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…
Why I moved comments to Disqus
Running a blog, even a low-volume out-of-the-way blog like mine, attracts spammers. It’s a simple fact of life. If you have comments turned on, you will get spam. There’s lots of ways to deal with that, but no way to stop it coming. Lately, it’s been hammering the server hosting my blog, so I decided to change how I was dealing with spam by essentially outsourcing most of the problem to Disqus.
Remove the WordPress post date filter on custom post type admin pages
WordPress custom post types can be very useful for storing all sorts of different types of data in WordPress — and I should really write a post about that some time. But the date a post was published, i.e. its post_date, isn’t important for many custom post types. So why have a drop-down list of dates to filter your custom posts types by if you don’t need it?
Stop CloudFlare Rocketscript breaking WordPress plugin scripts
CloudFlare offers a service called Rocketscript, which compresses, concatenates, and defers any JavaScript on your web pages. On some websites, it can make a significant difference to the apparent page load time, because it waits until the web browser has loaded the page before it loads and executes scripts. Of course, that sometimes means it breaks things! Fortunately, CloudFlare offers a way to avoid that, and it’s possible to use it on your WordPress plugin scripts.
sessionStorage with expiry time
Session storage is a very handy tool for caching content fragments retrieved via AJAX. Once we’ve pulled the content once, and stuffed it into session storage, we can access it again quickly without the overhead of a round trip to the server. But what if we want to limit the age of that content, so that it expires before it gets too stale?