Archive for the category ‘WordPress’

I’m finally moving my hosting away from MediaTemple.

They been a pretty good host in all, with a bunch of niggles of course. I think hosting is probably like FTP clients—you’re lucky if you find something half-decent, and you’ll never be satisfied.

The main reason for my dissatisfaction has been the slow server response times, which may be to do with the much-criticized Grid Service I’ve been on, but is probably also a lot to do with them being on the other side of the world. I’d been hankering to make the move closer to home (London) for a while. The straw that broke the camel’s back recently is a bit of blatantly terrible service that’s worth shouting about.

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My Custom Fields plugin is maturing. It’s running hassle-free on a couple of major client sites, so it’s out of beta. And the latest 0.6 version includes some major new features, including…

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I’ve just released a new version of my Lock Pages plugin for WordPress. I think it’s long overdue, and the plugin feels much more satisfactory to me now. Of course, any major revision brings the potential for new bugs, so do let me know about any glitches!

Improvements include:

• Updated check for page edit screen for WP 3
• Improved removal of Quick Edit functionality
• Removed edit permalink elements, slug meta box, parent drop-down, status and password fields for locked pages
• Added locking for page status and password protection
• Created POT file for translations
• Added Spanish translations (thanks to Javier Gómez Pose!)

You can install / upgrade via the WP plugins admin screen, or head over to the wordpress.org plugin repository.

My Custom Fields WordPress plugin recently added the ability to select files from the Media Library into custom fields. To provide this functionality, I created a separate plugin, which can also be used in other contexts, e.g. a theme settings page.

File Select is available download. Let me know how it works for you!

Someone asked in a comment here recently whether a WordPress plugin I’d posted could be adapted to work as theme code. The reasoning was that a client might deactivate a plugin, breaking some of the site’s functionality.

Careless clients clicking around in the admin interface can be a concern for a responsible developer. Of course, the primary way of limiting this kind of risk is to assign clients to appropriate roles. If the pre-defined roles don’t quite fit, Justin Tadlock’s excellent Members plugin can help you get it right.

But say you have a client to whom you want to give plugin activation / deactivation capabilities (so they can add new plugins themselves), but the site you’ve built includes certain plugins that really shouldn’t be deactivated. What then?

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So, I’ve got a WordPress site with a bunch of custom post types. On the archive pages for those posts, I have a taxonomy drop-down for a custom taxonomy called “theme” (I know, a slightly confusing label to use in WordPress, but that’s what it has to be). The idea is that you select the theme and the archive listing is filtered accordingly.

Now, for creating the drop-down I use get_terms. This has a hide_empty argument, which will omit terms that aren’t being used. The problem is, my “theme” taxonomy applies to all custom post types. So if a term is applied to any post anywhere, it is included, even if it’s not used at all for the post type being viewed, it appears in the drop-down. When you select it, you get a 404, because the request returns no posts.

How can I stay on the archive template and return a polite “There are no posts here for this theme”?

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I’ve just spent a bit of time wrangling with the issue of how to utilize the WordPress Media Library for custom fields. That is, if I have a custom post meta box (I’m using my custom fields plugin for this) into which I want people to put an image or a file, how can I get the popup overlay to work for me?
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There’s a new version of my custom fields WordPress plugin. Development got slowed to a halt and I’ve not included everything I wanted to in this release, but I’ve put it out because it contains a fix for a bug someone kindly found.

There’s a bunch of new features, which need thorough testing to iron out any further bugs. Check out the changelog in the readme.txt for more details.

Thanks to everyone using the plugin and reporting bugs. I’m aiming to get the plugin into good shape for the WP repository soon. It’ll probably stay in beta for a bit after that, but at least we’ll be able to auto-update :)

qTranslate is a fantastic plugin for WordPress that allows you to easily create mutlilingual sites. However, a project I’m working on only needs certain sections of the site to be translated.

So, I’ve tried creating a plugin that functions to selectively disable qTranslate’s functionality. But I’ve not succeeded—yet.

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