Archive for the ‘Wordpress’ Category

20 Apr

Redirect users from WordPress admin pages

After some time looking at the various user-restriction/membership style plugins, I realized that there wasn’t a quick and easy way to ban normal users from all of the wp-admin pages.

Fortunately, wordpress makes this sort of customization easy with its amazing API. These four lines of code are all that’s needed:
(more…)

14 Feb

Cursor Trail

This is a pretty simple plugin and probably as useless as they get!

This was inspired by David Walsh’s MooTools implementation. Check out his demo to see functionality, it’s the same thing except you can control the fade speed and cursor image, as long with start/end dates for special occasions.

Activate it for Valentines Day for a special surprise, if that’s today you’ll know what I mean :)

Download it here! (more…)

12 Aug

Single string with multiple translations

Multilingual wordpress sites are not as straight-foward to create as you may think (unless you’re using multi-site). There are various plugins that make this easier, although they all lack something or other (my favourite is qTranslate so far). It gets tricky when you add custom text to sidebars, other plugins, or your themes. It’s not really the fault of the translation plugins either, because it’s literally impossible to reliably force plugin outputs to be translated in a user-friendly manner. (more…)

25 Jun

Choosing the right WordPress plugins

When choosing WordPress plugins, you need to keep in mind that these are open source, therefore each plugin is maintained by someone for free, so some plugins are made by people that aren’t experienced coders (which may result in the plugin preventing your site from loading), or may not have time or resources to maintain the plugin to keep up with new WordPress releases.

This becomes especially important when considering the crucial and complex plugins that make your site work the way you need, as finding a replacement in the future may be prove to be much more laborious than doing a little due diligence beforehand. Imagine, for example, if your photo gallery stopped working when you upgrade to the latest version of WordPress!

Due to this, it’s important to take certain things into consideration when choosing a plugin, and if keep these in mind you’ll probably find that your selected plugins get updated with the new WP releases and are regularly improved. There’s lots of factors that you need to consider when choosing a plugin. Below are some of the major things to think about: (more…)

17 Apr

Security is Relative

Matt posted a small bit regarding the recent alert NetworkSolutions put up claiming that there was a vulnerability (not giving a link either, undeserved). Turns out that the issue had nothing to do with wordpress, and more to do with their file permissions. His aptly titled post, Secure File Permissions Matter raises a good point about security in general…. your site is as secure as your server, which is actually as secure as where your server is kept. (more…)

04 Apr

WordPress 3 Beta 1 – A look into the new features

I had a chance to install the recently released WordPress 3 Beta 1 onto my PC and I thought I’d highlight some of the most notable (in my opinion at least) new features that you can expect. For a more comprehensive list of improvements, head on over the 3.0 features page on the  Wordpress Codex (more…)

08 Dec

Disable User Gravatar

Stops wordpress from grabbing a user avatar using their registration email.

Download

Requires At Least : 2.7
Test Up To : 2.8.6
Current Version : 1.0
Download latest version

19 Nov

Submitting a form on WordPress leads to a not found page?

I found a little niggle in WordPress when creating a custom form using shortcodes and plain PHP/HTML for processing. Turns out if your form uses $_POST['name'] in your form, WP does not like that and serves a Not Found (404) page. Changing that input field name to a different one, say surname, fixed the problem immediately. Took me a good 30 minutes to figure that out!

05 Nov

Twitter Goodies Widgets

Uses the twitter goodies widgets API to create offical twitter widgets (profiles, lists, faves and search) straight from your control panel. Same opti

Download

Requires At Least : 2.7
Test Up To : 3.0.4
Current Version : 1.2
Download latest version

28 Oct

Syntax Highlighting on your wordpress posts

I’ve had the unpleasant experience of having to play and experiment with syntax highlighting plugins for any code I’d like to post on here and other blogs. Unfortunately, there’s a ton of options to choose from and many just aren’t up to scratch.

What’s worse is that some have funny syntaxes such as using <pre class=”language”> tags which are easily broken by the wordpress WYSIWYG editor and your code gets mangled. Not only that, but changing over to a better plugin becomes a tedious task if you have to change all those pre tags to shorttags.

I’d like to recommend a plugin which works very well, called SyntaxHighliter Plus by Fred Wu and other contributors. In my opinion, it’s one of the easier plugins to use and makes posting code a breeze. (more…)