Posts tagged: PHP
Display Gravatar & Autofill Fields for Previous Commenter
When someone comments on your site, cookies with the information the entered are saved to their computers. WordPress makes it easy to access that information. In fact, in your comments.php template they are ready-to-go PHP variables you can spit out anywhere you’d like. Let’s take a look.
Two Ways to Limit the Number of Posts without a Plugin
Let’s say your blog is set to display ten posts per page, as specified via the WordPress Admin under Settings ▸ Reading. Once set, ten posts will appear on your home page, archive pages, search results, and so on. In other words, if it isn’t a single-view page or an actual “page” page, you’re gonna get ten posts per page. It’s a global setting.
But what if you want to display different numbers of posts for different types of page views? For example, instead of showing just ten posts on your search-results pages, you may want to show a whole bunch, like maybe fifty or something. Perhaps you would also like to limit the number of posts displayed on your category archives to only five.
Redirect Mobile Users to a Mobile WordPress Theme
Let’s say you want to have a special theme for your WordPress site for mobile users. You don’t want to use a pre-canned solution or anything third-party, you just want to create and design the theme yourself. So what you need to happen is for the site to detect mobile users and server up an alternate theme instead. Here is how I might do it.
How to Import and Display Feeds in WordPress 2.8 and Beyond
Importing and displaying feeds in your WordPress themes is a great way to share additional content with your readers. Some good examples include:
Make an Infinite More-Posts Section
The goal here is to make a list of posts in the sidebar that show a number of recent posts. There will be a button you can click which will replaces those links to recent posts with older posts, AJAX style. You can keep clicking the button and keep getting older and older posts. On this site, we currently show 5 recent posts. So this little section shows the 5 posts after that, then clicking the button once will show 5 more older than that, and so on. This quick post outlines six steps to make it happen.
Global Custom Fields, Take Two
Just as I hoped, someone wrote in with a far nicer solution to my Global Custom Fields solution than I originally had. Big thanks to David Hollander for this.
Advanced WordPress Targeting with body_class_plus()
Since WordPress 2.8, we can target specific types of page views with CSS using the new body_class() tag. Designed for use within the <body></body> element, body_class() outputs various class attributes according to the current type of page view. This makes it easy to apply page-specific styling such as current-page navigation highlighting and other nifty CSS tricks.
Breadcrumbs in WordPress
Breadcrumbs are such a standard design pattern these days I find it surprising there isn’t a build in WordPress function for displaying one. But no matter, that’s what plugins are for. A quick Google search brings up a couple. Yoast has one, so you know that one is pretty good. The other popular one is the NavXT plugin, which I actually used recently on a project and can fully vouch for it.
3 Ways to Monitor PHP Errors
Close monitoring of your site’s PHP errors is crucial to operating a healthy, secure, and well-performing website. When left undetected, PHP errors can reduce performance, waste bandwidth, and leave your site vulnerable to malicious attack. PHP errors usually occur unpredictably and spontaneously, and may be triggered by even the slightest changes to your server configuration, database setup, or WordPress files. Even if your site appears to working properly on the surface, it may in fact be suffering from undetected PHP errors that should be fixed as soon as possible.
Commonly Useful Page Templates
I find on nearly every one of the many, many WordPress powered sites I take care of, I have at least a couple of special page templates that I set up and use frequently.
Display a Random Post (with AJAX Refresh)
I think you’ll be surprised at how ridiculously easy this is. We are going to leverage some serious smartness from both WordPress and from the JavaScript library jQuery.
How to Remove the WordPress Version Number
In this DigWP tutorial, we take a look at a the potential security risk inherent in displaying your site’s WordPress version number to anyone or anything that happens to stop by for a visit. For anyone who has been working on securing their WP-powered website, one of the most commonly seen security tips around the WordPress-o-Sphere has got to be this:
