WordCamp Cape Town 2014
It’s that time of year again – time for WordCamp Cape Town. This year’s WordCamp is going to be at the same venue as last year, but it will have more depth and more enriching content that previous years.
Author: Hugh Lashbrooke
Head of Community Education at Automattic, working in the WordPress community. Blogging about community management, open-source and WordPress.
Better bbPress admin icons
After recently training a client on how to use their new bbPress-powered site, I discovered that the default admin menu icons for bbPress are not very intuitive and the client found them slightly confusing, so I improved them.
WordPress: Upload user-submitted files from the frontend
There are many use cases for allowing users to upload files from the frontend, but the trick is making sure the file is uploaded and saved in the WordPress media…
A complete, versatile options page class for any WordPress plugin
Building an options page for a plugin can be a daunting prospect, so here’s a single class that will help you to create a versatile and user-friendly options page for your plugin that fits neatly into the WordPress dashboard.
WordPress: Add items to the ‘At a glance’ widget
The WordPress dashboard includes a handy widget that displays some brief information about your site at a glance – this snippet will show you how to add your own custom post types to that widget.
Snippet: Check for the latest WooCommerce version
With WooCommerce 2.1 having just been released, you’ll find that a number of functions that you have been using in your plugins and themes have now been deprecated in favour of better and more aptly named functions. Here is a simple function that checks if a site is running the specified version of WooCommerce or higher.
Developing the future of podcasting
Almost exactly a year ago I released Seriously Simple Podcasting, a podcasting plugin for WordPress that does exactly what it says on the tin – makes podcasting simple. Now the time has come for a massive overhaul of the code – the end result of which will be v2.0 of the plugin.
WordCamp Cape Town 2013
Since the beginning of the year, myself and a few of the guys from WooThemes have taken over the organising of the WordPress Cape Town community. Over the course of the year we have organised two local meetups – one for WordPress’ 10th Anniversary and the other just because we thought the community deserved it. Next up is none other than WordCamp Cape Town 2013!
WordPress: Random post order with correct pagination
If you have ever wanted to display your posts (or a post type archive) in a random order, but keep the pagination consistent then here’s your solution.
Storing snippets in Gist
I’ve been using Gist for a while, but only as a way to quickly share snippets of code with people. I’ve now decided to change that a bit and make better use of the service – as a result I have added all my snippets from this blog to my Gists and I will continue to add even the smallest snippets as I develop them.
Easily generate a month select box in PHP
Having a drop down menu for month selection is a relatively common need, but it can be a pain to write from scratch each time. Here’s a short snippet that will generate a select input (drop down menu) for all 12 months of the year – the option values will be the month numbers with leading zeros.
Seriously Simple Podcasting – User Survey
Since my podcasting plugin, Seriously Simple Podcasting, has become relatively popular I am doing some customer research for the next steps for the plugin’s development. Any answers you can give will be invaluable.
A .gitignore file for multiple WordPress sites in one repo
I put together a .gitignore file that will exclude all WordPress core files from your repo so that only your themes and plugins will be uploaded – this works recursively, so that it will ignore all the copies of WordPress you have in the sub-folders of the repo.
Code template for a WordPress plugin
I’ve been working on a lot of plugins lately – many for my work at WooThemes and a few for my personal projects – and over time I have developed a standard code base from which I start any of my new plugins. I decided to share that code base here.
Simple animated scroll for jQuery
If you use links to navigate to other elements on the same page, it’s generally a good idea to animate the scrolling so you don’t disorientate your users. This snippet will make that easy for you.
Totally simple jQuery method for selecting all checkboxes in a form
It’s a common problem with a dozen different solutions – if you’ve ever needed to add a ‘select all’ checkbox to a form in order to make your users’ lives easier then you’ll have searched for a simple way to do it. If you’re using jQuery here’s a very simple method.