planetOzh

How To: Per User Options in WordPress

Ozh — Mon, 28 Dec 2009 13:46:19 +0000

The essence of plugins is giving to WordPress users more control over their blog, that is, most of the time, more options. Typically, a plugin adds a page under the Settings menu, where you can modify the options (see this article on register_setting() for best practices).

But if you think about multi user blogs, it can make sense to implement per user options instead of "global" settings. And guess what? It's dead easy.
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Christmas Giveaway: Win a Copy of The Smashing Book

Ozh — Sat, 19 Dec 2009 00:14:13 +0000

Christmas is around the corner, so how about a little giveaway? I feel like offering one of my readers a copy of The Smashing Book (313 pages, paperback, full-color images on coated paper, seems like a pretty book indeed). Drooling yet? Enter the giveaway!
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How To Style Editor (Or Any Role) Comments in WordPress

Ozh — Mon, 16 Nov 2009 20:24:50 +0000

I've recently moved to WordPress an active community site which is run and moderated by several editors and administrators. Each post gets dozens of comments, and I wanted to highlight those made by staff members.

What not to do

If you've googled a bit for a solution on how to identify authors' or admins' comments, you've probably seen several explanations on how to implement this by comparing emails. Something like:

PLAIN TEXT

CODE:

if( $comment->comment_author_email == 'admin@blog.com' ) {
$class = 'admin';
}
?>

While this is sort of OK for a single author weblog, it's totally inconvenient and not scalable for a community site run by several editors and administrators: you would need to edit the template file whenever there's a new member in the staff, and nothing prevents an unlogged user from commenting using your well known email address.

So, what to do instead?
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Review of “WordPress Plugin Development: Beginner’s Guide”

Ozh — Thu, 29 Oct 2009 14:38:31 +0000

A few months ago (yeah, that long) I was asked by Packt Publishing if I would like to review a copy of WordPress Plugin Development: Beginner's Guide by Vladimir Prelovac. Needless to say, I thought this could be fun and interesting, so I jumped on the occasion, and finally found some time to read the book and share my thoughts about it.
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WordPress Quote Of The Day

Ozh — Fri, 23 Oct 2009 07:41:12 +0000

By Joel Fisher in the wp-hackers mailing list:

I in fact choose to use a coffeemaker to boil vegetables. Why?
Because if I used something else that just makes coffee, my client would ask me "Can it boil vegetables?".
WordPress is a powerful and flexible tool. Period.

I love this :)

YOURLS Was Cool? YOURLS 1.4 Is Awesome!

Ozh — Wed, 14 Oct 2009 19:33:15 +0000

I've finally released the much awaited and long overdue YOURLS version 1.4. It's still not perfect but there are no more blocking issue that I know of. This version brings a much better installer, an upgrader from version 1.3 of course, lots of code improvements, and, yum yum, stats (example). Honestly, bit.ly and such, you're not better any longer :)

Please pay attention to the included readme file, especially if you're upgrading from version 1.3 (and if so, please backup your database before upgrading)

While I'm at it, I'm sending out warm thanks to anyone who have filed issues and feedback regarding bugs, especially to a guy from Das Literatur-Café for detailed, fast and frequent reports.

If you encounter unexpected behavior, the best thing to do is file an issue so I can keep track of them easier than in blog comments here (of course, before file it please search in older and closed one to make sure it's not already there). Have fun shrinking your URLs!

WordPress Plugin Competition 2009: 43 Reviews

Ozh — Tue, 29 Sep 2009 09:37:15 +0000

As you may know already (and if you don't, dude, follow me) I was one of the judges in the WordPress Plugin Competition held by Weblogtoolscollections.

The podium for this year's comp has been finally revealed so, as promised, I'm now publishing the 43 reviews of the 43 contestant plugins. Warning: this is going to be a long one.

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The Definitive Guide To Using WordPress as a CMS

Ozh — Thu, 17 Sep 2009 06:26:13 +0000

Every now and then, here and there, you've seen people asking for tips or articles explaining how you really can use "wordpress as a cms". I've read most of these articles, and they all fail and miss the point, honestly.

So, without further ado, I'll reveal The Definitive Guide To Using WordPress as a CMS.
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Bye Bye Trackbacks

Ozh — Tue, 15 Sep 2009 20:13:31 +0000

Lately I realized that I absolutely don't care any longer about trackbacks. At the beginning, it was fun to get a notice every time someone would link to my blog, and I would religiously check their site and probably discovered cool blogs this way. But now? While I value comments, I just don't see the point of trackbacks any more.

I get too much of them to have the time to check them all
They make ugly [...]anchor links[...] in my comment moderation queue
A third (on my blog at least) are spam (mostly caught by Akismet hopefully)
And when they're not spam, 95% of the time they come from a website I can't understand because I don't speak that language

So, after several minutes of loud pondering, I've decided to simply turn them off on the whole site. For the record and if someone is wondering, besides turning the option off in Settings / Discussion, you need to send the following to MySQL:

PLAIN TEXT

CODE:

UPDATE `wp_posts` SET ping_status="closed";

Bye bye ping/track/whatever-backs!

Top 10 Most Common Coding Mistakes in WordPress Plugins

Ozh — Fri, 11 Sep 2009 17:31:17 +0000

Short intro for readers who don't follow me or this blog's feed: I've been a judge in the annual WordPress Plugin Competition, and as such I have reviewed a number of plugins. Read more about this.

As promised, I'm going to share a list of the most common mistakes, errors, misunderstandings, bad habits or wrong design decisions I've encountered while reviewing all these 43 plugins. Some are highly critical stuff (I've contacted 3 plugins authors after finding serious security holes in their plugin), some are more potential annoyances than real bugs, or are just causing a waste of server resources that could be avoided, but all have something in common: they're trivial to fix.

(Image stolen from Thom Holwerda without permission)

I've classified them in two parts: 10 bad code signs, plus a bonus with design decisions that suck. If you consider yourself a semi experienced coder or better, be sure to skip this article, you're not going to learn a thing :)

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planetOzh

How To: Per User Options in WordPress

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