One of the things I’d always disliked about the core get_the_excerpt() function in WordPress is that it does not allow you to retrieve an excerpt based on a post ID or object. This limitation means that this function is essentially useless in custom WordPress loops that do not have the global $post object set up.…
Front end registration and login forms (meaning placed within your site’s pages, and not the default wp-login.php) are one of the elements that really take a site out of the “standard WordPress” zone. With forms that allow your users to signup and login without ever leaving your main site, you provide a much more consistent…
Easy Content Types make it extremely easy to add new custom post types to your WordPress site. What is not always so easy is getting those post types to show up in your template files. This is mostly because a lot of themes do not support them very well. So I’m going to show you…
Just like the post meta system, WordPress has a powerful user meta system that allows developers to store additional “meta” information about the registered users in the database. This meta information can be just about anything you want it to be, and can serve a variety of purposes. At the time of writing this tutorial,…
Easy Content Types makes it really easy to create custom meta boxes with as many fields as you want. Did you know you can use these fields to control the layout of your posts or pages in WordPress? With just a couple of fields, and some tweaks to your theme’s template files, you can provide…
If you have lots of posts in your WordPress site, you have probably used the Category and/or Tag filters at the top of the post list page. These filters are great because they very quickly allow you to limit the kind of posts that are displayed, and let you find the one(s) you are looking…
Part seven of Writing Your First WordPress Plugin concludes the series by demonstrating how to extend the plugin options that I showed you in part 6, and how to use them to control various aspects of your plugin’s output, such as turning it on or off and changing theoutput’s theme. There is not a lot…
In part 6 of Writing Your First WordPress Plugin, I’m going to continue where we left off in part 5 and demonstrate how to create your plugin settings form. We will create a complete settings page that allows you to save your plugin options to the database easily from the Settings page that we added…
In part 5 of Writing Your First WordPress Plugin, I’m going to take you through the process of adding an admin options page to your first WordPress plugin. This options page will allow your user to configure the settings for the plugin very easily. In this case, we’re going to use it to allow the…
WordPress 3.3 has a really nice new Help menu that can be used by plugin and theme developers to show a lot of helpful information to the users. It’s very similar to the Contextual Help Tab, but allows much more information to displayed in a more organized fashion. Instead of all content being displayed in…
Being able to quickly find the unique ID number of any user in your WordPress database can be very useful, especially if you run a website with lots of users. One of the ways that we can easily find a user’s ID is by customizing the table displayed on the wp-admin/users.php page. We can add…
Ever noticed the messages WordPress displays when you activate a plugin, or save settings? Or the messages that some plugins show in the dashboard, perhaps notifying you of a missing requirement? These are called Admin Notices and I’m going to show you how to add your own in your plugin or theme. They’re really quite…
This tutorial demonstrates how to display a list of recent custom post type entries in any widgetized sidebar in less than 5 minutes. The widget is provided by my plugin called Better Recent Posts Widget Pro, and it is exceptionally powerful, yet very easy to use. The widget will allow us to list entries from…
In order to be kind to our friends that do not speak the language we have written our plugin in, it is always a good idea to fully localize your WordPress plugin. This means make it “ready for translation”. If you are one of those that is blessed with the fluency of more than one…
This tutorial explains the process behind writing a Maintenance Mode plugin for WordPress such as the one I released a few days ago: CGC Maintenance Mode. The final result of this tutorial will give you an advanced plugin capable of putting your site into maintenance mode, while allowing authorized users to view the site normally,…
