Archive for July 2009

Report from WordCamp UK 2009

20th July 2009

wordcampuk-2009-graphic WordCamp UK 2009 was my first WordCamp, and certainly won’t be my last. This informal conference was an interesting mix of bloggers, developers, small businesses, corporate consultants, designers and open source enthusiasts, all united by an attachment—varying from considered preference to warm affection—to the WordPress web publishing platform.

I know quite directly, through my inability to keep pace with the current demand for my WP-related services, that my choice to specialize in WP, made aeons ago back in 2005, was a damn good choice. Not only good, but unaccountably prescient. WP is already a major deal in the web sphere, and is set to keep growing.

Permalink | Posted in WordPress | 1 comment » |

jQuery hover drop-down menus and the setTimeout issue

16th July 2009

You know those days when you kind of know there’s plugins and whatnot aplenty to do something? But you’re feeling stubborn, and you’d rather re-invent the wheel? Today has been like that.

It’s not just being stubborn, though. Sometimes you want to re-invent the wheel so you know how to make better wheels yourself. In coding, you have to strike a balance between getting stuff done quickly and efficiently by relying on what’s already been done, and actually progressing your own skills.

Anyway, today I solved something that had been bugging me for a while: creating slick drop-down menus. I know CSS-based drop-downs, and they’re a good thing. But having got into jQuery recently, I wanted to get them right with scripting.

Permalink | Posted in jQuery | 9 comments » |

WordPress theme files processing order

11th July 2009

I was just writing something in a new WordPress theme that required me to output the title of an archive page twice (once for the main title tag, once in some breadcrumbs). I’ve got a series of if / else statements in archive.php that construct the title, depending on if it’s a category archive, a date archive, an author archive, etc.

I thought, rather than duplicating this code, I would move it into my initialization code in functions.php, where I define some constants. I used to stick this stuff at the top of header.php, but I thought I’d try and keep that cleaner and begin directly with the DOCTYPE. Anyway, this arrangement has hit a snag!

Permalink | Posted in WordPress | 3 comments » |

Customizing the new user email with a pluggable function

10th July 2009

A client of mine loves the new “Send password” checkbox on the Add New User page in WordPress. Before 2.8, users registering through the registration form got the email with their account details; but if an admin added them through Add New User, they didn’t. Now admins can choose whether or not to trigger the email.

But the default copy is pretty sparse. The ability to customize the copy in it is a good candidate for inclusion in the WP core, but it’s relatively easy to hack it for now—thanks to pluggable functions.

Permalink | Posted in WordPress | 11 comments » |

Standalone “more tag” processing for WordPress

8th July 2009

A WordPress site I’m working on needs automatic listing of sub-pages on certain pages, including excerpts from the sub-pages’ content. I’m having to grab the sub-pages with a custom query due to complex custom field matching, so I’m not using the_content() for outputting. How to make use of the “more tag”, the handy  placeholder that WP uses to extract teaser copy from the full contents?

Permalink | Posted in WordPress | 1 comment » |

Detecting WordPress login via htaccess

1st July 2009

I just had to come up with a quick bit of .htaccess code to very basically protect PDFs on a client’s site from being downloaded by people who aren’t logged into WordPress. I thought I’d share the code, specifically to highlight the way to detect if someone’s logged into WP through Apache’s directives.

Permalink | Posted in Apache, security, WordPress | 4 comments » |

View complete archives »