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Do you remem­ber a time when those one or two lines of code just didn’t make sense? When your theme looked dif­fer­ent across vari­ous inter­net browsers and you had no idea why? Do you remem­ber when last that happened to you? Those were the times when you more than likely vis­ited a sup­port forum, post­ing with the final few morsels of energy you had left. Did you find an answer?

Support for­ums, in gen­eral, seem to be notori­ous for host­ing lots of posts about prob­lems, with few posts offer­ing solu­tions to those prob­lems. I see this on a reg­u­lar basis on many web devel­op­ment sup­port for­ums… many quer­ies and few answers. Continue Reading

I’ve been read­ing a lot over the past few months about child themes in Wordpress and how users have found them to be an invalu­able resource when cre­at­ing Wordpress themes.

What’s this “child theme” thing?

For those unfa­mil­iar with the concept, the way I’d explain it is as follows:

A user chooses a Wordpress theme (or theme frame­work) which they would like to cus­tom­ise. They then cre­ate a new theme with only the files required for the cus­tom­isa­tion. The main change comes in the style.css file where the theme details are spe­cified. The line “Template” is added to the theme details, which then spe­cifies the folder name of the main theme (chosen above). An example block would like like this:

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Earlier this week, pop­u­lar geo-​​social web­site, Foursquare, enabled their “Foursquare every­where” fea­ture. Since it’s incep­tion, the com­pany has offered their ser­vice (allow­ing users to “check in” at places and to dis­cover new places in their area) in a select few cit­ies. With the grow­ing pop­ular­ity of geo-​​social web­sites such as Foursquare and Gowalla, the demand for access to Foursquare in non-​​support cit­ies has, over the last few months, grown sub­stan­tially. Continue Reading

Whichever industry you work in, whether you work for your­self or a com­pany and whatever your job descrip­tion, there are days where things just aren’t going your way. No mat­ter how long you sit at your desk, tap­ping your pen­cil, the solu­tion to the prob­lem at hand just isn’t apparent.

As a developer, the prob­lem and solu­tion are usu­ally quite clean-​​cut (such is the nature of code, pro­dom­in­antly). The solu­tion, how­ever clean-​​cut it may be, isn’t always vis­ible when approach­ing a cod­ing task. At times like those, I employ a the­ory:
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Hey every­one.
I’ve been tweet­ing quite a bit recently about cus­tom URL rewrites in Wordpress. After a few hours of trial and error, I’ve man­aged to get my spe­cific cus­tom URL rewrites work­ing. After read­ing through sev­eral tutori­als online (the major­ity of which used the same examples to explain only a por­tion the inform­a­tion I was look­ing for), here’s my tutorial– a get­ting star­ted guide to Custom URL rewrites in Wordpress.

The pro­cess

So, what exactly are we doing here? To put things in point form, this is the process:

1. Create cus­tom rewrite rules
2. Add our new vari­ables to the public_​query_​vars array
3. Flush (and thus, regen­er­ate) all Wordpress rewrite rules
4. Add our func­tions from steps 1, 2 and 3 into Wordpress via actions and filters

Right, so lets get down to it then. Continue Reading