WordPress Design & Development Notes

For the past 4 years or so I have been sharing lessons I learn in my day-to-day work here at kevinleary.net/blog. Sharing my experiences working with WordPress and other open-source web technology is something that I truly enjoy.I am grateful for the fans I have gained, arguments I have sparked, and people I have helped. Sharing my knowledge freely to others that are willing to learn is my small attempt at giving back to the wonderful WordPress community. The team at Automattic, and the community of talented theme and plugin developers, has given far more to me than I can ever give to them.

Unrealistic Expectations

Over the years I’ve learned a few harsh truths about the WordPress community, and open-source communities in general, for that matter. There are hordes of people out there who have unrealistic expectations about what to expect when they receive something for free. WordPress is incredible software that has undoubtably taken thousands upon thousands of hours to develop.

Astonishingly this is provided to anyone free of charge at WordPress.org, yet there seem to be neverending criticisms about issues specific to individual environments, custom setups and out the box scenarios. It’s not uncommon to see “bug” reports in the support forums. Quite often these “bug” reports describe “missing” features. Read More

Lately I find myself re-using these handy bits of code in many of my WordPress themes. They will help you identify the name of the current template file being used in the front-end or admin. If you’re interested in checking against the current theme template then you should check out the core is_page_template() function.

In the Front-end

To get the name of the current theme template file name you need to intercept the template_include filter and save a new PHP global variable that can be referenced anywhere. Read More

WordPress has an extremely powerful, lesser known trick to easily let you view and edit a complete list of all the editable database settings for your site, including fields added by plugins. Enabling this menu for admin users is easy, just use the following code in your `functions.php` file. Read More

Thanks to the hard working developers at Automattic, and the many contributors to the WordPress plugin repository, the API’s, plugins, and development capabilities available to WordPress theme developers and website managers is tremendous.

Most of the work I do is customized theme and plugin development, and I take content management very seriously. Project after project I have recognized patterns in the tools, techniques and plugins I use time after time. I’ve crafted a list of resources and guidelines I typically follow during the course of a professional quality WordPress project. Read More

WordPress allows you to add a description, caption, title and link onto any media attachment. But what if you want to add custom fields to your images, video or audio files? This can be done by manipulating data with the attachment_fields_to_edit and attachment_fields_to_save filters. Read More

Tracking popular posts in WordPress often involves the use of a plugin. Many of the popular posts plugins out there come with tons of configurable options that you don’t need.

If you’re interested in a simple, bare bones method for tracking the popularity of a page, post or post type then perhaps this handy function will help you out.

Read More

Have you ever noticed that an unwanted popup tooltip appears when you hover over an image in WordPress? This is created by the title attribute that is automatically added for many image attachments (including post thumbnails). Removing this attribute from all of your images can be done with the following handy function.

/**
 * Remove image titles
 *
 * Remove the "title" attribute from all image attachments and functions
 * using the wp_get_attachment_image() function
 *
 * @param $attr An array of attributes for the <img />
 * @return $attr Filtered attributes without the title
 */
function remove_attachment_title_attr( $attr ) {
	unset($attr['title']);
 
	return $attr;
}
add_action('wp_get_attachment_image_attributes', 'remove_attachment_title_attr');

Just add it to your theme’s functions.php file.