WordPress Archives

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 turn URLs into clickable links in the_content()

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The P2 theme has a nice feature built-in: the ability to turn URLs into clickable links on the fly. It does this by using a WordPress built-in function called make_clickable(). Here’s how we can use this function to make this feature available to any theme. The above code, once inserted into your child theme’s functions.php … Read more

How to enable the Author Bio Box in TwentyThirteen

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The TwentyThirteen theme has a built-in option to display an Author Bio Box underneath each post. It’s nicely formatted and can be implemented very easily – if only their authors would mention that this feature even exists, let alone how to activate it. To understand how it works, we need to take a peek at … Read more

How to hide WordPress Update Notifications with ZEN DASH

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In this episode I’ll show you how to hide and remove those (almost daily occurring) WordPress Update Notifications. I’ve built this functionality into a plugin I’ve written over 5 years ago called ZEN DASH. The plugin’s main purpose is to hide all kinds of clutter from the WordPress admin interface, such as unused tabs, dashboard … Read more

How to add something to the_content in WordPress using PHP

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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.

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How to bring back the date on Sticky Posts in TwentyThirteen

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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!

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How to bring back the Author Byline in TwentyThirteen

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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.

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How to fix the Disappearing Mobile Header in TwentyThirteen

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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.

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