Author: Tom (Page 334 of 430)

A Better WordPress Planet Plugin

May 24, 2013 / Tom / 0 Comments

Whenever you first install WordPress, one of the widgets that’s first displayed on the main page of the dashboard is the Other WordPress News widget (which actually used to be referred to as WordPress Planet). This widget has been present for as long as I can remember and is basically an aggregator of a number of different WordPress blogs.

Kinda cool, right?

If you’re someone who spends the majority of their time working in the WordPress dashboard, it’s a solid option for making sure that you don’t miss a beat of news when working with WordPress.

The thing, some have found that the feeds that populate the feed doesn’t do justice to the blogging ecosystem that exists within the WordPress blogging community. It’s not that the provided posts are bad, it’s just that they lack some of the new comers.

Enter A Better Planet.

Should a WordPress Plugin Change Post Content?

May 23, 2013 / Tom / 0 Comments

Yesterday, I released Markdown Code For WordPress – an extremely simple plugin that makes it easy to replace Markdown backticks (`) with inline code comments. As mentioned in the post, it scratches an itch of my own that I’ve opted to share just in case anyone else shares the same, y’know, itch.

In the comments, Konstantin left a great question that I felt was worth discussing further:

Why not carry out the search and replace once before the post is saved and not every time it is displayed?

I left a response in the comments:

I didn’t want to do prior to saving the post just in case people use it, opt to disable the plugin, and then want to go with some other markdown editor or some other plugin. This keeps the original tokens in take so they can do a search and replace for it.

In short, I’ve had less than stellar experiences (read: back feedback) when it comes to mucking with data prior to saving it with the database especially when users want to abandon the plugin.

But I thought this was a great question that warranted a deeper discuss and wanted to bring it up here to get the rest of opinions from fellow developers.

How To Build a WordPress Plugin – Frequently Asked Questions

May 23, 2013 / Tom / 0 Comments

In about a week, I’m going to be hosting the first course in my How To Build a WordPress Plugin live workshop over on Envato. I covered the details in a previous post. Since the post has gone live, I’ve received a number of emails, tweets, and comments about the course so I wanted provide somewhat of a Building a WordPress Plugin FAQ.

For the record, this page will be a growing record of questions that I’ve received about the course so bookmark it, check it out, and feel free to leave comments.

I’ll do what I can to keep this page as current as possible. Continue reading

Introducing Markdown Code For WordPress

May 22, 2013 / Tom / 0 Comments

For those who have been reading this blog for sometime, you know that I’m a fan of using lines of code in my posts.

I’m not referring to the larger code block (I use SyntaxHighlighter Evolved for that), but for code that exists in a single line much like this. The thing is, when I’m drafting my posts, I often place those strings in backticks – `like this` – and then go through and replace them code tags prior to publishing the post.

Tedious, right?

And I love Markdown as much as the developer, but I’m not ready to fully abandon the WordPress editor for it. Instead, I’d rather have just a few tags supported that I frequently use and be able to have them replaced automatically.

So I wrote a really simple plugin for doing just that: Markdown Code For WordPress.

Defining a Custom WordPress Menu Hook

May 21, 2013 / Tom / 0 Comments

When it comes to defining custom option pages, theme pages, menu pages, and submenu pages, the provided API makes this trivially easy; however, one of the less used aspects of these functions is the ability to define a custom WordPress menu hook.

For example, in a recent project I needed to do exactly that when adding a submenu to the WordPress Tools menu so I thought I’d share my process for doing exactly this.

Note that if you’re looking to add a submenu to a different WordPress menu, then there are a couple of options that are available. First and foremost, the most common option is to use add_submenu_page and then use tools.php as the parent slug as specified in the Codex.

But if you happen to be working with the Tools menu, then the add_management_page function is your best bet because it’s designed for exactly that.

So for this article, that’s what I’ll be using.