The GDPR makes us jump through a lot of hoops to cleanup our websites and make all our code compliant. Many aspects of the GDPR are far from completely defined yet and there is a great uncertainty what is required, what can stay and what needs to be adjusted right now.
Embeding Youtube videos is one area, that many are afraid of. You need to mention the use of youtube in your data privacy policy.
Something like that :”Our website uses plugins from YouTube, which is operated by Google. The operator of the pages is YouTube LLC, 901 Cherry Ave., San Bruno, CA 94066, USA.
If you visit one of our pages featuring a YouTube plugin, a connection to the YouTube servers is established. Here the YouTube server is informed about which of our pages you have visited.
If you’re logged in to your YouTube account, YouTube allows you to associate your browsing behavior directly with your personal profile. You can prevent this by logging out of your YouTube account.
YouTube is used to help make our website appealing. This constitutes a justified interest pursuant to Art. 6 (1) (f) DSGVO.
Further information about handling user data, can be found in the data protection declaration of YouTube under https://www.google.de/intl/de/policies/privacy.”
The question remains, if that is actually enough? Youtube allows you to switch to a cookieless embed on their website, that limits the data flowing to Google servers.
But how do you use that programmatically, with the Youtube iFrame API?
The iFrame API documentation has not been updated since 2014 and does not mention any option to switch to the cookieless youtube host.
But there is an easy option, just add the host option “https://www.youtube-nocookie.com” to your calls :
There we go, so simple and painless :)
The GDPR is a good thing, as it helps to secure our privacy. Those that are complaining now, are those that waited until the GDPR went live and did not take the time to really prepare soon enough.
BTW the email spam sent by so many services, was so not required, but helped me to clean up / delete those dormant accounts ;)
WooCommerce Appointments is a commercial booking plugin that allows you to setup appointments with WooCommerce. It has full integration into Google calendar to track appointments of your staff.
Staff availability can be set globally or via each staff members profile. While this is nice, I was looking for an option to actually handle availability via another Google Calendar as well. That was a must have feature for a current project.
What do you do, if that feature is not available yet ? You poke the code!
The magic entry point for the staff availability is the user meta “_wc_appointment_availability“, which is made available through includes/class-wc-product-appointment-staff.php.
A couple of weeks ago I asked support for a simple filter hook to alter the availability on demand from the outside.
The development team added the feature in one of the latest releases, making wc_appointments_staff_availability the entry point for my custom availability changes.
You can either pull Google Calendar Events directly through the Google Calendar API or use the available iCal export option. In this quick example I will use the private calendar iCal export file.
Lets setup a quick clean calendar, called “Availability”. So simple and catchy :)
For this example I am using the PHP ICS Parser, but any other parser will do. Install it via composer: composer require johngrogg/ics-parser.
Lets create a quick little plugin to get us going and save it to /wp-content/plugins/CustomAvailability/smile.php
Its time to get the data into the system. I am only pulling and altering the availability for one single user in this example, the user with the USERID “3”. This should provide you with a good starting point.
The example pulls and parses the ics file on every load, use a transient or REDIS to store data and only refresh in certain intervals.
Hope this gets you started! I build a simple interface around it, with a lot of more rule options. This makes the setup for each staff member a brise. Now each of them can setup a calendar easily and provide me with the ics link :) WooCommerce Appointments rocks …
There are many variations of these out there, SSilence/php-imap-client is a lib with a nice set of methods, clean integration and pretty good documentation. Adding it to my goto essentials !
GitHub
We all have been in situations were we need content or information from a connected website, but have no access to a REST Api or any other backend feed.
In these cases screen scraping is the only option to get needed information to finalize an integration. You can do that directly in CURL, but that can be tedious. Far easier to use a nicely packaged solution that combines a component that simulates web browser behavior and a component that eases DOM navigation for HTML and XML documents. Meet Goutte!
Install via composer.
Login into a website and navigate to the page that has your needed information
Get the data you need.
Goutte @ Github BrowserKit Documentation DOM Crawler Documentation
An icon font to use with the Google Maps API and Google Places API, using SVG markers and icon labels.
Map Icons makes Google Maps Markers dynamic with control over shape, color, size, and icon easily changed using options in the marker object as well as simple SVG Notation and CSS.
GitHub / Preview
I have been working on a project , that relies on text-to-speech cloud services for a lot of things.
Audiomanager abstracts access to popular text-to-speech cloud services like Google, Ivona, Amazon Polly… Really a timesaver, when evaluating different services.
When using your main content feed to share posts via buffer or other services, it is crucial that your feed validates cleanly.
There are always things in the generated WordPress content that can break your feed validation. Here some things to cleanup or alter your delivered feed content.
is_feed() Check for syndication request. This tag is not typically used by users; it is used internally by WordPress and is available for Plugin Developers.
Check for feed syndication in your themes functions.php
The sizes attribute breaks feed validation, here how to clean it up.
After some downtime, GreenApe is breathing again. I revived the brand with a good friend of mine and we will be reopening shop options shortly.
Michael and I have been friends for a long time. We have been working on many different projects over the years.
He launched GreenApe in 2011 and I helped him with his first steps. A couple of months ago we decided to merge our competences and expand what GreenApe offers and stands for.
From the website: “The GreenApe brand was established in 2011. GreenApe’s career began with the 1st Single Malt Whisky Coffee.
As the first of its kind, our coffee is refined with Original Single Malt Whisky. To this day, he pampers many connoisseurs and gourmets with his unique taste. Now there is another reason to rejoice.
From now on, we are continuously expanding the GreenApe product world with several stylish gadgets and useful accessories. For you this means that you will be able to discover even more beautiful, special or practical things in the future.“
GreenApe is all about lifestyle & leisure products, fun gadgets and unique food & drinks.
Fun Fun Fun :)
sql.js @ Github
Font Face Observer is a fast and simple web font loader. You can use it to load fonts and customise your browser’s font loading behaviour.
Font Face Observer gives you control over web font loading using a simple promise based interface. It doesn’t matter where your fonts come from: host them yourself, or use a web font service such as Google Fonts, Typekit, Fonts.com, and Webtype.
Font Face Observer @ Github