Category Archives: WordPress

Tips and Tricks on WordPress usage and development. I am very passionate about WordPress, but it doesn’t work just by itself – it needs a rich environment to live and breathe in.

If you’re after theme and plugin alterations, we have a category for that.

How to add something to the_content in WordPress using PHP

PHP, WordPress

Sometimes we need to add additional text or elements to the_content in WordPress. This can include links, icons, shout outs, author biographies, and so forth. I wanted to add an Apple Podcasts badge underneath each post in my podcast categories, adding a link to the badge, depending on the category. I’ll elaborate how I did this in a later post.

Right now, let’s have a look at how we can add elements to the content retrieved from WordPress. This should work independently of your theme, and no theme-file-hacking is necessary to accomplish this.

All we need to do is intercept the_content as it is requested, append our elements and return an amended version of the_content. Let’s see how this works.

Continue reading How to add something to the_content in WordPress using PHP →

How to bring back the date on Sticky Posts in TwentyThirteen

Themes, WordPress

By default, the TwentyThirteen theme suppresses the date byline when a post is marked as Sticky (in which case, it’ll always be displayed at the top of the posts list).

That’s usually great, because Sticky Posts are often timeless announcements, and the fact that they’re a year or two out of date doesn’t look as handsome as if the date byline would simply be removed. I like this as a default behaviour.

Here’s what a default sticky post looks like, without the date displayed:

But of course, every now and again you may want to break the rules and shake up the whole universe. I did this on my iOS Dev Diary recently, where an announcement post would have been very helpful with the date displayed (I didn’t intent to keep it there for long).

So how do we bring back the date on Sticky Posts in TwentyThirteen? Let’s find out!

Continue reading How to bring back the date on Sticky Posts in TwentyThirteen →

How to bring back the Author Byline in TwentyThirteen

Themes, WordPress

I could have sworn that when I started using Automattic’s TwentyThirteen theme over five years ago, it displayed an Author Byline in the meta description. That’s the text right underneath the title of a post, the same line that displays the post date, categories and tags.

I remember this because there were many an instance on which I had to hide that Author Byline, because on single author websites, crediting yourself over and over again just leads to a cluttered reading experience. Furthermore, if you have several tags and categories to display, the meta line can easily run over into a second line, adding to more clutter than we want to see.

Turns out that over time, the WordPress team have had a lot of feedback about the Author Byline, and it turns out that nine times out of ten, people just didn’t want to see it. So they decided to invisibilise it by default.

Thanks to David Greene and P. Chandra for bringing this to my attention.

Let’s take a look at two options that can bring it back in TwentyThirteen. Continue reading How to bring back the Author Byline in TwentyThirteen →

How to fix the Disappearing Mobile Header in TwentyThirteen

Themes, WordPress

I’ve recently changed themes on this site, from my own development of P2 Categories to Automattic’s TwentyThirteen. P2 Categories was not mobile friendly by default, and TwentyThirteen gives all my major notebook sites a cohesive look, making maintenance easier for me.

One thing I’ve noticed about TwentyThirteen is a small bug that’s been discussed several times around the web: when no header text elements are shown (under Appearance – Customise – Site Identity), a graphical header image disappears on mobile devices. Or more accurately, when the screen width changes to anything below 767 pixels.

If a site title and description are shown, the bug does not present itself, and instead the theme resizes the header image as well as the text without issues. That’s the behaviour I’m experiencing on both my 3D Dev Diary and my iOS Dev Diary.

I did some digging and found a suitable solution for this problem. Let me share it with you here.

Continue reading How to fix the Disappearing Mobile Header in TwentyThirteen →

WordPress 5.0 and Gutenberg: What does this mean for you

Podcast, WordPress

In this episode I’m explaining the implications of the new default text editor in WordPress 5.0. It’s called Gutenberg, named after the man who invented the printing press (and hence revolutionised how printed books were duplicated and distributed at the time).

I’ll also show you how to test drive the Gutenberg editor in WordPress 4.9 and earlier, and how to bring back the Classic Editor if Gutenberg is not for you.

I’m not going into details on how to use the new editor, this is just an explanation what Gutenberg means, where the change will happen and how to remedy your WordPress instance if you feel lost with it (like I did when I first tested it last week).

