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

With the release of WordPress 3.0 came one of the most sought after features from the WordPress Community, custom menus. Custom Menus allow users to create menus in a visual editor and, given their theme supports it, assign them to different types of pages or posts. Previously it was up to the theme developer to give you the option to change the navigation. As with anything in WordPress, there’s the basic functionality and then there’s taking it to the advanced level. Did you know there are advanced settings for your custom menus? You can alter the ‘target’ a menu open loads into, the CSS Class of this item, or even the ‘rel’ type? It’s all cleverly hidden from the everyday user in the ‘Screen Options’ item in the upper right corner of the Appearance -> Menus area of wp-admin.

Continue reading “Advanced WordPress Custom Menus” »

You may use WordPress every day to maintain your website and build your presence online, but did you know there is a dedicated team of developers, designers, and authors who build and maintain the core of WordPress? If you want to know who they are check out the About Page @ WordPress.org. WordPress also has a pretty substantial and helpful community of plugin developers, theme designers, bug reporters, and patch testers that work solely for the improvement of WordPress as a Content Management System. Contributing to the WordPress project can be done in many ways, but here are 5 ways that I think you can help improve WordPress. These are simply ways that don’t take much time, and I would suggest that if you found this product helpful, you try and contribute as much as possible to help improve the product that has made you successful.
Continue reading “5 Ways you can Contribute to WordPress” »

The ‘draft’ status is a feature in WordPress that I use heavily. When I get an idea for a topic, I will typically just write up a title to remind me I have something I want to write about. I went looking for a way to quickly access my drafts and stumbled upon ‘Quick Drafts Access‘.

This plugin adds a menu item under the ‘Pages’ and ‘Posts’ sidebar menu of the WordPress Admin interface, with a count of the number of drafts you currently have. As expected, clicking on this will bring you to your list of drafts. Quick, Simple, and meets my needs. I figured, it could probably help some of yours too.

A few things I think I’d like to see out of this useful plugin would be the ability show this menu to only a specified WordPress role(s), making posts and pages a separate option (would allow the roles option to be more useful), and for WordPress 3.2+ I’d like to see this in the Admin Bar list so I can quickly get to the drafts from anywhere on my site.

I think these three options would make the plugin even more useful to me than it already is. Go install it today if you are having to manage a number of drafts on your WordPress site.