SnippetsNextGEN Gallery is one of the easiest to use image gallery plugins for WordPress, so we now try to use it wherever a website needs to have user-managed sets of images: sliders/carousels, trade/media galleries, scenic galleries, you name it. We can do that easily because NextGEN allows you to create custom gallery templates.
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.
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.
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.
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?
Ok, so we're allowed to have one (1) size option for thumbnails in all galleries, and they can be either cropped square, or not. This is my only option? But what if I want to have a gallery page of all of the lovely staff for my clients website, and their photos have been sensibly taken in portrait format, I do NOT want the thumbnails for this gallery to be cropped, that would be just wrong. And then there is to be a page with a photo gallery of the staff picnic where people have enjoyed taking happy snaps in both landscape AND portrait formats because that is what suits, so I need these thumbnails cropped.
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.
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.