Snippets
Events Manager gives you a special placeholder that you can put into its templates, for inserting the event's "featured image" into lists and single event pages. If you want to insert a thumbnail, it uses the timthumb script to create one on the fly -- but it crops that thumbnail. Here's how to use the WordPress uncropped thumbnail (or any registered image size).
Events Manager is my events and bookings plugin of choice for WordPress, because it is very flexible, easy to integrate into a theme, and has hooks galore for customising to suit almost any requirement. Its location map doesn't offer a way to provide directions, however. So, here's how to replace the Events Manager locations map with WP Flexible Map and get a directions link on location pages.
Countless references on the web will tell you that you can access Unicode data in MySQL by setting the connection character set to utf8. Mostly, they tell you to execute the statement "set names 'utf8'" as the first statement in your connection. But when you are accessing MySQL from Classic ASP using the MySQL ODBC driver, you get an error: "SET NAMES not allowed by driver". Here's how you actually do it in Classic ASP.
A common requirement when building an online shop is to ask shoppers if they'd like to subscribe to shop's newsletter, so that they can be updated when new products and specials are available. WooCommerce doesn't come with such things as part of their standard checkout form, but with a few handy hooks, it's very easy to add.
There are times when things just go wrong. I had one of those times the other day. The pressure was on to deliver a project, and there were bits of PHP and CSS and JavaScript flying everywhere here at WebAware Central. And so it happened: I wiped the image attachment meta data in the WordPress database.
WordPress lets you store custom fields on your posts (and pages, and custom post types that allow it). However, it gives them to you in a rather inconvenient manner, with your values mixed in with its own special fields and any plugin's special fields, and with values in an array. Here's how to easily deal with that.
If you build fragments of HTML and JavaScript dynamically from browser script, you need to take care to encode any special characters in your strings. Building your HTML using DOM createElement() and createTextNode() is often better, but sometimes the better solution is to generate a block of HTML. Here's a couple of simple functions to do that, quickly.
WordPress comes with a few standard widgets, one of which is the Text widget. It's a fairly versatile widget that lets you add simple text or even HTML into any widget zone on your website. One thing it doesn't let you add is shortcodes. But it's very easy to allow the Text widget to accommodate shortcodes too.
The Opera browser persistently refuses to honour "return false" in an onclick handler, and is quite possibly the only web browser that does this. Because I don't usually add event handlers inline any more, I haven't noticed this defect until now, but it just bit me today.
Probably the best thing about WordPress, from my perspective as a developer, is its hooks. It has filter and action hooks for nearly everything, which means I can easily customise a WordPress website to meet pretty much any requirements thrown at me. Well, nearly any. Except widgets.
Here's a quick-and-dirty XSLT script for transforming a Microsoft Access XML schema file into an SQL table create statement. Being quick and dirty, you need to edit the resulting statement, but it will get you most of the way there.
The best thing about WordPress, besides the fact that nearly anyone can edit a website built with it, is hooks. Filter and action hooks allow developers like me to customise a WordPress website in myriad ways. Many good plugins provide hooks too. But inevitably, you'll run up against a problem where you'd like a plugin to have a hook that it just doesn't have. You can ask the plugin author nicely to add that hook, and maybe they'll add it sometime soon, maybe even on time for your deadline. But what if your deadline comes before they add it?