Tom McFarlin

Software Engineering in Web Development, Backend Services, and More

Category: Projects (Page 26 of 39)

Posts introducing, updating, and covering various projects to which I’ve contributed or that I maintain.

Category Sticky Post

Category Sticky Post 1.2

April 8, 2013 / / 0 Comments

Last week, I release a relatively major update to Category Sticky Post. For those of you who have been reading this blog for some time, you know that I released the first version back in August of last year.

Since then, there are been several minor updates most of which were primary bug fixes or hot fixes.

Though this update is still a relatively minor update, it introduces a few things both behind-the-scenes and functionality-wise that should improve how it works especially with posts having multiple categories

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WordPress System Info

SysInfo For WordPress System Info

April 5, 2013 / / 0 Comments

One of the neat things about attending conferences like WordCamp Atlanta is that you get the opportunity to get some facetime with other people that you may typically only interact with via Twitter.

Case in point: This past WordCamp Atlanta, I had the pleasure of hanging out with Dougal Campbell, Brian Krogsgard, Dave Donaldson, Mike Schinkel, Jonathan Davis, James Dalman, and others.

But one of the neater things that happened was, over lunch, Dave happened to demo something that he had baked into a number of his Max Foundry products. Specifically, it was a WordPress system info tool specifically for helping him diagnose errors while handling support requests.

During a brief conversation, he mentioned that he was considering releasing it as its own plugin and placing it on GitHub.

I dug the idea.

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Including a WordPress Page Template in a Plugin

March 7, 2013 / / 0 Comments

Note that this plugin is just a working proof-of-concept. Do not use this in a production environment.

One of the challenges of working with templates within the context of WordPress plugin development is that there’s no easy way to bundle templates with your plugin and register them with WordPress.

Template are usually relegated to theme development. And rightly so, correct?

After all, page templates are used to provide layout and presentation which is precisely what themes are meant to provide.

But if you’re working on a larger, more complex plugin that introduces custom post types, page templates, and other advanced functionality then there may be a use case in which bundling templates with your plugin is necessary.

I’ve hit up against this exact issue in a recent project, so I thought I’d share the basics of how I solved the problem, and then provide an example plugin to make the process of registering page templates with WordPress themes a bit easier.

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Tag Sticky Post Updated To 1.2

March 1, 2013 / / 0 Comments

Earlier this week, I received a following forum notification in my inbox regarding Tag Sticky Post:

I’ve downloaded the plugin Tag Sticky Post that will allow me to stick posts depending on which tag I’m currently browsing in my blog. The tag that will be checked is from the post’s custom_field “tag_sticky_post”. So, if I go inside the post and set post “A” to stick on tag “1”, if I go to http://www.myblog.com/tag/1 the post “A” will be shown on the top with a custom css class (to highlight it). So far so good.

The problem is that the plugin can’t seem to work when I’m browsing archives for 2 tags at the same time, like the example I gave above:

Example: http://www.myblog.com/tag/tag1+tag2

You can view the entire post here.

This prompted an update to the plugin that I’ll discuss in more length in another post, but first note that this particular use case provided a perfect example of the type of enhancement that fit with the vision of the plugin.

So yesterday, I officially released Tag Sticky Post 1.2.

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