” (forum link)
  • Removes the need for PIL to be installed in the local development environment.
  • Removes the need for PyCrypto to be installed in the local development environment.
  • Better checking if the application has write access to the Google Cloud Storage bucket for uploads.

If you find any issues with the latest version of the plugin you can file them in the support forum.

We also gladly accept pull requests – you can find the plugin source on Github.

Generating Dynamic WordPress sitemaps on App Engine

Sitemaps are a valuable tool in helping search engines crawl your website. In this post I’ll show you how you can have a dynamically generated sitemap for a WordPress blog hosted on Google App Engine.

Because of the read-only nature of the file system on App Engine, we’ll use Google Cloud Storage to store the generated sitemap file. We’ll also add some handlers to serve the sitemap, and to update it as part of a scheduled cron job.

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