Community Education Manager at Automattic
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
When building a plugin that has its own settings page, it’s often handy to create a link to the settings page straight from the Plugins list – this saves users the time it takes to find where exactly your plugin appears in the admin menu. Here is a simple code snippet that creates the settings link for you – all you need to do is tell it where to go.
I recently had a problem with a form submitted in WordPress returning a 404 error everytime even though it was submitting to an entirely valid URL. The form submission was managed via AJAX using jQuery.post(), so at first I assumed it was a Javascript problem – after a bit of testing, however, I discovered it was happening even if I submitted the form via PHP. In the end it turned out that the problem had nothing to do with Javascript, PHP or the server configuration, but was actually due to a restriction built into WordPress that isn’t immediately apparent.
I recently had to clean up a database table of user data because it had the same email addresses assigned to multiple users. The first step was putting together a query that pulled only the duplicate email addresses and also told me how many times they occurred – this simple query looked something like this.
In order to minimise the amount of plugins your site uses, here’s a simple function I use to show a post’s featured image in the RSS feed (something WordPress does not do by default).
When creating web apps, there’s often a need to generate a random password for your users. There are a number of ways to do this, but in needing to do this recently I came up with this very simple function that will generate a password (or other random string) of whatever length you wish.
The other day I was working on a project that required me to extract a numeric ID from the current page’s URL. The problem was that the ID could either be at the end of the URL string or in the middle, depending if there were any parameters added on or not. Here is how I worked around the problem by looping through each character of the string.
I recently learned a handy little trick for tracking what companies do with your email address when you sign up for their newsletters, or enter a competition, or they find some other way to sucker you in to giving them your personal information. The only requirement for being able to do this is to have your own domain.
When I receive the final PSDs from a designer I invariably want to reach through my computer and slap him for making my life difficult. With very few exceptions, there will almost always be at least one design element that is frustratingly hard to achieve using HTML and CSS (no matter how easy the designer may think it will be). The new properties available in CSS3 have reduced this frustration thankfully, but from time to time there are problems that crop up.
When working with CSS, I have constantly encountered one particular property that is grossly misused – the position property. If you check out the source of almost any website you will see plenty of elements with randomly defined position properties. I just thought I’d clear up some of the confusion, as understanding this property will make your life significantly easier when creating layouts.