Category Archives: WordPress

How To Downgrade A WordPress Plugin

security-risk So you may be asking "why would I ever want to know how to downgrade a wordpress plugin?" There have been numerous times when a plugin updates and breaks your site. It may conflict with another plugin. It may have functionality that you require, but the plugin author redeveloped the plugin. As a result, you have a bunch of content tightly integrated with your site that would require a bunch of work just to remove.

So what would you do? You could deactivate the plugin. That might leave a bunch of residual plugin residue all over your site (i.e. shortcodes, theme functions, etc.).

If you are in a crunch and need to wait on the plugin developer to update their plugin, you can always downgrade and wait.

But how do you downgrade a WordPress Plugin? It isn't functionality that WordPress includes, (or encourages for that matter). With a little finesse, you can get your plugin downgraded. Continue reading →

How To Install WordPress

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This tutorial will show you how to install WordPress on your hosting provider. This tutorial assumes you've already uploaded WordPress and created it's appropriate MySQL Database.

Open up a browser and go to your domain.

You should see a screen similar to the one below. Basically it states that you don't have WordPress installed yet and need to set it up. This is the famous "5 Minute Install". It will guide you through the rest of the installation.

Continue reading →

Say Bye Bye to Link Manager in WordPress 3.5

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Well, not quite. But the consensus is, it needs to go. Links have always been kind of "primative" when it came to WordPress, but over the last two years, things have really sped up. There was the advanced link insert option in the wysiwyg editor. There was the creation of Menus that allowed for all kinds of flexibility. This is essentially what links should've been way back when. Interestingly enough, that is exactly what they are going to replace it with.

Instead of a links manager, you can now use the Menus manager to create your blogrolls. You will have more flexibility, auto-updating paths, sub-menus and all the other fun that the Menu Manager provides.

So, what's next? Andrew Nacin stated in his last meeting notes that they will:

Remove the bank of default links if that’s all the user has.
Install the Link Manager plugin on upgrade.
Move the admin code into a plugin.
Move all of the code into a plugin.

He also stated that while 1 and 2 could make it into 3.5, the others probably won't be until 3.6 or 3.7. The good news is it will be in a plugin, so if you are die hard for the link manager, you can just keep the plugin.

So what can you do? I would get started right away and move your links to a menu, so when the transition comes, you will be ready. It honestly won't take but 10 minutes for 90% of users. Most people don't even use the link manager anymore, and if they do, they've forgotten all about it.

BBCode Style WordPress Shortcode Attributes

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I wanted to create bbcode styled shortcode attributes for a plugin I am developing. The problem is, WordPress doesn't really let you do that with their shortcodes. They require you to have a more of a key=>value pair setup of passing parameters. This is all good and fine for control, but I knew the usability would be hindered if I did it that way. In essence, the shortcode itself was the key, and what I needed passed was the value. I didn't want a key=>key=>value pair style. It would just be too confusing. So I explored the shortcode API a little.

When you look at the Shortcode API, they tell you to pass your shortcodes like this:

public function shortcode($atts, $content = null) {
     extract (shortcode_atts( array(
         'location' => 'default'
     ), $atts) );
}

Basically, it creates variables of the attributes you need passed and leaves out all the rest.

So, basically the above would look like this: [shortcode location="http://www.google.com/"].

But what if you wanted it to look like [shortcode="http://www.google.com/"]?

Here is how I did it.

First, I got rid of that stupid extract() function. I passed it into my class variables so I could reuse it for debugging later.

After that, I then pulled up the raw $atts passed into the function. Basically, the first element of the array was what I wanted and it looked like this:

array ( 0 => '="http://www.google.com/"')

So, with a little string replacing, I could get my url I wanted.

The final result is as follows:

public function shortcode($atts, $content = null) {
	$this->atts = shortcode_atts( array(
		'location' => $this->fix_attribute($atts[0])
	), $atts );
        return $this->atts['location'];
}
 
protected function fix_attribute($attribute) {
	return str_ireplace(array('="', '"'), '', $attribute);
}

Now, someone can use the shortcode in either syntax: [shortcode="http://www.google.com/"] or [shortcode location="http://www.google.com/"]. If location is set, it will use that instead. Otherwise, it will take the first element of the $atts array.