SnippetsWordPress 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?
I just ran into a problem reading XML data exported from a Microsoft Access database. For whatever reason, Access has written VT (vertical tab) characters in the XML, which PHP's XMLReader baulks at. To be able to handle that on each data load without requiring the user to edit their XML, I wrote a simple PHP stream filter that replaces each VT character with a LF (line feed).
I've built a few websites now in WordPress with some custom data that had to be integrated into Classic ASP websites. Here's how I did this using AJAX from VBScript.
I just went searching for a nice, simple example of populating a form from a database, using AJAX and JSON. I hope it's just that my Google juice is depleted after a hard week, but I couldn't easily find one. So I wrote one.
The wp-e-commerce shopping cart plugin lets you sort your products by a few different things: name (product title), price, date/time created... but it doesn't let you sort by category name and then product title. Here's what I just came up with for one client; it isn't generic, but other developers should be able to adapt it for their circumstances.
Role Scoper is a very handy WordPress plugin for websites that need to manage access to pages for a range of different user classes. But it has a nasty habit of getting in the way sometimes, and it can mess up the pagination of a custom WP_Query by changing the number of found posts (found_posts). Here's how to tell it to leave you alone!
It's quite common to use WordPress as the host for an online shop, and that often means having an order page that needs to be encrypted via SSL. You don't want your customers providing credit card details or other sensitive information over an unencrypted connection! But many WordPress plugins don't take SSL into account, and merrily load scripts and stylesheets without encryption. Here's a couple of ways to fix this problem.
The Events Manager plugin for WordPress is pretty flexible, allowing you to easily add custom attributes to your event posts. It also has conditional placeholders that allow you to display or hide information conditionally. There is a nice tutorial on the plugin website showing you how to add your own conditional placeholders. Lets bring this all together with a conditional placeholder for a custom attribute.