This is an absolute beginners tutorial on how to get yourself a local WordPress development environment set up on your Mac OS X with MAMP. Step by step (and with screenshots,) we’ll go through each part of the process — downloading and installing MAMP, basic MAMP configuration, creating a MySQL user and database, getting WordPress up and running, and in the end I’ll share some...
Stop SOPA Ribbon for WordPress
Stop SOPA Ribbon for your WordPress site or network. A plugin I made in a few minutes to show my support. It works with Multisite if you need a ribbon throughout the whole network. Learn more about SOPA on the Stop American Censorship website or read the Help Stop SOPA/PIPA in the WordPress news section.
Diet Pills, SEO, and Theme Frameworks by Andy Stratton
Andy Stratton gave a presentation called “Diet Pills, SEO, and Theme Frameworks” at WordCamp Chicago 2011. He talked about WordPress themes, frameworks, marketplaces and a lot of related misconceptions, and some of the many problems with commercial themes including SEO, customization, child themes. Here’s a quote if you haven’t got time to watch the whole video. There are...
About the "Lock in Effect" in WordPress Themes and Plugins
The WordPress themes and plugins market is huge these days. With all that wide range of products available, we sometimes stumble into situations where we’d like to change our mind, i.e. use a different plugin or theme instead of the one we’re currently using. Eventually we figure out that it’s incredibly tough to replace some of the themes and plugins, because as soon as...
Akismet Comment Spam Chart
I turned commenting off on articles older than 14 days a copule of months ago and here’s the impact shown by Akismet’s stats page. No wonder why I stopped receiving a bunch of “please moderate” e-mails every day.
How to Get the Current URL in WordPress
Here’s a quick tip! I was wandering around the web for the perfect solution to retrieve the current URL in a WordPress theme or plugin. I found a bunch of solutions for PHP, but not directly related to WordPress so I thought there has to be an easier way, and after a few hours of examining with global variables seems like I found it. global $wp; $current_url = add_query_arg( $wp...
Change the WordPress Core to Django
I couldn’t not post this tweet by Andrew Nacin. Seriously, why not change the WordPress core to Django? ;) Perhaps the author of the quote meant a Django-style templating engine, which is indeed cool and quite popular too. Oh well, that was a good laugh, thank you!
How To: Add Taxonomies to Your Custom Post Types in WordPress
Custom Post Types are not new to WordPress, they’ve been around since version 3.0 and have really changed the “WordPress as a CMS” game ever since. Custom taxonomies though, have been around even earlier and are used to group your posts and custom post types. This post will give you a short insight on taxonomies in WordPress and show you how to add different taxonomies to...
Plugins vs. "… Without a Plugin"
Posted this yesterday on Twitter, thanks for all the retweet and fave love! I started seeing quite a lot of tweets and posts on how to do things “without a plugin” in WordPress and 99% of them involve writing snippets in your theme’s functions.php file. Now, how does that differ from writing a plugin? It’s more difficult to manage and maintain. If something stops working...
Protected Meta in WordPress
I was doing a few tweaks to the Twitter Embed plugin earlier today and found out that authors that access to the custom fields interface could exploit them to print unfiltered HTML. This happened because I cached the HTML retrieved from the Twitter API in an unprotected meta field to the post. The easiest workaround was to add an underscore prefix to the meta key, so my_meta_key for example...