Create a custom Featured Image box
When building a UI for adding meta data to a post in WordPress it’s always best to stick to the WordPress styling as much as possible. So, if you’re adding an image…
Tag: Snippets
WordPress: Check if user role exists
As part of a recent Sensei update we added some custom capabilities to the editor role, but we discovered that some people have deleted that role from the database as a way of cleaning up unused data on their sites. This meant that our add_cap() calls were causing fatal errors for these sites. Here’s how we solved this problem for ourselves.
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.
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.
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.
WordPress: Add plugin settings link to Plugins page
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.
Find duplicate field values in MySQL
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.
WordPress: Add featured image to RSS feed
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).
Simple way to generate a random password in PHP
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.
Loop through each character in a string in PHP
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.
Making a semi-transparent background behind opaque text in CSS
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.