WordPress Rewrite API – Part 1

The Rewrite API for WordPress is one of the most overlooked features, yet it provides some unparalleled functionality that drastically improves user experience. This tutorial aims to help you understand how the WordPress URL Rewrite engine works and the different uses of this API. This entry is part 1 of 3 in the WordPress Rewrite…

User Submitted Image Gallery – Part 6

Part 6 of User Submitted Image Galleries will show you how to setup the single image page that shows the details for a particular image. This section is not very complex, but it covers a few very important techniques that are really good to know when it comes to modifying information on post templates via…

Drag and Drop Order for Plugin Options

The drag and drop method of ordering items in an option table is very popular, and also extremely useful. Rather than forcing users to manually enter “order” numbers to sort items the way they want, they can simply click and drag the items into the desired order. I use drag-and-drop ordering quite a bit in…

Making a Simple Rating Field Type in Easy Content Types

Several users have requested that I build a “rating” field type for Easy Content Types that will allow administrators / editors to apply a rating to a post or custom post type entry. This sort of field type would be exceptionally useful for users running review websites, such as book, movie, or game reviews. I…

User Submitted Image Gallery – Part 5

In part five of this User Submitted Image Gallery tutorial series we build the advanced query system that allows users to filter images by categories and tags. This will be one of the most advanced sections of this series. This entry is part 5 of 9 in the User Submitted Image Galleries Series

User Submitted Image Gallery – Part 4

In part three of this User Submitted Image Gallery plugin tutorial series, we created the function that processes image uploads. Now it is time to build our gallery’s short code, which will be used to display the complete gallery of user submitted images. This short code is rather complex and we won’t fully finish it…

Introduction to the Transients API in WordPress

The Transients API in WordPress is a simple method for storing cached data in the database. It allows us to take resource-intensive queries and store them in temporary caches to improve performance. Transients are temporary, meaning that after a specified amount of time, the cached data will be deleted and re-cached, or updated. This quick…

Registering Custom Meta Field Types for Easy Content Types

Easy Content Types is a very powerful plugin that makes it really easy to setup custom post types, taxonomies, and meta boxes. One of great but lesser known features of the plugin is that it has an API built in to allow users to register their own custom meta field types that can be used…

User Submitted Image Gallery – Part 3

In part three of the User Submitted Image Galleries series, we’re going to look at automatically creating our “guest” user account, and process the image uploads from the submission form. This is where our plugin really begins to take shape. After this section, we will get into actually displaying our images on the “gallery” page.…

Using Filters to Alter HTML Output

Filter hooks in WordPress provide a very powerful way to “alter” the output of functions. Using filters we can easily add extra HTML to some functions, and strip HTML from other functions. Some filters, such as the “body_class” filter, allow us to modify the class names of an HTML element, and some filters have nothing…

User Submitted Gallery Images – Part 2

In this part of the User Submitted Image Galleries series we will look at setting up our custom image sizes and also the image submission form. In the previous part we registered out custom post types and taxonomies, and setup the basic structure of the plugin. This entry is part 2 of 9 in the…

User Submitting Gallery Images – Part 1

In part one of the User Submitted Image Galleries tutorial series, I’m going to walk you through the beginning steps of setting up our User Image Gallery plugin. This is a plugin that will allow us to have a user-submitting gallery of images our website. If a user registered an logged-in, they will be able…

Create a Simple Mail Chimp Sign Up Form

In this premium-members only tutorial, we’re going to take a brief look into working with the Mail Chimp API to create a newsletter sign up form for your WordPress site. The final result will be a complete plugin that you can install on any WordPress site to begin accepting email subscriptions to your Mail Chimp…

Password Protect Taxonomy Terms and All Posts in the Terms

A few weeks ago, AJ Clarke of WP Explorer released a really slick photography theme called Fotos. Aside from just being a great theme, it also has a great feature that allows users to password protect their photo foto galleries. While developing the theme, AJ, who is a good friend of mine, asked me for…