WordPress

How to Create a WordPress Shortcode that Only prints CSS for Certain Posts, Pages or Attachments

This morning, I found myself converting a WordPress Page Template into a plugin when I found myself limited by the WordPress Shortcode API. “Limited?” you ask. “The WordPress Shortcode API is awesome and easy to use… how could you possibly feel limited?” Well, I ran into a problem, but I found a solution… go easy, man… go easy…

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TEMPLATEPATH for Child Themes

So, the topic of this month’s Portland Wordpress User’s Group is “Child Themes”. I’ve never really utilized this functionality of WordPress until a few days ago when I worked support into The Platypus Theme.

One thing that I noticed was that the value of the constant TEMPLATEPATH always points to the “parent” theme. Which, after some thought, is to be expected. However, I was left wondering, How do I access custom files that I have put inside my child theme’s folder?

After some digging around in the core, I was able to piece together this solution:

$themes = get_themes();
$current_theme_name = get_current_theme();
$current_theme = $themes[ $current_theme_name ];
$templatepath = WP_CONTENT_DIR . $current_theme['Stylesheet Dir'];

Here, we have defined the variable $templatepath which we can use to find the path to any custom file in our child theme.

Hope this is useful to someone.

Please note, this solution will only work on versions of WordPress 2.6 or greater.

Text-based Image Links – No Longer Needed

I was recently looking through the WordPress Codex when I stumbled upon the pages for the following two functions: previous_image_link() & next_image_link().

These functions control previous and next navigation while a user is viewing an image attachment’s page. Up until now, these functions would only allow a thumbnail preview of the previous or next page. This was rather annoying to myself and other users so I created this plugin which allows a user to specify text alternatives to the default image links.
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Posts By Tag Plugin

Isn’t open-source software great? I think so. I recently found the Posts By Tag Plugin by Sudar Muthu which provides a sidebar widget which can be configured to display posts from a set of tags in the sidebar. The plugin did exactly what I needed, except provide the ability to sort the posts. In a blogging/News environment users will usually want their posts to be sorted in descending order, but a situation arose where I needed my posts sorted in ascending order. Unfortunately, the plugin did not support this feature.

So, I dove into the plugins’ source code and added the functionality to sort the posts in either ascending or descending order. I emailed Sudar the modified file and he integrated the changes in the newest release of the plugin.

Awesome!

You can download the plugin here.

You can read Sudar’s post about the changes here.

Text Based Image Links 1.2

I just released an new version (1.2) of my Text Based Image Links WordPress plugin. The new version, offers more flexibility than the previous version allowing users to add custom class, id and title attributes to the links it generates. In case you have no idea what this plugin does or why you absolutely have to have it, visit it’s new home in the WordPress Plugin Directory.