A good example showcasing the is_plugin_active conditional statement that saved Peter from a whole lot of donkey work. All it took was 12 lines of code. ∞
Stay Up To Date
Two Resources For Writers/Journalists Using WordPress
DynamicWP has put together a list of 11 plugins that are especially helpful for writers using WordPress. One of the nifty plugins from that list that I discovered is AP Style Dates And Times. This plugin automatically abbreviates times and months according to the AP Style guide.
The second resource that you should keep handy if you’re the journalist type is a post written by Ryan Imel on WPCandy.com that lists a number of different services and plugins that Ryan has used to keep WPCandy readers up to date on everything happening within the world of WordPress.
WordPress Projects To Follow On GitHub
Themergency has a list of WordPress related projects to watch that are using GitHub as their source code repository instead of the traditional Subversion approach. In case you didn’t know it already, WordPress itself is also using GitHub except that it’s being synched every thirty minutes with the Subversion repository and only contains read-only access. Judging by the comments, a number of themes are also using GitHub as their repository. I wonder if this has translated into a more social experience in users contributing back to the original project which is supposedly one of the awesome benefits of using GitHub? ∞
Collection Of WordPress Constants
Developers are going to want to add this page to their list of resources. Dominik Schilling has written a guest post for WPEngineer.com that covers a wide range of constants that can be used with WordPress. I’ve used and seen many of those constants defined within the WP Config file. It’s pretty cool to see such a wide range of constants available to change the behaviour of WordPress all in one place. ∞
Viewing Data With The beCounted Plugin
Lorelle shared an interesting plugin that can be used to show data called beCounted. Check out their example of the 2010 Open Source CMS Market Share report which they’ve turned into a page where you can view how many downloads have occurred for each publishing system since you visited the page. ∞
Links To Commercial Solutions On The Codex
In a recent discussion amongst those on the WordPress Documentation mailing list, Scribu brought up the question on whether or not links to commercial solutions were allowed within the Codex. Lorelle VanFossen summed things up pretty nicely in the following quote:
A fantastic article that helps spell out the details of the Codex article on a site that isn’t selling “commercial content” other than hosting advertising and such (normal stuff) more than producing free, “open source,” shared content is allowed as it is considered external reference material. These are set usually in the “More Resources” section not within the Codex article.
Seems like a good compromise to me as it should prevent commercial entities from being able to use the Codex for link juice. Although that should be a lot more difficult considering new user registration for the Codex was disabled a few months ago to try and thwart spam attacks.
Creating An Account Center In WordPress
WPRoots has published the first in a series of articles that will explain how to create an account center in WordPress. The series starts off by explaining how to create the page template for the account center. Follow up posts will contain information on how to create a custom login page and how to display specific user information within the account center. ∞
Please Don’t Use The Post Title As A Hyperlink
While reading a discussion that was being had by the folks who populate the WordPress Hackers Mailing list regarding the difference between the aside and status post formats, Mike Schinkel commented on a practice that I think needs to be stopped.
I’ve been noticing that some themers have decided to implement “link” post formats such that in archives and in the RSS feed the post title is used as the anchor text, and the hyperlink on that title is the actual link being published and NOT the permalink of the blog post that uses the “link” post format!
This approach violates all the experience we have become familiar with in blogs and especially RSS feeds, and can be very confusing when someone sees a link from an RSS feed, clicks the link expecting to be taken to the blog and gets taken elsewhere instead. Where it is especially confusing (and time wasting) is when the user (i.e. me) clicks the link and then switches tasks with plans to read the post later in the day while the blog post loads in the background. But then when I later view my open tabs in my browser I see a page from a web site that I think is just spam so I close it only to later in the day see the RSS feed again and think “Hmm, I never saw that” so I click again, and sometimes task switch after which the cycle continues.
So for the TL;DR crowd, themers PLEASE do not implement themes that break the standard UX for blogs; titles should be hyperlinked with permalinks to the blog post, nothing else. Show explicit link text and/or icon instead. It may seem “cool” but it can be hell on the blog’s readers. JMTCW, anyway.
Please don’t make the post title the actual link to an article when using the Link Post format. It prevents me from linking to you and it’s not the behaviour I’m expecting. I’m excepting to click the link to read comments or such on the post but because the title acts as a link, I pretty much have no way of getting there. It’s a frustrating experience and that’s why I agree with Mike!
How To Insert Links Inside Of Image Captions
Occasionally, I ‘ll take a look through the WordPress Ideas site to see what kind of activity is going on. The other night, I discovered an idea that immediately lit the light bulb over my head, mostly because I couldn’t believe that it was not already a feature in WordPress. Approximately one year ago, Jeremy Clarke submitted the idea to allow URLs to be inserted into image captions with the primary goal of making it easy to attribute images to their source. I’ve personally come across the issue where instead of applying the image credits within the image caption, I have to add a note somewhere within the post which is stupid since image captions are the PERFECT spot for attribution. Fast forward to October 18th, 2011 with WordPress 3.3. knocking on the door and this ability is still not present within WordPress. However, there are a couple of things that point to this feature being added soon as the status for the idea is marked Good Idea! We’re Working On It. There is also a ticket in trac, #18311 that has a patch but is currently awaiting review.
While there is not a native, user-friendly way of adding links to image captions, there are a couple of ways in which it can be accomplished. The first is by using ‘ instead of ” when entering the code for your link. However, when switching between the code and visual editors, the link is erased leaving text in place of the link.
Second, you can try using the code provided by Kaspars of Konstruktors.com inside of your functions.php file which will add a “Source URL” field to every image that is uploaded through the WordPress media library. When using this method, it’s important to note that the source URL will be visible only if you specify an image caption upon inserting the image. If implemented correctly, it will look something like this.
Third, you can try using the Links In Captions Plugin by Zack Katz. After activation, you can add links to captions via the following format: {link url=”http://www.example.com”}Anchor text here{/link} Two benefits to this plugin is that it has support for the Target and Rel attributes and you can use shortcodes within the caption area.
Personally, I think Kaspars solution is the most user-friendly after the functions.php file is setup correctly. I’d like to see him package that as a plugin so more users can take advantage of it as it looks as though it was part of the media manager all along. However, the best scenario is for this functionality to some how end up within the core of WordPress. If you have the know-how, please consider contributing to the ticket or writing a better patch to get this into core.