In this video I’ll show you how to fix an odd phenomenon I’d like to call “The Occasional White Screen of Death”. Here’s what happened:
Podcast: Download (Duration: 6:26 — 5.9MB)
How to disable JetPack nag messages in the WordPress Admin interface
I really like WordPress, and I really like JetPack. I use the plugin on many client websites, who usually have their own WordPress.com account, which is necessary to enable the plugin successfully. Most of them however choose not to sign up for a payment plan, which as of 2017 leads to (now rather annoyingly frequent) … Read more
How to fix the Visual Editor or Text Editor in WordPress when it’s not working
I had a weird phenomenon on a Multisite installation the other day. I can’t tell you with which update exactly it happened, as I only write a post on that site once every couple of months, but it must have been around the 4.7 or 4.8 upgrade. Here’s what was happening: I could log into … Read more
How to install a free SSL Certificate in Plesk Onyx
In this episode I’ll explain how to add a free SSL Certificate for web traffic in Plesk Onyx. First we’ll enable the Let’s Encrypt extension in Plesk, then we’ll create the certificate and prepare our subscription for SSL traffic. And finally, we’ll tweak two values in the WordPress database so that all requests will be … Read more
Upgrade Trouble: when WordPress is asking for FTP details, but there’s no FTP server on your system
I was working on a CentOS 7 server the other day that had a LAMP stack installed. It was used to host only a single instance of WordPress. Upgrading themes and plugins from the admin interface worked fine, but curiously, WordPress core upgrades did not. Instead, WordPress was asking for FTP details every time, which also … Read more
How to set WordPress Categories depending on the Post Title
I was working on a project the other day that required to determine which category a new post would go into, depending on the post title. This was important because posts were automatically acquired without the web interface, and in this workflow there was no way to pick a category other than the default. In … Read more
P2 Header Ad – Version 1.6 released
I’ve just released a new version of my P2 Header Ad plugin! It fixes a few issues I’ve come across in debug mode: styles are now loaded via wp_enqueue_scripts hook fixed a debug warning that assumed a constant rather than a value verified compatibility with WordPress 4.5 There’s still a lone warning that appears in … Read more
How to turn plain URLs into clickable links in WordPress
The marvellous P2 Theme has an interesting feature: write out a plain link, and it magically becomes clickable without explicitly adding the a href tag.
This may not be a big deal if you’re writing posts in the visual WordPress editor rather than HTML, but for those of us who like to write in HTML, it’s just one less thing to worry about.
I was investigating this feature recently, and it turns out WordPress has a built-in function that can do this: they call it make_clickable(), and it works with URIs, FTP, Email addresses and anything starting with www. The function is really easy to use too: it only takes one parameter (a string), and returns the clickable HTML code.
$clickableText = make_clickable($plainText);
Let’s see how to use it in context, using the TwentyThirteen theme.