When you click one of my PHP code download links (for example, the Less WordPress plugin), you see the PHP source code on your screen, even though the file is a .php file. How do I stop the server executing the PHP code? With a WordPress plugin, of course. Continue reading “Plaintext: a WordPress plugin” →

I’ve been enjoying Alex King’s excellent Popularity Contest plugin for several weeks now. It’s fascinating to see which posts are being viewed, commented, tracked and pinged, all through the one interface. After using it for a while, I thought of a useful way to extend it and also found and fixed a wee problem. Perhaps these changes will make their way into the next version of Alex’s plugin, but till then you can always download my version from here. Continue reading “Popularity Contest for Pages” →

I have released Search Meter, a new WordPress plugin that should help you keep your blog focused on what your visitors want to read. It does this by keeping track of what your visitors are searching for, and more importantly whether they are finding it. Continue reading “Search Meter: a WordPress plugin” →

There is a bug in the way WordPress 1.5.1 handles draft posts and Advanced Editing mode. One effect of this is that pingbacks and trackbacks are sometimes sent with the wrong URL. This problem has been around for a while, but it looked a bit complicated so I figured that somebody would fix it one day. But as I was trying to write a useful new plugin, the bug hit me. So I have investigated the bug and found out what it’s all about. I have also written a plugin that fixes the problem. Continue reading “WordPress pingback and trackback bug” →

This is an investigation into some problems with the way WordPress generates .htaccess rules to make its fancy permalinks work. For a new site I am building, I wanted the permalinks to not have the date in the URL. Accordingly, I set the permalink structure to the following.

/%category%/%postname%/

Once I did this, I couldn’t access any single posts. Continue reading “WordPress rewrite rules” →

Less is more.

Less is a WordPress plugin that makes reading posts more intuitive for your many readers. With Less, when readers click a (more…) link on your post “teaser”, they see the full article on the screen, not just the part after the (more…).

Continue reading “Less: a WordPress plugin” →

Here’s an amusing hack to fix a niggling problem in the WordPress default theme. I came up with this soon after I started using WordPress, but I recently noticed that this small annoyance had generated a discussion on Mathibus.com. My fully automatic solution is now ready for a waiting world. Continue reading “Safe Title: a WordPress plugin” →

Code Markup is a WordPress plugin that makes it easy to include program code samples in your posts. You can even include HTML markup in the code sample; Code Markup magically knows which characters should be displayed as code and which should be rendered as HTML. Continue reading “Code Markup: WordPress plugin” →

Top Cat is a WordPress plugin that allows you to specify a main category for your posts. Even though WordPress posts can have more than one category, you may want to specify which of them is the main category. Top Cat lets you do this and also provides template tags for displaying the main category of each post. Continue reading “Top Cat: a WordPress plugin” →

Evermore is a WordPress plugin that automatically abbreviates all posts when they appear on a multiple-post page such as the main blog page. Readers will simply see a “teaser” rather than the full post. It has the same effect as putting <!--more--> after the first paragraph of every post. All formatting and HTML tags are preserved in the abbreviated post. Continue reading “Evermore: a WordPress plugin” →