I’ve been itching to get involved with another WordPress podcast for some time now. I had such a great time on the WordPress Weekly show with Jeffro that I knew it was only a matter of time until it happened. The show will be live streaming tonight (Wednesday) at 8pm EST. You can watch the show live on the WPCandy Stream page.

For more information on the show, and ways to participate, make sure you check out the WPCandy.com announcement post.

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I’ll be giving a WordPress for Beginners presentation, showing new WP users just how easy it is to write and manage content in WordPress. I’m also going to cover basic plugin and theme installation and recommendations.

This will be my first time attending this WordCamp, but I’ve heard great things about it. The event is being organized by one of my good WordPress friends John Hawkins. I’m really looking forward to seeing a lot of my West Coast WordPress friends this weekend!

If you plan on attending make sure to track me down and say hi!

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1. I’m Speaking at WordCamp San Francisco 2011 This Weekend!
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The initial talks about starting a SitePoint podcast actually began over a year before the first episode was released. It took a full year to organize, plan, prepare, and record the first show.

I’ve had an amazing time recording the show over the years. We recorded a live show at BlogWorld Expo in Las Vegas 2010. I did some really fun interviews with Matt Mullenweg (of WordPress), Andy Peatling (of BuddyPress), Roy Rubin (of Magento), and multiple SitePoint book authors. We even won the Podcast of the Year award in 2010 by .Net Magazine!

Aside from the great shows we’ve recorded over the years, what I’ll miss most is chatting with my friends every few weeks. I’ve developed a strong friendship with Patrick and Stephan over the past few years that, as Patrick put it, extends far beyond the show. It’s been fun watching all of us grow, personally and professionally, since the start of the show.

It’s going to be strange not being on the show, but as they say all good things must come to an end. I’m confident this isn’t the end of podcasting for me, just the end of this chapter of my podcasting career. Until the next chapter!

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I had the pleasure of organizing the event this year with Doug Stewart, Reed Gustow, and Anthony Bubel. The event was a huge success!

Saturday we had an amazing lineup of speakers covering four tracks and a classroom with all sorts of awesome WordPress related topics. Saturday ended with an epic after party at National Mechanics. Sunday we held a Developer Day with more hands on hacking, which is always a fun time!

Overall it was an awesome event and one I am extremely proud to have been a part of. The Philly WordPress Community really stepped up and helped put on an amazing event.

I gave a classroom style presentation titled “Creating Your First WordPress Plugin”. The slides are embedded below:

Be sure to check out the other great presentations on the official WordCamp Philly 2011 SlideShare group.

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1. WordCamp Philly 2010 Was A Huge Success!
2. WordCamp Philly is Tomorrow!
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Working on a client site recently I needed to customize how error messages were displayed in Gravity Forms. By default GF will display an error message above the form if any field values aren’t validated (ie a required field is left empty). On this particular website I wanted the error message to display in a simple JavaScript popup, instead of on the page. Below is the code I used to do just that:

add_filter( 'gform_validation_message', 'sw_gf_validation_message', 10, 2 );

function sw_gf_validation_message( $validation_message ) {

	//display error JS popup
	add_action( 'wp_footer', 'sw_gf_js_error' );

}

function sw_gf_js_error() {
	?>
	<script type="text/javascript">
		alert( "Please fill out all required fields indicated by a *" );
	</script>
	<?php
}

As you can see I’m using the gform_validation_message filter to customize how the error message is processed. The PHP variable $validation_message stores the original error message GF was going to display. In this example I didn’t use the original error message, but you could easily pass that to your JS popup if needed.

This is a pretty simple example of customizing the Gravity Forms error message. Enjoy!

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I’ll be a part of the Security Showdown panel with Mark Jaquith and Jon Cave. We’ll be performing live plugin security audits on submitted plugins and discussing best practices for securing your plugins and themes.

WordCamp SF is the biggest WordCamp of the year. It’s literally a who’s who of the WordPress Community and I can’t wait to be back this year!

If you plan on attending make sure you track me down and say hi, I might even have a couple items to give away! :)

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WordCamp Boston will be held on July 23rd-24th in Boston, MA. This year’s event looks to be jam packed with great speakers and sessions. The event will feature three tracks each day. On Saturday the speaker tracks will range from Development to Education and How-To. On Sunday the tracks will range from Advanced Development to Strategy and even some Design sessions.

WordCamp San Francisco will be held on August 12th-14th in San Francisco, CA. WordCamp SF really is the essential WordCamp of the year. The original WordCamp was held in SF in 2006 and has grown ever since. I had a blast last year and can’t wait to see all of my community friends again this year. I can only hope a dance off breaks out again at the after party!

I actually won’t be speaking at either event, which will be a change for me. I’m going to hang up my speaker hat until WordCamp Philly 2011 later this year. I do, however, plan on helping out at the Happiness Bar at both events.

If you plan on attending either event make sure you track me down and say hi! :)

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To add a link, or modify any of the existing action links, we’re going to use the manage_sites_action_links action filter in WordPress. This filter will allow us to modify the action links before they are displayed on the screen. This means you can add, or remove, any links you want.

Let’s look at the code:

add_filter( 'manage_sites_action_links', 'my_plugin_network_list_action', null, 2 );

function my_plugin_network_list_action( $actions, $blog_id ) {

    $actions = array_merge( $actions, array(
	'custom_link' => '<a href="'. network_admin_url( 'sites.php' ).'">My Custom Link</a>'
    ));

    return $actions;

}

First we call the manage_sites_action_links filter hook which executes our custom function my_plugin_network_list_action(). Our function accepts two parameters: The $actions array which contains all action links and the $blog_id which stores the site ID of the site we are hovering in the list.

To add a link we are going to use the PHP function array_merge() to merge our link into the array of existing links. In this example I added a link named “My Custom Link” which links to the Network Admin sites list. The final step is to return the $actions variable. Simple as that!

For more awesome WordPress plugin goodies check out my new book: Professional WordPress Plugin Development

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