Author: latz
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Yet another rant about bad WordPress plugin programming habits
in wordpressThe other day I came across a plugin that provided some useful functions to WordPress but is so badly coded that I can’t recommend it to anyone to use it. Though there are a lot of blog posts ranting about people “doing it wrong” this not be named plugin does so many things wrong in…
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My favorite Greasemonkey-Script
in bloggingGreasemonkey is a fine Firefox-Addon that allows you to execute some Javascript on the page to change the content or do other stuff to enhance the experience. My all-time favorite is Jasper’s Google Reader subscribe. What does it do? Every blog, almost every news site, and many other web sites provide RSS feeds. They are…
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The selectbox mystery of WordPress
in wordpressThe other day I wanted to use a selectbox with 5 elements in my plugin’s option page. No problem I thought: What everybody including me expects is something like this: But I actually got this: The mystery lies in the style sheet for the admin area: #wpcontent select { padding: 2px; height: 2em; font-size: 12px;…
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WordPress: Shorten title
in wordpressA frequently asked question in WordPress forum is how to shorten the title of a post to a predefined number of characters and to append a “…”. The problem is solved with a few lines of code: add_filter( ‘the_title’, ‘short_title’ ); function short_title( $title ) { $chars = 20; if ( strlen( $title ) >…
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Remove “by author” post section from Genesis themes
in wordpressAs I already wrote in How-to remove the author from your Twenty-Ten posts most blogs do not need the section “by author” since there is only one author. By default most Genesis themes contain this section (e.g. the prose theme): Let’s see how-to remove the author’s name from the post info.
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WordPress: Remove links from the_category()
in wordpressThe standard way to display the categories a post belongs to is to use the function the_category, e.g, the call the_category(‘, ‘); will output: link, photo, regular, video As you see the categories are automatically linked to their respective category pages which in most cases is the style needed. Nevertheless there may be situations where…
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WordPress plugins: Don’t hard code path names …almost never!
in wordpressThe other day I found a plugin claiming the following in its instructions: 1) Upload the entire my-cool-plugin folder to the /wp-content/plugins/ directory 2) DO NOT change the name of the my-cool-plugin folder […] What the heck? Why shouldn’t I change the name of the folder? The author didn’t actually hard code the plugin path…
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WordPress: Unified Login Error Messages
in wordpressIf you log-in to your WordPress blog and use an unregistered username the system will answer “ERROR: Invalid username. Lost your password?” and if you got your username right but not your password: “ERROR: The password you entered for the username admin is incorrect. Lost your password?” So you know independently if you used a…
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How-to remove the author from your Twenty-Ten posts
in wordpressThere are more than 1300 themes available in the official Theme Directory but many WordPress blogs are using the default theme Twenty Ten. The default header of a post looks like this: Besides the date of publications the author of the article is displayed but since most blogs are operated by single persons this information…
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HTML/PHP: Single and double quotes
in programmingIf PHP programmers are creating a link from variables often you can see the following code: echo ” . $linktext . ”; or ?>