Chris K Designs

One of the things that I’ve learned throughout my years of software development is that if you can automate something, do it. Automation, when done correctly, saves time, creates less bugs, and bring consistency. As someone who sets up quite a few WordPress sites, one of the things I’ve come to loath is the installation process, settings updates, and installing plugins. Recently I started keeping a copy of the WordPress files with my most commonly used plugins already in the wp-content folder. This meant I just had to activate them once installation was done. But I wanted to take that a step further.

What if you could have your WordPress installation activate plugins, set your permalink structure, setup your timezone, default your comment settings, and get rid of the ‘Hello World’ and ‘Example Page’ entries?! Yeah, that might save you a few minutes. So here’s the trick.
Continue reading “Creating a custom WordPress Installation with default settings” »

I’ve pushed an update to the Better AdSense Targeting plugin for WordPress. Version 1.1 has been pushed to the WordPress Plugin Repository. This is a maintenance update to help improve your experience and results. As noted below, I did remove the option to target or ignore the ‘comments section’ due to the ability to accurately identify the comments loop 100% of the time. I hope to have a better way of doing this in the future. In this update are the following:

• Corrected issue when the loop is entered in the sidebar
• Now using the Shortcode API for the and tags in posts
• Removed option for Comments as there is not valid way to know the start/end of comments loop yet
• Added check for W3 Total Cache and warn to allow comments when minifying

It’s that time of year again, the WordPress Survey is up and waiting for your data. Please go supply some information about how you use WordPress. Before you get all scared about giving them information, here’s a little snippet about what it’s used for:

We hope that your answers can be beneficial to lots of people in the community (including you!). Results will be made available to all survey respondents and may be published at WordPress.org, on the WordPress Developer blog, and presented at WordCamps.

All data will be anonymized: no email addresses or IP addresses will be associated with published results.

Head on over today and give some information to help build a stronger product and community for WordPress.

WordPress 2011 Survey

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” »

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” »