Archive for October 2009

I’m currently working on a client’s WordPress site where there’s quite a few bits of custom functionality in my custom theme that rely on them entering values for posts or pages using WP’s custom fields.

Custom fields are really flexible. However, they’re not perfectly user-friendly. For instance, if no post or page is currently using a custom field that you’ve built functionality on, the user has to enter the name as well as the value of the field the first time it’s used. The drop-down of field names is dynamically gathered from the fields currently in use. Also, sometimes you want to make things easier for clients by having inline tips, and inputs that suit the field (e.g. a checkbox or select drop-down instead of just a plain text entry).

So, I set about piecing together a way to take over the Custom Fields meta box…

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There’s a few posts around that reveal a nifty use of the WP_User_Search class that’s part of WordPress’ core code, in order to select all users that have a specific role (the trick seems to have originated with John Kolbert).

But… WP_User_Search is only loaded when you’re inside the WP admin area. What about front-end template code?

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I’m very please to announce my first WordPress plugin! It’s called Lock Pages.

The idea came from work with various clients where certain pages started to get moved around, or just vanished. A page can “move” by having its parent page or the slug changed. Sometimes clients would delete a page and replace it with an updated version which had a slightly different slug.

Of course, many of these things just stem from usually harmless habits picked up from working with files on a computer. But on a website, you want to persist your URLs as long as possible. Unless absolutely necessary, pages should be kept with the same permalink, to avoid breaking links and to maximize PageRank and such like.

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There’s been a few posts round and about recently with people chipping in to make suggestions for WordPress plugins. Here’s my tuppence worth…

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Jeff Starr recently posted on ways to monitor PHP errors. For some reason his method using WordPress’s wp-config.php file didn’t work for me, but I got the .htaccess version working OK.

I thought I’d knock out some code to display the latest errors as a widget on the WordPress dashboard.

As usual, this code is provided “as is”—use as you will, and let me know about any problems, but I can’t really offer support to people who aren’t comfortable with WordPress theme development. If anyone finds the time to wrap this up into a user-friendly plugin, do let me know (likewise if there’s already a plugin that does this better—I’ve not looked properly!).

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