So, you’re a freelancer and you make WordPress powered websites for your clients, cool. Now how many times have you experienced them calling, emailing, texting, tweeting you asking for a core upgrade, plugin upgrade, theme fix or whatever? Well I’ve been experiencing that quite a lot, and that’s a reason to charge an extra monthly fee for support. And with this plugin …...
WordPress: Extending the Contact Form 7 Plugin
There are tonnes of good plugins for displaying contact forms on your WordPress blog, even a simple comment form without displaying the comments would do just fine, but let’s speak about one called Contact Form 7 written by Takayuki Miyoshi. I don’t think there’s a reason behind the number 7, perhaps it meant the year 2007, when Takayuki published the first version of his plugin...
WordPress 2.9: From a Developer's Point of View
Yup, WordPress 2.9 is finally out and I’ve seen a lot of people upgrade immediately – sweet thing to do, I did so too and hadn’t had any problems here (I’m not using too much plugins), then I switched over to the 3.0 branch, all good! The semi-square buttons in the admin interface are fixed by the way ;) Anyways, this post is not about my blog, but about something...
W3 Total Cache with Amazon S3 and CloudFront
A few days ago Frederick Townes, author of the W3 Total Cache for WordPress has released an update to this wonderful plugin, and yes, it now fully supports Amazon S3 and CloudFront as the Content Delivery Network! This is a major one for me as I manually upload most of the static assets to my CloudFront account which may take quite a lot of time. The W3 Total Cache plugin does that for you in...
WordPress: The wp_update_post Dates in Drafts
This one’s pretty tricky. If you’ve ever tried to update a post using the wp_update_post function with drafts or pending posts, you might have noticed that the post_date argument is ignored, instead the current date/time comes up. The post_date argument works only for published posts or during the publishing process. I looked into the WordPress core code, the wp_update_post function...
Loading jQuery from a CDN in WordPress
This may seem like an easy task to do but is quite tricky in WordPress. Using a CDN these days is very popular, cheap and helps speed up your website taking the load off your web server. I personally love Amazon CloudFront! The tips at Google Code suggest you serve all your static content from different domains, preferably ones without cookies, so CDNs are perfect. All the problem with WordPress...
Every Millisecond Counts: Page Speed for Firebug
Here’s a little video that we’ve seen at Arvind’s and Sreeram’s presentation about speeding up the web at the Google Developer Day 2009 conference in Moscow. Inspiring isn’t it? Arvind and Sreeram talked about a very nice plugin for Firefox (built upon Firebug) which is called Page Speed, developed and maintained by the Googlers. You may read more about the plugin on...
Adding mod_rewrite Rules to .htaccess in WordPress
This is all about the Twitter Friendly Links plugin I’ve been working on lately. You might have noticed some 404 issues in the comments section on the plugin page, this in most cases is due to caching fail. I wrote about this a while ago when I was working on W3 Total Cache compatibility where all I had to do is set the wp_query object’s is_404 variable to false. Then again, the other...
A List of Awesome WordPress Blogs to Follow
Whether you’re a WordPress expert, beginner or simply a blogger running WordPress, WordPress MU, BuddyPress or any others, here’s a little list of WordPress blogs that you should definitely follow (not mentioning the WordPress Development Blog and Matt Mullenweg’s Blog, and maybe #wordpress on Twitter, I assume you’re following them since your first ever WordPress...
WordPress: Customizing WP-Syntax
I noticed a little bug in the WP-Syntax plugin for WordPress – the line numbers don’t match when using code with comments, well at least in Firefox 3.5. I realized it was caused by the italics where the line-height increased by approximately 1 pixel. It’s not that bad when you have a couple of comments in the code, but 60 lines of code with around 10 lines of comments completely...