Chris K Designs

I marked this as a tip, but I think this should be more of a Security Notice. If you are using WordPress you have, with no doubt, installed a few plugins to enhance your site. In the initial setup process you probably spent quite a bit of time installed a number of plugins, deciding which ones to keep and which ones to deactivate.
Continue reading “WordPress Tip: Unused Plugins” »

As I have mentioned before, one of my favorite plugins for a WordPress site is W3 Total Cache. This plugin offers you the ability to user a myriad of caching options to best suit your needs. Well with WordPress 3.1, the Admin Bar was introduced where logged in users (administrators) get a gray bar with options to manage commonly used areas of the WP-Admin interface. Well, W3 Total Cache updated to use this menu for clearing your cache at any time.

W3 Total Cache adding options to the Admin Bar, brilliant!

I love this idea and I’m going to explore using this menu as a quick admin bar so I never need to visit the wp-admin dashboard if I so desire. I’m going to write up a ‘hack’ or possibly a quick plugin that will let us use this menu for making our administrative life easier as an admin.

Cheers!

One of the most common things I get asked about when talking about developing WordPress plugins is my tools and development environment. Now, developers have all kind of tools and setups that they feel is the ‘Best’ way to do things. It’s all a matter of opinion really. It all boils down to needing a few things though, an Integrated Development Environment (IDE) that you are comfortable with, an LAMP, MAMP, WAMP stack (Apache, MySQL, PHP), SVN, and a download of WordPress. I’ll go through these 1 by 1 and show you how to get setup.

First off, a good book on development with your desired platform is NEVER a bad thing to have. I recommend Professional WordPress Plugin Development. They just released a new version of it and it’s a fantastic resource.
Continue reading “How to Setup a Basic WordPress Development Environment” »

It’s been a while since a post was up here, but I’ll be honest, the month of January was a little bit crazy at my real job so my plugins and WordPress posts took a bit of a back burner to 14 hour days :/. Well, I’m back and I have a few things waiting to come out in updates to a few plugins that I hope to have coded and tested in the next few weeks. For now, a quick tip on XML-RPC.

First off, what is it?

XML-RPC is a remote procedure call (RPC) protocol which uses XML to encode its calls and HTTP as a transport mechanism. “XML-RPC” also refers generically to the use of XML for remote procedure call, independently of the specific protocol.

In short, it allows you to remotely manage the content of a website from outside of the websites framework. If you’ve ever been in the Settings menu and clicked on ‘Writing’ you might notice an option of “XML-RPC” option that allows for XML-RPC Enable the WordPress, Movable Type, MetaWeblog and Blogger XML-RPC publishing protocols.

So what does that all mean? Well, for you WordPress users with fancy smartphones or blog management software, that means you can use applications to publish to your site. This includes the WordPress mobile apps for iOS, Android, and BlackBerry. This will let you manage, create, and approve posts, pages, and comments while you are not at your computer. I use it for my comments. I hate getting emails about comments as it causes inbox clutter, instead I just let my phone check every 30 minutes or 1 hour for new comments. It also allows me to manage posts from other authors on one of my blogs. If you find a misspelling while on the go, no sweat, edit a post and save it to make that change live.

Yep, that’s right, you can now venture in to the scary world of ‘outside’ and still be able to manage your WordPress site. No what are you waiting for!? Go get some fresh air!

I had previously talked about using WordPress’ built in “Hooks” to make WordPress do your bidding through Plugins or Themes. Did you know it’s possible to create your own “Hooks” within your Theme or Plugin? You can create a hook by inserting the following line of code where you want to execute your function:

do_action( 'my_hook' );

Now you just need to supply your function to run at this hook juncture. This is typically done in a functions.php file or within a plugin you are writing:
Continue reading “WordPress Dev 101: Creating your own Hooks” »