Web development

Improvements to Church Admin Plugin

Posted on April 29, 2013

I’ve made some improvements to the Church Admin Plugin in v0.52 Main menu – vastly improved with drag and drop and close Rota management – the rota now uses autocomplete to store people in their job! You can also email the rota out to participants Sermons – can now be uploaded and podcasted – mosts
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Bulk WordPress Password Reset

Posted on March 26, 2013

Sometimes it is a good idea to reset all the passwords for your WordPress website and email the users to let them know their new password. Especially when you have been hacked – if you have been hacked, read about what to do My emergency password reset plugin will regenerate every user’s password and email
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Using Meta Boxes on Plugin Admin Pages

Posted on March 22, 2013

Meta Boxes are boxes that appear on the dashboard and for custom features on edit page/post pages. They can also be used in plugins too. Here’s how to create meta boxes on an admin page that will remember whether you have opened/closed them and the order you have dragged them into. They are relatively easy
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So your WordPress site has been hacked

Posted on February 5, 2013

Last night we were hacked by Turkish Jihadi’s who replaced our index.php, disabled Akismet and one other plugin. What do you do when that happens? Change your host password and FTP password immediately. Let the host what has happened and ask them to investigate how it happened. We have a plugin called Simple Login Log
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How to internationalise a wordpress plugin

Posted on January 23, 2013

If you want your plugin to have a greater reach why not internationalise it – hopefully people will soon start translating it for you! Here’s what to do! Step 1 set up the plugin to load the translation files with this code, changing “your-plugin-name” as needed.

//add localisation
$my_translator_domain   = 'your-plugin-name';
$my_translator_is_setup = 0;
function ca_loc_setup(){
  global $my_translator_domain, $my_translator_is_setup;
  if($my_translator_is_setup) {return;}
  load_plugin_textdomain( 'your-plugin-name', false, dirname( plugin_basename( __FILE__ ) ) . '/languages/' );
  $my_translator_is_setup = 0;
}
add_action('plugins_loaded','your-plugin-name');

//add localisation

$my_translator_domain = 'your-plugin-name';

$my_translator_is_setup = 0;

function ca_loc_setup(){

global $my_translator_domain, $my_translator_is_setup;

if($my_translator_is_setup) {return;}

load_plugin_textdomain( 'your-plugin-name', false, dirname( plugin_basename( __FILE__ ) ) . '/languages/' );

$my_translator_is_setup = 0;

}

add_action('plugins_loaded','your-plugin-name');

That means that wordpress will load the right
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Control how Facebook likes & Tweeted URLs look from WordPress

Posted on December 12, 2012

If you want to control what image and content Facebook uses when someone likes a post/page on your WordPress site, then add this snippet to your theme functions.php. Any Facebook likes will then use the featured image from that post or page. A similar thing can be done with Twitter – called Twitter cards –
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IMPORTANT Changes coming to Church_Admin Plugin

Posted on May 21, 2012

The next update for the Church Admin plugin will make an important change to the way people are stored. Up to now each database row has contained a family, which limits the usefulness of the plugin as churches get larger (Perhaps husband and wife are in different small groups, or a teenager is in a
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Using wp_editor() in WordPress 3.3

Posted on February 14, 2012

If you want that lovely editor (like the one I am writing in right now for this post) to appear in a plugin, here’s how…

$initial_data='What you want to appear in the text box initially';
$settings = array(
		'quicktags' => array('buttons' => 'em,strong,link',),
                'text_area_name'=>'extra_content',//name you want for the textarea
		'quicktags' => true,
		'tinymce' => true
	);
    $id = 'editor-test';//has to be lower case
    wp_editor($initial_data,$id,$settings);

$initial_data='What you want to appear in the text box initially';

$settings = array(

'quicktags' => array('buttons' => 'em,strong,link',),

'text_area_name'=>'extra_content',//name you want for the textarea

'quicktags' => true,

'tinymce' => true

);

$id = 'editor-test';//has to be lower case

wp_editor($initial_data,$id,$settings);

It really is that simple!

Speeding up WordPress

Posted on July 5, 2011

I recently rebuilt www.keepchickens.info on the WordPress platform with over 200 pages and it was slow to load. Very slow www.pingdom.com put it at between 9.4 secs and 15 secs – ouch. Consequently the hits went down 28.3% over the first month – even more ouch. The site was built around pages with no blog
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View Calendar by Categories

Posted on June 22, 2011

The calendar-list shortcode has two new features – limit to one category and number of weeks to show To get the shortcode code simply go to the category page on the Calendar admin page… Click on the “Category List” link on the calendar page and then simply select and copy the right shortcode for the
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Abundant life, church planting, web programming