Using custom database tables for your WordPress plugins is one of the way that you can greatly improve the kind of plugins you are able to create. DB tables give you a way to manage, organize, and save data for your plugin, and creating them for your plugin is very simple.
The Farbtastic Color Picker is a fantastic tool for developers and designers to utilize as a way to give their plugin (or theme) users an extra level of control. With Farbtastic, we can allow our users to change the colors of certain elements, such as the background color of our widget, by using an elegant…
Ever wanted a function to display your Flickr photos anywhere you want? This quick plugin will give you exactly that: a simple function that you can place anywhere in your template that you want to display a list of photos from a Flickr account.
The other day a user posted a question on the WordPress Stack Exchange about how to display a calendar of your site’s custom post types, much like the default WP Calendar widget. After a quick google search, I found a function written by Jennifer Dodd that did exactly this. The user who asked the question…
Creating WordPress widgets, from simple to advanced, is not a very difficult task, though it can be hard to get into developing them if you do not have the right tools. This tutorial, written at WP Roots, will give you everything you need, including an example, to begin writing advanced WordPress Widgets. This entry is…
This is a really handy trick that I just learned today. Whenever we can, it is always best to only load styles and scripts for our plugins when they are needed. This tutorial will show you how to load stylesheets and scripts only when a post contains the short code that the styles / scripts…
Sometimes, when using a custom post type in your plugins (or themes), it is desirable to add the already-registered taxonomies (Post Tags and Categories by default) to your custom object type. This quick code snippet will show you how to do that.
Google recently releases its Plus One service, and, as usual, dozens of people immediately made WordPress plugins utilizing it. Google Traffic Pop by Tyler Quinn is an excellent example. In this tutorial, I’m going to demonstrate how to make a (very simple) Google +1 plugin for WordPress.
Custom Post Types are an increasingly popular tool for WordPress developers to use when constructing their plugins. There are many, many little tricks that help to make the finished product more polished, and one of those is changing the “Enter title here” text that is displayed in the Post Title field on the edit screen.…
This next part in our Working with Widgets Series is going to show you how to create a simple recent posts widget, much like my Better Recent Posts Widget plugin, though it will be even simpler. The goal of this tutorial will be to demonstrate a very useful technique that you can use in countless…
A lot of times people wish to place a front end login form on their Website, which helps to hide the fact that the site is running WordPress. This works great, except when a user has a fail login attempt. When that happens, they are automatically directed to the default wp-login.php, which is not good…
A lot of people want the ability to display the WordPress login form within the content of one of the site’s pages. By default, WordPress does not provide any way to do this, so we are going to write a really quick, simple short code to display the login form.
Human readable time formats means that the date of a post or comment is displayed as “x time ago”. This format is much easier to read and interpret, and gives the reader a “relative sense” of when the item was published.
In this tutorial I’m going to walk you through how to create a simple widget to list categories, and custom taxonomies, in your sidebar. The final result will be a complete plugin that you can drop into your wp-plugins folder and activate like any other plugin. The code for this widget will be based entirely…
This useful little tip will show you how to retrieve an array of registered users from your WordPress database. We will use the get_users() function to query the database and return an array of users matching our parameters.
