Everyone knows the most popular WordPress plug-ins, but there are plenty of others out there that don't get the same level of press and are just as useful. Outside of the obvious ones, here's my alternate list of plug-ins that you should be using. Some of these do appear in the popular lists, but in general they're not near the first few pages. Advanced Excerpt ... This is quite an old plug-in, but it still works perfectly. It allows you easily customize the excerpt for posts. You can set the maximum number...
For the last few years I've run my own Subversion (SVN) server on either a spare box and more recently with a paid for server. This was mainly because my work was private and I was familiar with SVN, and I found that the TortoiseSVN client was excellent and easy to use. My needs have changed and evolved over the years, particularly in the last few months since I started these tutorials. So I have decided to start moving new projects and some of my tutorials to GitHub. I've been watching GitHub progress over the...
There are a few font's that I almost alway find myself using when it comes to WordPress themes, graphics or marketing materials. I tend to use them because they are clean, flexible, easy to read and alway enhance the end result. In no particular order they are: Open Sans Archive Bariol Blanch Nexa Print Clearly Manteka Open Sans ... Open Sans is a great font, it looks great in pretty much all media formats and comes in a range of different weights. I tend use it primarily for large blocks of text rather than...
Continuing on from last weeks introduction to OAuth 2.0 using the Twitter API, this week we're going to focus on an alternate implementation of OAuth 2.0 used in the LinkedIn API. This implementation requires that you manually authorize the application before you can get a token. This implementation is a more complex as it requires you to be re-directed to the authentication server, which then re-directs you back to your own site with the approved token. This allows LinkedIn to add additional permissions...
In my last tutorial we created a shortcode for displaying recent Tweets using the Twitter API and OAuth2.0. Having thought about it a bit more, I think that it would be quite handy to have it as a widget as well. It's actually very easy to turn any shortcode in to a widget, and this logic could be used for lots of different shortcodes. Getting Started ... First up, we'll need to grab the source code from the previous tutorial. Underneath our previous class we're going to get the sample class from the WordPress...
For the past many years Adobe has been the dominant video player on the market with their Flash video player, however sometimes you just want to try something different, and that is where Flowplayer entered the picture. Flowplayer allows you to quickly add a video player on your websites. After having tried it out I must admit this is probably one of the better alternatives currently available. Perhaps one of the biggest advantages Flowplayer has over other existing video players is the ease of use,...
Building on the last few WordPress related tutorials, this week we'll being using the Twitter API to display a users most recent tweets using a shortcode. Several of the existing tutorials and code examples out there use the old version of the API or the search API that do not require authentication. This API has been deprecated and been replaced with version 1.1. Although it still works, Twitter can disable it at any time. One of the main changes to the API with the introduction of the 1.1 API was the implementation...
One of the little known, but incredibly useful functions of WordPress is wp_cron. It allows you to schedule tasks for execution at a later time, the tasks can also be repeatable. It's not perfect and does have one serious problem, in that it is only executed while users are actually navigating the site. But on a popular site this won't make a difference, but it's still worth noting. Something I see regularly been asked for is the ability to disable commenting on or delete/hide older posts, generally for...