Tag Archives: WordPress Plugins

My WordPress plugins toolbox

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Hey everyone,
Just thought I’d post a list of my most regularly installed WordPress plugins and why they are installed on virtually every WordPress installation I do. If there are any plugins I haven’t listed that should be, please let me know in the comments. :)

1. Maintenance Mode

This plugin is truly awesome. It allows the developer and end-user to test the WordPress installation thoroughly, on the server where it will eventually be hosted, without displaying it to the world. It also allows the user to, as it says in the title, take the website down for maintenance at any stage and leave a message for users letting them know of the downtime.
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Getting the information of a root page in WordPress

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Often, when using WordPress as a content management or blogging tool on a website, one uses a multi-level page structure. This entails a page being listed “underneath” another page in a tree structure. Usually, if your WordPress installation’s permalinks deviate from the default setting, your page URL structure will look something like this:

http://websiteurl.com/parentpageslug/subpageslug (Note: note a real URL)

What if you require a value to be set depending on the highest level parent page? The process looks like this:

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WordPress Shortcodes… in short

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In the spirit of the topic, I’ll keep this post short and sweet. Today I’ll be discussing WordPress’s shortcode API and how to utilise it.

WordPress shortcodes are codes (eg: [list_bookmarks]) which can be typed into the content area of a page or post in order to provide functionality of some kind. Shortcodes can be wrapped around text (similarly to how HTML tags are wrapped around text) or can be used as a single tag. In this post, I will discuss using shortcodes as a single tag to save time as well as providing more control to the user of your WordPress theme/plugin/function.
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Integrate tinyMCE into a WordPress widget

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So, the native WordPress text widget is great, right? It allows users to insert virtually any form of content into a widget, provided they either want plain text or know a bit of HTML. The fact that this widget can be used in multiple instances is also awesome. Recently, I’ve needed to provide a bit more control though. Hence, my integration of tinyMCE.

Before I start, this tutorial assumes that you have a widget up and running (multi-instance or a conventional single instance widget) that has a text area which will be replaced with a tinyMCE editor. This tutorial is only about the integration. In my research on this topic, I came across a support query where a user was experiencing the same issue I was having: the content of the tinyMCE replaced text area was not saving. After a bit of testing, I found the solution.
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