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...
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...
When I first started playing around with websites in the late nineties (wow, I feel old now) there wasn't much in the way of choice for development IDE's, there was really only Microsoft FrontPage and Macromedia (now Adobe) Dreamweaver. Being honest they weren't great, Dreamweaver's big claim to fame was that it generated cleaner html than FrontPage. Both where poor by today's standards, this was mainly because they where WYSIWYG editors, allowing even novices to create simple pages. When I went...
One of WordPress' greatest features is its ability for customization. There are many sites out there that could benefit greatly from these features. I've seen sites that sell cars and houses to simple music sites that could benefit from one specific customization function within WordPress, the register_post_type. The register_post_type function, as its name suggests allow the user (or theme) to add a new post type such as car, house or album. Once this post type has been registered, the user can...
This week we'll be extending WordPress by adding a custom shortcode. This shortcode will allow us to add a Google Map to a post using a simple piece of text in a post or page. Shortcodes are a quick and easy way to add functionality to a post in WordPress. They look something like this: [ gallery ids="1,2,3,4"] We'll also using PHP based Object Orientated Programming (OOP) to create our shortcode. We'll create a basic class, that has some static functions with in. We'll be using static methods because we...
This week in part 4 of creating our simple to-do application we'll be learning how to send email notifications/reminders. To do this we'll be using the PHP mail method and learning how to schedule repeatable tasks on Linux using cron. The equivalent process for Windows is the task scheduler and it is pretty self explanatory. WordPress has what it calls the wp-cron alternative, but it's use is limited as it requires someone to actually use the site. Cron ... Cron is the Unix/Linux schedule process, it...
So far we've created some basic PHP pages and added some simple authentication. Today we're going to going to build on that by adding database support. This will allow us to add proper authentication to our application and start saving tasks. I should also note that I am currently writing PHP in-line and not using functions (or object orientated PHP) I will tidy this up in the next tutorial and spend more time explaining it and what it's benefits are. Last week ... Last week we installed XAMPP, so you should...