Entries tagged "WordPress"
Mysterious WordPress Update Causes the Number of Comments Link to Include the Post Title
With the recent WordPress upgrade, the links that show how many comments were made to the blog posts have changed. My template was originally designed to only show the number of comments, but now it also includes the post title. Let's take a quick look at what's causing the issue and what can be done in response. [Continue reading]
Lessons Learned: Outputting Shortcode and Plugin Results
If you look closely at the documentation for WordPress Shortcodes, there is a specific way to output content to the screen. Of course, this is a part of the documentation I skipped while developing my first plugin which lead to some baffling results. To help save you time, I wanted to share one last lesson learned from writing my plugin. [Continue reading]
Lessons Learned: How Not to Name Shortcode Attributes in WordPress
Developing my first WordPress plugin provided me with many learning opportunities. We already talked about the quicker way of uploading plugin files. In this post, I wanted to share the problem I had with shortcode arguments. Hopefully it will help you avoid the same issue. [Continue reading]
My First WordPress Plugin: Generates a Bulleted List of Clickable Blog Post Titles
I recently helped with a redesign that involved building a website with an out-of-the-box WordPress theme. The theme met our needs for the most part, but we were looking for something to dynamically generate an FAQ page from blog posts tagged with "FAQ". After trying some third-party plugins which didn't quite work for us and attempting to modify the theme files directly, I decided it was time to build my first WordPress plugin. [Continue reading]
Prevent Broken Links in WordPress Posts by Using Root-Relative Links
WordPress does many magical things behind the scenes. HTML tags needed to display a blog post are added for us. Posts tagged with keywords are automatically connected to other posts with the same tag. Side bar widgets generate lists of recent posts, most used tags, etc. with no intervention from us. We just need to write the posts, add the tags, activate the widgets and WordPress does the rest. With all these automation features, I have overlooked a potential flaw in the system—they use absolute links. [Continue reading]
Thoughts from the CyberScorpion.com Redesign
It's finally done. The CyberScorpion Bytes blog has been redesigned! When switching to WordPress a few years back, a pre-made theme was chosen for the design so I could hit the ground running with the blog. It was never the plan to stick with that template. I wanted to build my own. Now that it's done, I wanted to share some thoughts. [Continue reading]
How to Disable (or Modify) the Revision History in WordPress
For some reason, WordPress maintains the revision history for posts in the same database as the live posts. The issue with having the revision posts in the database is the extra overhead. Whenever the website queries the database, it needs to work with all records—including the revisions. Of course, this will unlikely be a problem for most blogs. But for those who prefer to keep websites running as efficiently as possible, the number of revisions can be limited…or stopped altogether. [Continue reading]
Using the Date Format Chosen by the User Instead of Hard-Coding Your Own in the WordPress Theme
WordPress has a setting under the admin panel where blog owners can indicate how dates should be displayed for blog posts and comments made to the blog. The setting isn't very useful though when the date format is hard coded into the theme. Instead of making users edit the theme files, let's take advantage of the WordPress setting. [Continue reading]
Easy Way for Comment Spam to Bypass the WordPress Moderation Queue
Did you know that spammers could bypass the WordPress comment moderation feature? If your blog is set to automatically post comments from visitors who have previously approved comments, you could be at risk. However, there is a quick fix to the issue. [Continue reading]
You Haven’t Even Started Blogging and You Already Have a Typo
There are a number of blogs out there which list dates incorrectly. It doesn't help that many of the templates built for popular blogging platforms like WordPress, display the dates incorrectly be default. If you maintain a blog, develop templates, or have ever typed out the date; please stop writing them as October 3rd, 2011. [Continue reading]
