Most of you probably use the_date() or the_time() in WordPress themes and plugins to display when a specific page, post was published. If you post a high volume of articles each day it may be beneficial to follow a design pattern similar to TechCrunch or Mashable to display the time a post was published in…
As a member of the UX design team you need to have a strong understanding of your customers/users and their specific goals and incentives. With this understanding of your user you can craft user personas to dig into to the what, why, and how. What is a user persona? A persona is a detailed description…
During development today I received a nasty Checksum mismatch Subversion (SVN) error during the commit process in my editor, Coda. The Error svn: Checksum mismatch for ‘.svn/text-base/index.php.svn-base’; expected: ‘f8d45250f7df5561635854165862fdd8’, actual: ‘644f85c4befa671150c5c6ec5fad9885’ It seems that Coda had changed the Subversion (SVN) reference versions of some of my repository files, causing this file mismatch. The Solution The…
I do all of my WordPress development locally, and typically deploy that to a staging server, or sometimes a live server, using Beanstalk’s SVN deployment feature. I use a Mac for development, and MAMP Pro to run a localhost environment with multiple hosts (local.website1, localhost.website2, etc.). Occasionally I need to upgrade or install WordPress plugins…
This is a test page for the Responsive Video Embeds plugin. Re-size the browser and watch the videos automatically scale to fit the resolution. The resizing effect on this page can be a little bit choppy at times, mostly due to the fact that we’re loading and resizing far too many videos for a single…
During the process of migrating the DNS for Openviewpartners.com to Cloudflare we experienced some issues with the TimThumb image resizing script. Specifically, Cloudflare was blocking Timthumb from displaying images, resulting in broken links across the network. The Solution Cloudflare was incredibly responsive on Twitter, and discovered that the issue was solved by turning off the…
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.…
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…
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.
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…
Over the past year Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Google+, and other social media websites have continued to gain popularity around the web. Providing users with simple and easy ways to share content is now, without a question, a web design standard. Adding widgets to your website is easy, but the scripts provided by most major social…
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.
Allowing your users to share your content in the easiest, best way possible is important these days. With the help of Open Graph Protocol you can easily control the images, titles, descriptions and other metadata that is used by major social networks including Facebook, Twitter, Google Plus & LinkedIn.
All code samples have been moved to a GitHub Gist. 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…
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…