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TIL (thanks Ali) the escape functions finish up by applying a filter to the safe output, making them unsafe again.

 

The WordPress community is very excited about raising the minimum PHP version to one that's longer supported. ;-)

 

Hide Trackbacks 1.1.3

Hide Trackbacks is a WordPress plugin that hides pingbacks and trackbacks from your website comments.

I’ve updated the plugin to indicate it works correctly with WordPress 4.9.9 and earlier. It's now also up to PHP 7.2 compatible, and has a number of small fixes to improve code legibility and alignment with the WordPress Coding Standards.

 

Transitioning to Gutenberg

The WordPress Project says:

The Classic Editor plugin will be officially supported until December 31, 2021.

[...]

Since the Classic Editor plugin is central in this transition, we are considering including it with upgrades to WordPress 5.0.

In the context of my professional work with WordPress it would be beneficial to see the Classic Editor plugin be included by default into the installation package. This would signal to plugin and theme developers that we are in a transition phase but supporting the existing installations, until Gutenberg is more fully accepted by the wider community. Not doing do could put pressure on smaller developers to just test their updates for Gutenberg only, resulting in a lot of broken sites or a security nightmare where people won’t be able to update to the latet versions of WordPress or their plugins until the teams and processes are ready.

 

Hide Trackbacks 1.1.1

Hide Trackbacks is a WordPress plugin that hides pingbacks and trackbacks from your website comments.

I've updated the plugin to indicate it works correctly with WordPress 4.9 and earlier.

 

Embedding a ted.com video by pasting the URL into a WordPress post means the whole video loads (33mb!) on pageload! Great videos, bad service.<p>#status </p>

 

@manton on iOS I can only post after attaching my WordPress blog even though I have a micro blog via Kickstarter?<p>#status </p>

 

WordPress blogging from my micro.blog service! Yes.<p>#status </p>

 

I'm really impressed with the @WordPress theme customisation UI from within the product.<p>#status </p>

 

<a href="https://wordpress.org/plugins/character-countdown/">Character Countdown</a> is a handy WordPress plugin if you want to post status updates from your site to Twitter.<p>#status </p>

 

Hide Trackbacks works with WordPress 4.2

Hide Trackbacks is a WordPress plugin that hides pingbacks and trackbacks from your website comments.

I've updated the plugin to indicate it works correctly with WordPress 4.2.

 

The more I think about modern blogging; the more I think the out of the box concept WordPress et al presents us is outdated.<p>#status </p>

 

Microblogging with WordPress and Twitter

Manton Reece has been having very interesting discussions about microblogging and content ownership recently. He's working on an unannounced project in this area and I've been following his progress.

A few days ago he wrote a post about Microblogging with Wordpress in which he describes most of the process of writing your status updates on your own blog first. As I had to adapt his process for it to work with my configuration of WordPress and as I am using Twitter instead of App.net I thought it would be useful to detail how I went about, based on Manton's write-up.

Requirements

  • A theme that supports post-formats.
  • an IFTTT and Twitter account.
  • A self-hosted WordPress installation, hosted using Apache.
  • (optionally) the DoNote app from IFTTT for your mobile device.

Step 1: Link a status updates feed to Twitter

In order to post only the status updates to twitter, we have to identify them in both WordPress and for IFTTT.

Create a dedicated category

In Wordpress, if you do not have a category for status updates, create a Snippets category (with the slug snippets). Note the category ID. In addition, create a new category called ifttt-status if you plan to post to Wordpresss from your mobile device later, as I did (this is a workaround to allow WordPress to convert from this category to the status post format).

Setup the RSS feed endpoints

With the category ID, we can now create a new feed by editing the .htaccess file in your WordPress installation directory, see my gist comment on manton's configuration. I had redirection issues with Manton's original setup so I amended it. What we do here is create two endpoints, one for posts without status updates (rss.xml); and one for only status updates (snippets.xml). We then point any requests to /feed (the default WordPress endpoint) to the first endpoint.

