digitalize.ca » WordPress

Co-Authors Plus v2.6

Mohammad Jangda — Tue, 27 Dec 2011 17:17:15 +0000

Co-Authors Plus v2.6: Search user’s display names, change byline order and more | danielbachhuber.

Thanks to Daniel, Co-Authors Plus, which I’ve long neglected, finally has an update with some long-overdue bug fixes and some sweet new features.

On $wpdb->prepare

Mohammad Jangda — Wed, 23 Nov 2011 19:30:08 +0000

If you do the following, you’re a terrible person:

$query = "SELECT ID from {$wpdb->posts} WHERE ID = %d";
$query = $wpdb->prepare( $query, $value );

There is absolutely no reason for prepare to be on a separate line.

Here’s how you do it the right way:

$query = $wpdb->prepare( "SELECT ID from {$wpdb->posts} WHERE ID = %d", $value );

One line. Simple, easy to read, and not confusing.

WordPress Distraction-Free Skin: Terminal/Matrix

Mohammad Jangda — Thu, 04 Aug 2011 17:21:23 +0000

Because all the cool kids want to feel like they’re writing posts in the Matrix. (Inspired by Zen)

View on Github

We are all WordPress

Mohammad Jangda — Thu, 17 Mar 2011 20:17:25 +0000

We all use it, we love it, and we want to learn it, teach others, and help WordPress become even better.

We are all WordPress.

– Jackie Dana

Dogfooding Edit Flow

Mohammad Jangda — Tue, 16 Nov 2010 22:38:50 +0000

Note: Most of the code here is specific to my environment on Webfaction, github and for use with WordPress plugins. You can make it work for other setups (i.e. different hosts, local gits, or even SVN) but will involve some tweaking.

Scott recently had a great idea to run the bleeding edge release of Edit Flow on our official site. I usually do this for most of my plugins before releasing, though, it’s a manual process: FTP up the latest code and give it a test run. That’s not fun.

Here’s a far better, automatized way to keep your repo up-to-date. You can either use cron or githooks. Pick your poison.

Step #1: Clone-ify

On the server, where Edit Flow would be installed, delete it (if it exists), and clone the github repo. (You have to install a git instance, if you don’t already have one.)

Step #2: Cron-ify

Set up a cron job to run every so often so that you don’t have to manually run “git pull” to stay up-to-date.

This job runs daily at 1:01am and does a git pull on the repo. On my site, the cron job is set to run daily; the Edit Flow site is set to update every couple of hours. Go with what works for you. Check out other options for cron jobs.

(Alternate) Step #2: Hook-ify

github gets POSTy

If you’re really adventurous, an update once (or even several) times a day isn’t enough for you. You want to live on the bleeding edge and update as soon changs are made! Thanks to githooks, you can do this fairly easily. Github takes it a step further and makes it even easier with Post-Receive URLs:

We’ll hit these URLs with POST requests when you push to us, passing along information about the push.

Here’s a quick-and-dirty PHP script I cooked up that works with github’s Post-Recieve URLs.

Upload this to your server and change the BASE_PATH, GIT_PATH, and $repository_paths to match your environment. On github, go to your Repo > Admin > Service Hooks > Post-Receive URLs and add the URL to the script. You can click on “Test Hook” to have github send you a test payload.

And you’ll probably want to delete the cron job, as that’s now redundant.

Log-ify

If you want to keep a log of what these scripts are doing behind-the-scenes for troubleshooting, just append the following to the cron job or Post-Receive script after the “git pull” call. This appends all output (errors and all) to a git.log file. Keep in mind that this file will grow over time, so prune early, prune often.

Closing Caveat: I am, by no means, an expert on this topic. I’ve cooked up something that works for me, and it may or may not be The Right Way. Use at your own discretion.

Edit Flow v0.6

Mohammad Jangda — Fri, 12 Nov 2010 17:01:49 +0000

We pushed out Edit Flow v0.6 last week. We’ve got a couple new features, cleanups, and bug fixes, all outlined on the official blog.

Excellent work by Scott, Andrew, and Daniel (and anyone and everyone else who’s helped us along the way) on getting this out the door.

More awesome coming soon, so stay tuned.

WordPress Plugin: Introducing Custom Metadata Manager

Mohammad Jangda — Mon, 08 Nov 2010 17:31:51 +0000

With the custom post type enhancements introduced in WordPress 3, site builders and plugins developers now have access to what you could call “dynamic scaffolding”. With a couple of lines of code, you can easily generate the necessary UIs to help users easily manage and create new types of content.

You can add new post types (e.g. Movies, Reviews, Products, Projects, etc.) and specify the features each should support (e.g. title, body, authors, revisions, etc.) . Beyond that, you can add use the ever-flexible hook and filter system to add your own features. Combine that with custom fields and you can add your own fields (so a “movie” post type can have new fields to add things like “release date”, “rating”, and so on) .

However the code involved in adding those additional fields can get cumbersome, especially when you start looking at lots of content types with numerous fields. Add in other object types like users and comments and you’re now looking at a huge code base that needs to be maintained, updated and so on.

Well, I’m making it easier.

