Maintenance Mode Plugin

Posted on December 6, 2009 by Owen

Here’s a plugin that I use all the time on different blogs and I would really be lost without. It’s called Maintenance Mode and it’s a plugin that lets you block access to the blog or website until it’s ready for real visitors hitting the page. If you’re signed into an admin account then you can visit the site and see the pages that a visitor would normally see; but if you don’t have an account on the site all you get to see is a holding page.

It doesn’t matter if your blog is about ipods or fart cushions, it’s always best to develop your site in private than launch it when it’s complete.

Do you use PHP $_SERVER variables in forms?

Posted on September 24, 2009 by Owen

photo credit: Melissa Maples

I came across an interesting point that outlines that dangers of using $_SERVER variables to submit form, a practice that’s pretty common in WordPress plugins. The problem is that it opens the form up to be used for cross-site scripting (XSS) exploits. The post even has a couple of examples demonstrating how the exploits could be put together; examples that you can use to test your own code.

It’s important to know about these exploits and how they work. Ignoring them when writing code is a bit like putting cardboard displays in front of a crumbling building. It may look pretty from the outside, but you’re building something that is putting other people at risk.

So, read the post here.

WP Auctions reviewed on WP Tavern

Posted on September 3, 2009 by Owen

I came across a great review of our WP Auctions plugin that I built with Hyder down at WP Tavern, a website that specialises in all things WordPress related. We’ve put a tremendous amount of effort into the plugin, and it’s always great to get feedback from someone who’s tried out the plugin. On the whole, the review is positive, though there are some takeaways for us that we can build into improving the plugin.

In case you haven’t come across it, WP Auctions is an auction plugin for WordPress that lets you sell things right off your blog. You can sell anything from that old tv stand sitting in the corner of your room, to specialise pointe shoes to consultancy services; anything you can think about. It’s a great little plugin and we have great plans for it in the future too.

Read the review here if you want to learn about all the things it does.

Using Flickr for your WordPress blog

Posted on August 23, 2009 by Owen

: Image via CrunchBase

If you have a fair number of photos on your blog, you might want to store them on Flickr and use a plugin to integrate them with your blog. Why would you want to do that? Well, first of all Flickr provides free online storage for your photos (unless you go for a premium account), and also offers a pretty comprehensive way to sort, order and manage your photos.

So, how do you go about integrating them with your WordPress blog? Well, there are a number of plugins that let you do this, including Flickr Gallery to pick an example. This plugin lets you use shortcodes to embed photos and galleries from Flickr right into your blog posts.

Now that’s pretty powerful isn’t it?

Custom Taxonomies in WordPress 2.8

Posted on June 5, 2009 by Owen

Traditionally, WordPress has used to methods to help people create a taxonomy around their posts. Categories offer a rigid structure and tags offer a more flexible, albeit unstructured option. It was possible to use the Custom Taxonomy Plugin to extend this concept further but with WordPress 2.8, it becomes very easy to add these custom taxonomies to your standard build using just a couple of lines of code.

So, let’s have an example how these custom taxonomies can be used. Let’s say you’re creating a blog for a Fort Myers photographer who would like to talk about the various photo shoots she’s taking part in. She may want to group her posts around a structure that helps people identify what the theme of the photo shoot was, what sort of equipment was used and what sort of subjects were in her photos. You can create 3 separate taxonomies, one for each of those categories and WordPress will support the tagging and displaying of those taxonomies natively.

It’s a great move forward for increasing the flexibility of your blog. Read all about it in Justin Tadlock’s post.

Ten pointers for plugin authors

Posted on March 31, 2009 by Owen

I came across a great post today that talks about 10 characteristics of a great WordPress plugin. This makes essential reading for any plugin author because it’s a template for what users look for in a plugin. The article has all the detail, but here are the main points:

Easy Installation
Seamless Upgrade
Uninstall Option
Meaningful Error Messages
Localization Support
Intuitive Admin User Interface
Reset/Import/Export Options
Optimized
Secured
Good Support and Thorough Documentation

It’s great advice and I do know that I have a few of my personal plugins that are due an upgrade because they only fulfil some of the points above. At the end of the day, it’s all about how usable and supportable the plugin is and if you don’t keep the user in mind, then your plugin won’t get the exposure it deserves. It’s like swallowing the best diet pills in the world and then stuffing yourself. You’re just not going to get anywhere are you?

Using Custom Fields

Posted on March 26, 2009 by Owen

You might have noticed the “Custom Fields” section at the bottom of your Posts page. These let you add any extra information you want to a post, which can then be used in your template to enhance the page. I’ve used these on different sites in different ways and it does add a certain amount of extra flexibility to what you’re doing.

Here are a couple of examples:

ManxVoice: This uses custom fields for images and thumbnails related to the post. These are then used on the front page to enhance the display and make it look better for any viewers.
Tweetburn: This website uses custom fields to populate content pages with Twitter accounts from different categories. You can see from the topic pages that they are quite unique in content.

As you can see Custom Fields give you an immense amount of power over what you can do with your site. For example, if you have a website about automotive lifts, you could specify images for different products and then use these in different ways on your site. And if you find them quite challenging, check out the More Fields Plugin that makes using custom fields much easier.

Plugin Authors: use your ReadMe.txt file

Posted on February 22, 2009 by Owen

Here’s an interesting post that explains to plugin authors how to make full use of their readme.txt file. The purpose of the readme file is quite clear, it helps the WordPress plugin repository to apply the right captions and categorisation to you plugin. This is more important than ever, now that they have improved their search engine. The readme file contains the following sections:

Plugin Name
Description
Installation
Frequently Asked Questions
Screenshots
Other sections

And should be populated well for the site to help your plugin get found. The post also talks how you can use comments on the plugin to supplement this information. It’s worth using this functionality well, because besides making custom rubber stamps and stamping every plugin as it goes out of the door (which would only work if you’re mailing CDs), I don’t know of a better way of getting more downloads of your plugin.

Where are you coming from?

Posted on January 15, 2009 by Owen

Interesting plugin review down at Weblogs Tools Collection about a plugin called Referrer Detector. It welcomes people based on where they are coming from so that you can always give them a warm welcome. Here’s a screenshot of what it looks like:

It’s a nice idea which would work with most websites, regardless of if there are about satellite internet services or the Isle of Man. The nice thing about the plugin is that it’s driven by AJAX so it plays nicely with caching plugins (not like some other plugins I’ve used in the past).

Enjoy!

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