SnippetsYet another programmer blogging about code
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?
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.
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?
WooCommerce uses HTML5 number fields for shop quantities, because they restrict the characters you can enter, and Safari on iPad/iPhone conveniently shows the number keyboard. Webkit and Opera/Presto add spinners (up/down arrows) to HTML5 number fields. WooCommerce also adds +/- buttons surrounding qty fields, because IE and Firefox don't add spinners. WooCommerce then uses CSS to hide the spinners on Webkit:
I've been using the fabulous WP Migrate DB Pro since June; it makes it really easy to duplicate the data from one WordPress website onto another, something that developers need to do frequently, and it handles the problems of moving serialised data from one server to another without breaking it. When pulling data from a production server to a development or test environment, it also (by design) replaces all your settings, which might mean that test emails go to your clients -- can anyone say, "Dear Rich Bastard?" Thankfully, it also offers a couple of save-your-backside solutions.
I struck an odd problem recently with some code using closures. I use closures extensively for WordPress filter and action hooks when building custom plugins and themes for websites, and all usually works well on any version of PHP from 5.3 up. But I was finding that my closures weren't being called on some PHP 5.4 websites. The problem was eAccelerator.
When integrating non-WordPress PHP software into WordPress, sometimes the two butt heads over little things; pagination is one such thing. WordPress likes to move pagination into the pretty URL and out of query parameters. If your non-WordPress software generates content with URLs that have page= in query parameters, that means a redirect each time such a URL is fetched. A little regular expression magic can help fix that, with some assembly required.
I previously wrote about adding your own custom JavaScript actions to the WP e-Commerce cart update event. Of course, things change, people change, hairstyles change, interest rates fluctuate, WP e-Commerce moves goalposts, so there is a new way to do this since version 3.8.11 came out.
Gravity Forms plus its PayPal add-on make for a very easy donations form (and so does my Gravity Forms eWAY add-on). But the PayPal item description is pretty formulaic, and probably doesn't represent the donation very well especially when there are multiple options. A simple filter hook with a few lines of code can easily fix that though.
As Debugging in WordPress explains, it's easy to get good debugging information into a debug.log file while developing WordPress plugins and themes. Unfortunately, it sets the PHP error reporting level to E_ALL, which includes E_STRICT and can throw so much noise into the log that you can't find the useful information. What we need is a way to turn on the debug log but specify the error reporting level.
WooCommerce is a great e-commerce plugin for WordPress. It has some very nice basic features, but it's also easy to customise and extend. On single product pages, you can add to cart with a quantity other than just one, and on the purchase page you can add to cart via AJAX without leaving the page. Wouldn't it be nice to add to cart with both quantity and AJAX?
Events Manager + Events Manager Pro is a great plugin team for taking bookings for events on WordPress websites. One hitch I've struck is that if you as webmaster need to edit a user, and the user hasn't filled in all their details, Events Manager Pro won't let you save without filling in all of its required fields (basically, address details). And of course, the chances are that you won't know what those fields should contain.