Wordpress has a cool feature that allows you to create shortcodes to put in your posts like [bartag foo="foo-value"] and then process it using a PHP function.   Go to the codex page and check it out, it’s pretty straight forward.  Next go grab you a copy of CodeIgniter, crack it open and go to system/helpers/url_helper.php.  Snatch the safe_mailto() function and paste it in your code.  I put mine in the functions page in the theme for quickness but you can put it in a plug in if your up for all that.  Now underneath the CI function ,  write you a function that takes the attributes and content from the shortcode and then call the safe_mailto() function.  You should end up with something like below. That’s it! Now you can have protected and obfuscated email links in your posts!

//The CodeIgniter function
if ( ! function_exists('safe_mailto'))
{
	function safe_mailto($email, $title = '', $attributes = '')
	{
		// The actual function. You get the drift...
	}
}

// The function to process the shortcode
function maillink_func($atts, $content = null) {
	extract(shortcode_atts(array(
		'email' => get_bloginfo ( 'admin_email' ),
                'title' => null,
                'class' => null,
                'id'    => null,
                'style' => null
                //add more attributes if you want them, but add below too!
	), $atts));

        return safe_mailto($email, $content, array(
                'class' => $class,
                'id' => $id,
                'style' => $style
            ));
}

//Register the shortcode with Wordpress
add_shortcode('maillink', 'maillink_func');

// Usage
// [maillink email="someone@somewhere.com"]
// [maillink email="someone@somewhere.com" class="link"]Email Me![/maillink]

So yea I changed the site again but for the better I think (ugh here we go again).  No I won’t  go all into it with my reasons for this and that, just that I like it, I think it will work for me based on what I’m doing now a days,  and we’ll just see how the whole thing goes.

Thanks for dropping by!

Before I start, credit must be given for my inspiration to the Rapyd dev team. A lot of where I got this process from was due to how Rapyd has it’s samples set up in it’s distribution. The Rapyd samples pre-load a view filled with css and then plants it inline into the final view that is outputted. I liked the idea of having my css organized with my views, but didn’t want it inline with the rest of the html. Here’s how linking it externally can simply be done…

First set up a controller, maybe say named ‘themes’, and inside that controller we will set up a ’style’ function. First in that style function were going to set the header and tell the browser that this will be a style sheet. It’s very important you do this, otherwise the browser should disregard it, or at least I know in Firefox it will. Next we’ll call the view containing the css.

class Themes extends Controller {
   function index () {
      //do something
   }

   function style() {
      $this->output->set_header("Content-type: text/css");
      $this->load->view('themes/style');
   }
}

Now we will just call this controller from our final output view, or however you have your views embedded, in a link statement in your head area like so…

<link href="http://mysite.com/themes/style" rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" />

An alternate way of doing this…

function style() {
   header("Content-type: text/css");
   echo $this->load->view('themes/style', null, true);
}

However this method seems a little redundant to just use only a part of CodeIgniter’s abilities. But it might show someone how to apply this method in an regular php application. Douglas Clifton has a good article at Digital Web Magazine on doing it the non-CodeIgniter “style”.

Of course their is much more functionality you could add to your themes controller, but going into all that is beyond what I wanted to do here. Theme changing and adding dynamic variables within your ‘css’ views are just a start, and my meager little mind is thinking of many others, if I play with it more I’ll let ya know how it goes.