How to create an Extension in Plesk
Extensions are to Plesk what Plugins are to WordPress. They allow developers to add functionality to the Plesk Panel via PHP, make CSS and JavaScript tweaks and allow a very fine grained amount of customisations. Creating modifications in isolated files instead of hacking Plesk core files also assures that upgrades won’t overwrite any changes you’ve made (much like the Child Theme philosophy in WordPress). Here’s a quick how-to guide on writing your first extension. Uploading an existing Extension Extensions come into Plesk...
read moreHow to upgrade to MySQL 5.5 and PHP 5.4 in Plesk 11.5 (CentOS)
One of my clients wanted to run a web application that required MySQL 5.5 instead of the default MySQL 5.1 that ships with Plesk at the time of writing. He needed it due to the better handling of UTF8 characters. I struggled to find clear instructions on how to do this – so here they are CentOS 5.x In CentOS 5 you can switch to MySQL 5.5 under Tools and Settings – Updates and Upgrades. The installer shows something like this: Simply switch to MySQL 5.5 (packaged by Parallels) and hit install. CentOS 6.x Sadly the above convenience...
read moreHow to install ZEND Framework for use with MAMP
If you have MAMP installed and working on your Mac, it’s easy to get started with ZEND Framework development. I’ll show you how in this article. Download the framework from here: http://framework.zend.com/downloads/latest Choose the full version without ZEND Server (not necessary as we’re using MAMP). Unpack the download and put it somewhere safe. I’m adding mine to my Documents directory. I’ll also rename my folder to something like “ZendFramework” without the version number. To access it from...
read moreHow to run Plesk on your local network and access virtual domains on your Mac
Whether you’re running Plesk on a dedicated machine on your network or in a virtual environment, you’ll want to setup test domains and work with them as if they were live – just like it was running in a data centre. It’s not as easy as I thought, which is why I took some notes on how to do it. In this example I’ve got a dedicated CentOS instance on my local network. This can be my trusty old NC10 netbook, or a virtual machine running on Parallels Desktop on your Mac (I’ve explained how to set this up here:...
read moreHow to create a Plesk Mirror
When you deploy Plesk to various instances on your local network you can save the world (and yourself) from a lot of internet traffic by creating a local mirror. This is a duplicate of the original installer files needed to deploy Plesk which are downloaded once and can then be used from a machine on your network – which makes the installation much faster. This used to be a bit of a pain, but thanks to a new knowledge base article – and Ivan Butorin for telling me about this – it’s become so much easier to do. In this...
read moreHow to SSH into a Virtual Machine in Parallels Desktop
I was pulling my hair out the other day trying to connect to a VM in Parallels Desktop. It’s fairly straightforward, yet rather complex at the same time. Here’s how to do it step by step. In this example I’m running Parallels Desktop 8 under Mac OS X 10.9 Mavericks, and my Guest OS CentOS 6.5. Configuring your VM Before starting the VM, start Parallels Desktop and head over to Virtual Machine Configure Hardware Network You’ll get to a screen like this: Make sure the tick box is “Connected”. Under Type you...
read moreList of Plesk Resources
There is a lot of help available for Plesk which comes to you straight from the developers. A few years ago all we had was the Parallels Forums – that’s changed dramatically and if anything will only increase in the future. Here’s a list of sources I know to check for free support and updates on the latest Plesk developments: Plesk Forums: http://forum.parallels.com/forumdisplay.php?479-Parallels-Panel-Discussion Google+ Open Community: https://plus.google.com/communities/109881979300958500728 Uservoice for suggestions:...
read moreHow to style block quotes in P2
I’ve just snazzed up the blockquotes styling on a couple of my P2 sites and thought I’d share the code that did it. Here’s an example of the final result in P2: This is a block quote. You can create one by adding blockquote tags to the beginning and end of a block of text you’d like to look a little different. It doesn’t always have to be a quote, just something you’d like to give a little emphasis to. This is a little plain in the original P2 and I thought it deserved a bit of styling. Here’s what...
read moreHow to run PHP from the command line in Linux
Did you know that you can run PHP directly from the command line? Here’s how: Running a command Let’s run a one-liner and see the output displayed in our console. We’ll use phpinfo() because we know it should generate a lot of text. We need to start our line with php, use the -r switch and specify our command in single quotes: php -r 'phpinfo();' That’s it. You should see a familiar long list of set variables and info about your PHP environment. Note that you have to specify the semicolon inside your...
read moreHow to fix yum update failure blaming “qpid-cpp”
I’ve just tried to update one of my CentOS 6.2 servers that was built from an older AMI, only to find that the yum update command stopped unexpectedly with several dependency errors. They all pointed to something called “qpid”, and I must admit that I’ve never heard of it – nor did I know that it was installed. The long list ended with the following suggestion: You could try using --skip-broken to work around the problem You could try running: rpm -Va --nofiles --nodigest And why not indeed, since yum is so nice...
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