WP Code Snippets

How To Use timthumb.php with Multi-sites

Luke America — Tue, 23 Aug 2011 03:04:33 +0000

Many themes for WordPress, particularly commercial and premium themes, make use of the handy timthumb.php utility for resizing images dynamically (on the fly). In recent weeks, major security flaws were discovered with the popular utility. These were promptly repaired, but it still didn't provide support for multi-site installations. So ... we've added this capability to the latest 2.8 version. Now, you have enhanced security ... plus you can use our minor update as a direct replacement (read more)

How to Get Stats & Charts from Alexa (Part 1)

Luke America — Tue, 21 Jun 2011 09:36:56 +0000

Alexa is a very popular and free service for ranking website traffic. They compute traffic statistics by analyzing the web usage of millions of browsers which have installed their proprietary add-ons and plug-ins. The most well-known of these is the Alexa Toolbar. But to webmasters and bloggers, Alexa's ranked measurements can be an important element in leveraging our site's popularity as a selling point to advertisers, sponsors, buyers, and readers. (read more)

Easy WordPress Plugin Development (Part 7)

Luke America — Thu, 16 Jun 2011 09:00:39 +0000

This is the seventh article in our plugin development tutorial series. In the last segment, we covered debugging basics, cross-browser testing, and WordPress version testing. You can access the linked table of contents for the entire series below. Today, we'll discuss additional files that you should include in your plugin's folder. Table of Contents for this Tutorial Toggle Article DetailsIntroduction: Plug-in Development OverviewOverview of the Steps Involved · Why You Should Use the WordPress Plug-in (read more)

How to Get Twitter User Data (Part 2)

Luke America — Mon, 13 Jun 2011 17:00:25 +0000

In the first article in this series, we presented background and usage information for A Shortcode To Get Twitter User Data. Today, we'll present the various PHP functions which make this happen. Be SURE to put ALL of them in your theme's functions.php file. We used separate functions so that you can easily utilize them in your own plugins and other WordPress extensions. You can also grab the entire collection of functions (read more)

How to Get Twitter User Data (Part 1)

Luke America — Sat, 11 Jun 2011 23:00:39 +0000

Twitter is THE microblogging social network. And, we're fortunate to have a vast array of twitter-related plugins for WordPress. But, I haven't found one yet that just grabs the user data for any account and makes it available as an easy shortcode implementation for a blog. That's exactly what we'll develop today. Plus, we'll offer several cool functions that you can utilize in plugins and other WordPress functions. We'll instantly grab more than (read more)

How to Target MailTo Email Clients

Luke America — Wed, 08 Jun 2011 16:36:33 +0000

Creating a basic mailto link is a fairly common HTML task. Most of us have implemented the basic format, but there are actually a few options available. Today, we'll review this mailto protocol ... and extend it with a PHP function. The HTML mailto standard automatically uses your visitor's default email client. So ... we'll also discuss how to specifically target your email links for the three most-used web-based email clients: gMail, (read more)

Celebrating World IPv6 Day

Luke America — Mon, 06 Jun 2011 19:41:42 +0000

In just a few hours, many websites will celebrate World IPv6 Day. The global-scale test flight of these new IP addresses starts June 8th, 2011 at Midnight, GMT ... and lasts for 24 hours. You can catch your local times here. Several well-known sites will be participating including Google, YouTube, Facebook, Yahoo!, and Akamai. Here's (read more)

Two Useful PHP Validation Functions

Luke America — Sat, 04 Jun 2011 11:16:34 +0000

Data validation is an important aspect of form processing. In this article we'll present two PHP functions for data validation which may be useful to WordPress plugin authors. These are: email validation with domain checking and url validation with domain checking. Both of these are rather comprehensive tests. Email Validation If all you want to do is verify that an email address has the correct syntax, you can use the WordPress function is_email(). It's in: (read more)

Easy WordPress Plugin Development (Part 6)

Luke America — Tue, 31 May 2011 14:33:40 +0000

This is the sixth article in our plugin development tutorial series. In the last segment, we covered extra features that your plugin can implement. You can access the linked table of contents for the entire series below. Today, we'll complete our plugin's functionality by reviewing testing techniques. Table of Contents for this Tutorial Toggle Article DetailsIntroduction: Plug-in Development OverviewOverview of the Steps Involved · Why You Should Use the WordPress Plug-in Directory · Official Plug-in (read more)

7 Cool, Undocumented WordPress Functions

Luke America — Sat, 28 May 2011 13:47:47 +0000

Recently, I was working on a plugin that needed to extract the first and last names of the site admin on which the plugin was activated. I was fairly confident that I'd have to query the database to extract the information, cross-referencing tables. However, I discovered a new, robust WordPress 3.1 function, get_users() that can be used to gather the needed data. After coding a wrapper around it, I then discovered three older functions (read more)