Update (26 June): I updated the gist comment after identifying issues in initial configuration. Please reread the gist if you had problems using the initial configuration.

Post new status updates to Twitter

Now create a new recipe that is triggered from the snippets RSS feed, with the action to post a tweet with the tweet text EntryContent.

You can now blog from WordPress to twitter (just leave the title empty).

Step 2: Post status updates from your mobile device

I'm using DoNote to post to IFTTT which then posts to WordPress.

Setup WordPress

Login to your WordPress blog and in the users section create a ifttt user with the role of Author (this allows the user to create posts).

Install the "IFTTT Post Formats & Post Types" plugin, it will convert posts with the ifttt-status category to the status post-format. It will also hide the ifttt-status category from showing up in your template for example.

Link DoNote to WordPress using IFTTT

Back in IFTTT, In the My Recipe's DoNote section, create a new recipe for WordPress (you might get asked to provide the WordPress username and password you created for this purpose) with the action to create a post with the following values:

  • Title: (leave empty)
  • Body: NoteText
  • Categories: Snippets,ifttt-status
  • Tags: (leave empty)
  • Post status: Publish immediately

You are not limited to using DoNote if there is a trigger for your service, and you are not limited to usin IFTTT at all if there are WordPress plugins for your status update service and WordPress support for your writing app, but these will require similar configuration as detailed in this post.

Hope this helps!

 

Switched to secure connection [updated]

I've switched this site to HTTPS, a secure connection, using a ssl proxy service provided for free by Cloudflare, for reasons. Let me know if you come across any issues.

For those using WordPress, changing the settings Site Address and WordPress Address to HTTPS may make your site unavailable. FYI, the solution I settled on is to install the WordPress HTTPS plugin. Then I set the Site Address to HTTPS. Finally, I cleared the cache. All is working fine now.

Update (06/02/15):
I've moved away from Cloudflare as my DNS provider and as a side-effect this means I'm no longer HTTPS for now. Sorry.

 

Tweet: My Hide Trackbacks #wordpress plugin is now compat...

My Hide Trackbacks plugin is now compatible with version 4.1 (wordpress.org/plugins/hide-t…) Keep referrers, stop spam comments.

 

Tweet: Trying to figure out how to download all my past t...

Trying to figure out how to download all my past tweets using Twitter Tools for

 

Creating a Wordpress redirection page

This is the simplest way to add a page redirection feature to your WordPress theme.

First, create a new theme file called redirect.php with the following contents:

<?php
/*
Template Name: Redirect
*/
the_post();
header('Location: ' . get_the_content());
die();

To create a new redirection page:

  1. New page, change the template to 'Redirect'
  2. Switch to HTML editing mode and put the url in the content area.

 

Release 1.1 - wordpress-basetheme

The aim for wordpress-basetheme is  a bare bones, well structured, easily customisable WordPress base theme.

You can build on it to speed up your own theme development. It's so minimal that I wouldn't recommend it as your final site theme. Instead it makes it trivial to apply your design to a WordPress blog, or to build out from this starting point. This site is build on top of the project for example.

Version 1.1 is now available
Download | View on GitHub

Changes:

  • updated styling and version
  • previous next buttons on singles
  • ie style targeting (unused), remove admin bar until supported, top nav
  • archives added and accessibility improvement
  • date permalinks
  • consistent titling
  • edit link in footer, no home
  • moved comments into its own template file
  • padding issue

Your feedback is welcome.

 

Wordpress Base Theme

I've released a first look at "Wordpress Base Theme", a bare bones base for your own themes:

  • DRY
  • KISS
  • easily customisable WordPress base theme.

You can build on this to speed up your own theme development.

 

WordPress Coding Standards

If you are looking for guidance on how how to format your code, you could do worse than to base it this coding standards styleguide.

via WordPress Coding Standards