Podcast: Download (Duration: 9:22 — 8.6MB)

Catch this episode on my WP Guru Podcast:

How to share ebooks with WordPress (EPUB and MOBI files)

How To, WordPress, ,

If you’ve ever tried to upload an ebook in .MOBI or .EPUB format with the WordPress Media Uploader, you will have noticed an error message appear. Something along the lines of “Sorry, this file type is not permitted for security reasons”.

The only way then appears to be to ZIP the file and share it. That’s not a great experience for mobile users, who would simply like to click on a file and open it in an application such as iBooks or Kindle.

The solution to this puzzle lies in adding the required mime types to WordPress, so that these file types are allowed.

Let me show you how to do it in this article.

Continue reading How to share ebooks with WordPress (EPUB and MOBI files) →

How to increase the font size in Automattic's P2 Post Box

Themes, WordPress

Front page posting is what the P2 theme is all about – but I personally find the default font size on the front page a bit too small. Perhaps it’s my raging tired eyes. In every child theme I write for P2, I usually increase this – both for immediate posting, as well as for text editing (which also happens inline on the front page).

To do that, add the following to your style.css file:

This will address the font size for both inline editing as well as posting. I’ve chosen 1.3em because it integrates well into my other settings, but feel free to choose something larger or smaller (1.2em or 1.4em respectively). You can also choose a defined point size like 16px if you like.

To also address the text box for default comments, we can add this:

By default the font colour is black, so #555 tweaks it to be the dark grey that the rest of the P2 text has.

Happy hacking!

P2 Categories – Version 1.6 released

Themes, WordPress,

 

Last week I found some time to update my fork of Automattic’s P2 theme, aptly titled P2 Categories. In addition to all the greatness of P2, it’s been adding front-page category posting since 2013 (and hasn’t seen an update since then either).

Here’s what’s new in the latest version:

  • fixed the drop down menu, which was no longer working since Safari 10
  • rewrote the whole theme from scratch, based on P2 v1.5.8 (2016)
  • fixed a bug that would not show the correct number of posts in a category
  • added new p2-categories-functions.php file
  • updated a call to a deprecated WordPress function with wp_get_current_user()
  • fixed several PHP 7 deprecation warnings
  • updated class constructors to use __construct() methods
  • hunted down undocumented features and documented them
  • added a changelog file

P2 is no longer maintained by Automattic, except for dire security patches. I’ve noticed several deprecation notices, both for WordPesss 4.9 as well as PHP 7.2.1 and fixed those as well.

Get the latest version on GitHub

You can download the latest version of the theme over on the official GitHub Repository. Feel free to examine the code, tinker with amendmends and share with everyone who wants to use P2 with categories:

Why is this version not on WordPress?

I had submitted previous versions of P2 Categories to the WordPress repos too, and you can still download version 1.5 there. However, since 2013 web standards have become more strict, and there’s no way my theme would pass modern tests the theme team are using for new submissions. Sadly I’m not a web developer and it’ll be very difficult for me to update aspects of the theme I don’t fully understand.

Having said that, if you know how to pass modern web standard tests, feel free to send me a pull request on GitHub.

How to display categories in Automattic’s P2 Theme

Themes, WordPress

By default, Automattic’s phenomenal P2 theme does not support posting into categories from the front page, it only supports tags. My fork of the theme called P2 Categories does that though and lets you conveniently select a category from a drop down menu right there on the front page.

I wrote an update to it last week, and in so doing my article from 2013 came in handy that explains how to add this functionality to P2. Nothing much has changed in the source code, so it’s still relevant and accurate.

What the above article did not explain however was how to show which category a post belongs to. And because it’s still fresh in my  memory how to do this, I thought I’d better write it down for next time (and anyone who’s interested in how to do it).

Continue reading How to display categories in Automattic’s P2 Theme →

How to retrieve the total word count from all posts in WordPress

WordPress

Most of my own WordPress sites have been up for longer than a decade at the time of writing, and I was wondering how much I had written in that time.

Post count notwithstanding, I was interested in the total word count of my output in that period of time.

Here’s a small function that retrieves just that.

Word Count in Posts

Comments

But word count from posts is not all that a website adds up to: I have answered several thousand comments since then, and my answers may fill a whole book just by itself.

Here’s how to retrieve the comment word count for the current user:

To retrieve the total word count in all comments instead, we can do much the same thing by leaving out the user_id parameter in the above query. Subtracting the total word count from the current user word count would then reveal the comment word count that everybody else has left on a site.

Both functions work outside of The Loop.

You got to love statistics 🙂