WorkPlace Snippets

Tag: WordPress

  • To WordPress and not to WordPress

    Having been overwhelmed with Olympic fever, it’s been awhile since I’ve made a post relating to WordPress, but the community is as active as ever, especially with the release of WordPress 2.6.1 and the final round of voting for the WordPress Plugin Competition.

    This will, fortunately for you all, be a short post with what maybe a catchy title! The good book ‘how to write a good blog post’ sites teach us that a catchy title is very helpful in attracting the attention of browsers. Whether this will be one of the popular posts as a result remains to be seen, but there is a point to this post and the title: it turns out I have been spelling that special word wrong.

    That word, of course, is:

    WordPress

    I’ve always spelt it as WordPress, and never thought more of it, so I was utterly mortified when I started reading Lorelle‘s excellent article Tips on Writing Good WordPress Tips. The first point she made (as convincingly as always) was that:

    WordPress is a trademark and thus must be spelled appropriately.

    That sentence came like a bolt from the heavens (or stepping on a garden rake) and I was left with a sinking feeling in my stomach – just hours before I had chided someone on the WordPress Forums about getting the name of a plugin wrong, and yet I was already making an even more fundamental mistake about something I read about almost everyday – WordPress!

    That feeling of guilt happened to coincide with me reading a new post by Mark Ghosh on WLTC called Be Kind, Educate, (which is just as inspirational as Matt Mullenweg‘s Price of Freedom) where he analyses why there are so many fans of WordPress, and nature of the WP community. His last point, and the title of his article, credits Lorelle as an inspiration for his new pledge:

    to be as kind as I can be … to educate everyone that cares to listen

    So at the end of this post, not only am I going to spell WordPress correctly from now on, I am also going to endeavour to be a lot more patient and polite when I reply on the forums!

    p/s: Apologies to anyone I’ve offended on the forums from before.

    p/s2: I think I’ve patched up this site for WordPress, but if you spot any omissions, please let me know!

  • We have moved to self-hosting and a new domain!

    Although WordPress Snippets was only started last month (June) and I’ve only got round to posting one post, it seemed like a good idea to really take the blog a bit more seriously and purchase a domain.

    Thankfully WPSnippets.com was available, and initially I thought it would just be used for the WordPress.com version of the site. However, after weighing up some options, especially after reading Michael Martine‘s excellent Moving from WordPress.com to Self-Hosted WordPress in Plain English, I came to the conclusion that it would be better to go the self-hosted route (as with all my sites) and re-launch WPSnippets.com.

    The new site uses a brand new theme called BASE, which was developed by Cobus Bester of FRESH01. I’m looking forward to tweaking it slowly!

  • WP-Table plugin – Fatal Error fix for WordPress 2.5+

    10/05/2013: Everyone should now switch to TablePress by Tobias.

    Click here to visit TablePress.org

     
    WP-Table plugin by Alex Boelinger is a unique WordPress plugin that allows admins to create tables, by this I mean the ones with rows and columns like in Excel, easily in WordPress. It is the only one that I am aware of at the moment that makes it possible to add actual tables without putting-in extra HTML when creating new posts and pages.

    However, activating the latest version (1.52) of the plugin triggers a fatal error (shown below) in WordPress 2.5+:

    Plugin could not be activated because it triggered a fatal error.

    Fortunately there is a quick fix that can be done to resolve this issue, where the full credit for this solution goes to Michael Bester, the developer of the Kimili Flash Embed, who posted a comment on Jovel Stefan’s Embedded Video Plugin post about a fix to ensure that a plugin should check for the buttonsnap class upon activation.

    This class is used to add a button to your WordPress editor, and should only ever be loaded once, so if any other plugin uses buttonsnap, it will cause the fatal error to occur.

    To resolve this problem, find Line 344 in wp-table.php

    require_once(WPTABLE_ABSPATH.'js/buttonsnap.php');

    and add before it:

    if(!class_exists('buttonsnap'))

    So ultimately you should see this:

    // ButtonSnap needs to be loaded outside the class in order to work right
if(!class_exists('buttonsnap'))
require_once(WPTABLE_ABSPATH.'js/buttonsnap.php');

    I tested this on a local install of WordPress 2.5.1, and it worked very well. This quick fix has also been posted on the WordPress Support Forums, and hopefully others will find it helpful as well.

    Any feedback would be brilliant! If it works for you, please let me know by posting in the comments. Similarly, if it doesn’t work for you, then again, please do post! I don’t see the plugin requiring any further edits for the time being (apart from new features) and am confident that it will also work with later WordPress versions as well.

    UPDATE 20/07/08: Apparently the plugin does work with WP 2.6!
    UPDATE 28/12/08: And in WP 2.7 as well!
    UPDATE 25/05/09: WP-Table Reloaded supercedes WP-Table.

    FINAL UPDATE 10/05/13: TablePress is now the revamped, next-generation of WP-Table Reloaded. It is also by Tobias Bäthge and thus Alex Rabe’s WP-Table has now become even better! Many thanks to Tobias for his hard work!

  • First post?

    A typical first post for any blog. It’s probably a good idea to keep this short and sweet, but as the title of the blog suggests, this ‘site’ will be dedicated to tips and snippets relating to WordPress.

    It’s actually quite addictive hanging around on the WordPress Forums (especially the Plugins and Hacks part!) as people ask some very interesting questions there, which often make me stop and think – so is there already a solution?

    In some ways, I wish I was fluent in PHP and all that jazz, but perhaps this makes one more dedicated towards searching for a solution, rather than coding something from the ground up.

    Anyway, still want to say a big thank you to all the plugin authors (and people on the forums!) for offering such great solutions to problems! 🙂 Hopefully this site will be of some help to others as well.