Archive for Web Development Category
April 13, 2012
Sometimes a WordPress project calls for custom fields on Media. We recently built a custom gallery widget that involved uploading multiple images that would have a caption, a heading, the ability to selectively output the image, and the ability to set the hex code color of the text that was output.
To achieve this, I created a custom field on images that would allow you to input a value to be used as the color for the text and a custom checkbox to indicate to output the image.
There are two steps to this:
- Add the custom field to the edit screen,
- Process that field when saving / updating the media item.
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March 27, 2012
Updated: 5/2/2012
We love developing in WordPress. For many of our clients, there is no need to reinvent the wheel and WordPress can be a significant time saver.
WordPress is a very thoroughly developed platform – yet every now and again we bump into desired functionality that isn’t readily available, such as excluding categories from the Archive Widget.
Recently, I developed some code to do just that and thought I would share it.
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March 23, 2012
Many of our clients show their personalities on their websites – from Facebook to Twitter feeds, photo streams and more, they like to integrate a bit of themselves. While hooking up a Social Media feed is no problem, recently we had a unique request to develop a widget that displays the most recently listened to Spotify track with artist information and album cover.
It turns out there isn’t a straightforward way to do this; after a little digging around on the internet, and the help of the Spotify API, we were able to put together a solution that I wanted to share.
There are several steps to this process:
- Create a Lastfm account and setup Spotify to scrobble to Last.fm
- Pull the Lastfm Recent Tracks RSS feed
- Look-up the desired Track using the Spotify Metadata API and load the data
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January 18, 2012
Updated: 5/13/2012
I’ve helped our clients set up a lot of membership sites; one common request is that members are able to submit articles within WordPress.
Out-of-the-box WordPress can get you pretty far but commonly I run into two roadblocks with the default roles:
- The Contributor role doesn’t let Contributors see the Media Library
- The Author role lets Authors see everyone’s Media & Posts
While more often than not a plugin is the way to go for a full-on membership site, there’s a really quick fix that will let you assign users to the Author role and be able to hide other’s Media & Posts from them.
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August 01, 2011
Updated: 2/29/12
I wanted to setup a simple lightbox photo gallery on a WordPress site (v3.2.1, tested and working on 3.3.1) and, to avoid installing a slew of plugins, I put together a little gallery shortcode function using the built-in WordPress gallery shortcode as my starting point. I’m a big fan of PrettyPhoto, so I modified the output of the gallery shortcode to include a rel= attribute for PrettyPhoto galleries. (more…)
July 27, 2011
I recently needed to output a list of comments and bumped into a little trouble trying to output the comment excerpt. Usually I would use the built-in comment_excerpt() function but I only needed 10 words instead of the 20 that is hard-coded. I put together a little function that I found helpful and thought I would share.
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