Overview

Custom Metadata Manager introduces a very WordPress-like way of adding additional fields to your object types. The goal is to help you rapidly build familiar, intuitive interfaces for your users.

Consider this:

That one line of code kicks into gear some of that “dynamic scaffolding” magic I mentioned earlier. The Edit Post page now has a metabox with a text field. The plugin handles all the heavy-lifting for you behind-the-scenes, so that you can focus on more on building out and connecting your data rather than all the minor details. Checkit:

A magical new field with one line of code!

The API is similar to that used for registering custom post types and taxonomies so it should be familiar territory.

Object Types

But let’s not stop there. Let’s say I want comments and users to all have this magical new field. Let’s try something like this:

And we get the same field added for users and comments!

A magical new field for users with one line of code!

Note: I’ve omitted a screenshot for comments since it looks exactly the same as the posts screen.

Custom Metadata Manager supports fields for:

posts (built-in and any custom post types)
comments
users

If/when links and taxonomies get metadata support, I’ll add support for them as well.

Labels and Descriptions!

Avoid cryptic slug-like names and make it easy for users by assigning friendly labels and descriptions!

Groups

To avoid clutter on the Edit Post page, you can group sets of fields together.

Field Types

Text fields can get boring, so I’ve cooked in a number of different field types (just specify the field_type in the $args parameter and go!):

All sorts of different field types

Custom Callbacks

Notice that last one in the screenshot above? That’s using a custom display callback! You can override a bunch of different things (display callback, sanitize callback, etc.) to get even more control over the fields you add. That means you can do cool stuff like this:

Custom callbacks make custom fields even more fun!

Columns

We’ll throw in an easy way to add your fields to the Manage Post/User/Comments pages as well (in your $args, just set display_column to true). By default, the column will just the value of the field, but if you’ve got something complex going on, you can just as easily include a display_column_callback.

Columns made easy!

Example Code

I’ve included fairly detailed docs on Extend and for kicks, I’ve thrown in example code along with the plugin. (To see it in action, turn on WP_DEBUG.)

Why this plugin?

Don’t get me wrong: this isn’t anything revolutionary. Lots and lots and lots and lots have come before me. But my approach is probably the most “WordPress-like” there is (Bonus points to Easy Custom Fields which uses a code-based and very object-oriented approach).

The API is simple, intuitive and very flexible, providing lots of overrides if you don’t like the default functionality (or have specific use cases).

The plugin doesn’t use extra tables and stores all data in a WordPress native way, so you can use the standard get_metadata function to retrieve your custom data. That way you also don’t have to worry about losing your data should you choose to stop using this plugin.

(I have already deployed and used the plugin across a number of production sites and it’s working great and saving me significant amounts of time and code!)

Why a code-based approach instead of a UI?

Because most of the plugins I mentioned above do the UI thing (and some it really well!) and it’d be lame to just copy them. The code-based approach, though, more closely aligns with the existing WordPress approach of registering new types of content (post types, taxonomies, etc.).

This is also a developer feature, aimed towards site builders. And real developers don’t need UIs ;)

TODOs

What stuff am I cooking up for future versions?

Improved styling of rendered fields
Ability Pass in attributes for built-in fields (e.g. class, data-*, etc.)
Additional field types
Limit or exclude groups and fields for specific ids (e.g. show only on post id = 145)
Autosave support for fields on post types
Option to enqueue scripts and styles
Client- and server-side validation support
Add groups and fields to Quick Edit

—-

Download

Grab it from the WordPress Plugin Directory or just search for “Custom Metadata Manager” from the Plugin Manager within your WordPress install.

If you’ve read all the way through, thanks! Like what you see? Want more field types and features added? Just want say hi? Get in touch.

Plugin Update: Plugin Notes v1.1

Mohammad Jangda — Fri, 22 Oct 2010 17:01:47 +0000

I pushed out an update to Plugin Notes last week bumping up the version number to 1.1. Only three changes in this update:

Ability to add select HTML tags to notes, so you can now do cool stuff like the image above. Full list of allowed tags available here. (Thanks to Dave A. for the suggestion)
Fixed a bunch of PHP Error Notices that were popping up across the plugin (thanks to WP_DEBUG)
A small styling fix

Enjoy.

Plugin Update: Zen v1.1

Mohammad Jangda — Fri, 15 Oct 2010 19:00:56 +0000

I pushed up v1.1 of Zen yesterday. Not much changed in this new version. Key improvement is that the content textarea is now a bit bigger so things don’t look really disproportionate on larger resolutions.

I’ve also added 3 new themes:

Zen Sea & Sky

Zen Sunset

Zen Foiled Again (My new favourite)

Enjoy!

WordPress Tip: Hooking into Widget Save Callback

Mohammad Jangda — Tue, 14 Sep 2010 01:23:48 +0000

John Gadbois turned some code I gave him into short and useful write-up on how to hook into AJAX calls triggered when saving widgets. It makes use of jQuery’s Global AJAX event handlers, which allow for some very cool things, especially when you’re working with external libraries that use the jQuery AJAX methods. A future blog post will cover how plugins can use the ajaxSend event to hook into WordPress’ autosave.