Sillybean

WordPress Hidden Gems (OpenCa.mp presentation) on Slideshare

My presentation for OpenCa.mp this afternoon, WordPress Hidden Gems, is up on Slideshare. I’ll fill in some slide notes later, since it’s mostly screenshots and there’s much text in the transcript. Enjoy!

August events [updated]

I’ll be speaking at WordCamp Houston this Saturday. (It’s sold out, but HostGator is giving away a few more tickets this morning, so hurry over there if you want them!) My topic is WordPress as a…

Call a navigation menu using a shortcode

Today I came across a weird situation: I needed to place a navigation menu in the content of a page. A shortcode was the obvious solution, but there doesn’t appear to be one built in for menus. I created this…

New plugin: Convert Post Types

I’m moving some old posts over to a new post type now that I’ve upgraded the sites at work to WordPress 3.0, and I needed a way to convert hundreds of posts in a category. The Post Type Switcher…

Twitter Archive, WordPress Importer

I’ve finally managed to create a complete archive of my Twitter account — and none too soon, as I’m quickly approaching the 3200-tweet limit for exports. I’ll probably mess with the theme later, but for now I’ve followed

Beginning WordPress 3 is here!

My book is out! I got my author’s copies over the weekend, and this morning a friend reported that her copy arrived in the mail. So, even though the official release date isn’t until Wednesday, it’s here!

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Feeds for custom content types in WordPress 3.0

As you’ve seen before, there are many feeds that aren’t publicized in WordPress. You can use a query string format similar to the one you used for searches to get feeds of your custom content types. The post_type parameter…

Adding fields to existing options pages

There are lots of tutorials on adding a whole new options page for your plugin, but adding just a field or two to one of the standard options pages is a little different.

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function add_extra_privacy_options()

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Excerpts from Beginning WordPress 3

I’m posting Chapter 4, , in its entirety. So far the sections on , , and are up. I’m working on the section now, starting with . Look for the sections on audio, video, and other files later this week.…

Listing child pages with a shortcode

If you don’t want to list child pages on all your empty pages using a or a , you can create a simple shortcode:

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function child_pages_shortcode() {<br />
   global $post;<br />
   return '&lt;ul class=&quot;childpages&quot;&gt;'.wp_list_pages('echo=0&amp;depth=0&amp;title_li=&amp;child_of='.$post-&gt;ID).'&lt;/ul&gt;';<br />

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Another book giveaway; OpenCamp Dallas talk

Jeff will be giving away two copies of Beginning WordPress 3 during the 100th episode of WordPress Weekly. Mind you, the book hasn’t been printed yet, so he’ll collect your mailing info and I’ll send them out as…

Adding pages to all the WordPress submenus

Most WordPress plugin tutorials tell you to add your option pages to the Settings submenu, and that’s that. Did you know that add_options_page() isn’t your only choice?

Here are the functions to add pages to all the major submenus:

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Listing children on empty pages as a filter

Yesterday, I showed you how to automatically list child pages if a page’s content is empty. That code would go in your theme’s page.php file. What if you wanted to use it in any theme? The best solution is…

New plugin: Content Audit

If you’ve read Kristina Halvorson’s article on A List Apart or her book, Content Strategy for the Web, you know how important it is to audit your content once you’ve published it.

For years, I’ve used Jeff…

Automatically list children on empty pages

Here’s a little snippet I use in my theme’s page templates. It figures out whether a page’s content is empty, and if it is, a list of all its child pages is printed where the content would usually go.

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