When shoppers search a WordPress website, you want them to find products first before listing any articles and pages. And it’s surprisingly easy to achieve, with a simple filter hook.
Use Autoptimize effectively
Keeping your WordPress website fast can become pretty tricky once you start installing plugins and off-the-shelf themes. Everything seems to want to load at least one CSS stylesheet, and sometimes a dozen or more JavaScript script files. Some also inject great chunks of CSS and JavaScript into every page. Luckily, there’s the handy Autoptimize plugin to help you sort all of that out.
Set the tab size on GitHub, Gist, and Bitbucket
I indent with tabs. There, I said it. Viewing my code (and that of other tab indenters) on GitHub, Gist, or Bitbucket can be annoying because the default tab size in the browser is equivalent to 8 spaces. Modern browsers let you change that through CSS, and here’s some bookmarklets that do just that.
I twut
So I finally got a Twitter account. I figure everyone else is doing it so it must be nearly over, time to join. I’ll be twotting any new plugins and plugin updates there, so if you need notifications for those, please follow @webawareross. Just don’t expect to hear about which legumes I curried for breakfast (was borlotti beans today, will be split green peas tomorrow), what I’m listening to (Katalyst), or RT of k.rudd selfies.
Move Gravity Forms field labels above input fields
Gravity Forms has some nice compound fields to make it easy to accept things like names, addresses, and credit card details. One annoying thing it does, though, is put the labels for the input fields below them instead of above them. Here’s how to move Gravity Forms field labels above input fields where most people would expect them to be.
Tracking WordPress plugin compatibility with Trello
For a while now, I’ve been using the amazing Trello to help me keep track of various tasks. Sure, I use various bug trackers like Mantis and GitHub Issues too, but for some of the more high-level tasks it’s just easier with Trello. One job it’s particularly good at is helping me keep track of plugin compatibility testing.
Load Gravity Forms scripts for custom field
Gravity Forms is a very easy to use yet flexible tool for building forms in WordPress. It uses quite a bit of JavaScript and custom CSS, so it’s careful to only load its scripts and stylesheets when needed. But if you put a form into a custom field, e.g via Advanced Custom Fields, how will Gravity Forms know it needs to load them?
Remove register link from WordPress wp-login.php
I recently had to enable user registrations on a WordPress multisite, so that shops on that site could allow customers to register. I don’t want users to register any other way, only through specific applications on specific subsites. Enabling user registrations adds a “register” link to the wp-login.php script page. That invites trouble!
Order Form for WooCommerce
I have a new plugin, and it’s my first premium plugin (i.e. it’s not free!) — Order Form for WooCommerce. I’ve had it in the works since late last year when I wrote to meet some requirements for a client’s website, and it’s taken me until now (late April) to release it to the world at large. Please have a play with it on the demo site. US $25 US $40, cheap! :)
Remove SKU from WooCommerce front end
If you need to have SKUs on products in WooCommerce, but don’t want to show them on the front end, you can’t just untick an option in the WooCommerce settings: you can either have and show SKUs or not have them at all. So here’s a quick snippet that lets you have them, but remove them from the front end.
PHP really doesn’t do Unicode
I’ve heard many times that PHP doesn’t really do Unicode, or not properly. In seven years of working primarily in PHP, always in UTF-8, I’ve never really hit a problem, so I always figured it was something esoteric and unimportant for me. But already this year I’ve seen this problem twice, in different ways.
PDF to OCR in Linux
SWMBO has a pile of PDF documents to process and extract information from, and over 50 of them are scanned which means — NO COPY/PASTE! Unless we rescan with OCR of course. On Windows, she’d probably just use Acrobat, but on Linux…