web development & photography by phil banks
Excluding posts (or custom post types) from search results when they meet certain criteria is easy in theory. Just use the pre_get_posts action to modify the WP_Query arguments used to get the results. However there are a couple of small pitfalls to watch out for. Below are brief explanations and snippets for excluding posts based… Read more Exclude certain posts from search
I often run one off reports for clients directly from the MySQL database behind their (normally WordPress) websites. Most are straightforward, perhaps requiring data from the wp_posts and wp_postmeta tables. However it get's a lot more complicated if term data is needed too. This is because determining which terms belong to an object, what taxonomy… Read more Selecting title, meta and multiple term names with MySQL
Let's get a list of all duplicate postcodes (could be any string of course) out of a specific field in the database. This could be handled in PHP but, with a decently spec'd server especially, it's quicker to handle it in the database. The basic query looks like this: (this example is from WordPress but… Read more Ignore spaces when group MySQL query results
Regularly when we launch a new site we also put up a static scrape of the old site so that users can access content that has been removed from the new site. Commonly this is old news content that the client want’s to keep available for a transition period, but doesn’t want cluttering up the… Read more Case insensitivity on Apache servers
Advanced Custom Fields (ACF) is a great WordPress plugin for adding custom meta fields. It has a very useful relationship field that can be used to denote a connection from one post to another – importantly this is a one-way relationship. When you are on PostA you can generate a list of all the posts… Read more Reverse relationship query for last ACF repeater sub-field
A typical PHP snippet to create a Zip file looks something like this: $zip = new ZipArchive(); $zipname = ‘package_name.zip’; if ( true === $zip->open( $zipname, ZipArchive::CREATE ) ) { $zip->addFromString( ‘file_name.txt’, $file_contents ); $zip->close(); header( ‘Content-Type: application/zip’ ); header( ‘Content-disposition: attachment; filename=’ . $zipname ); header( ‘Content-Length: ‘ . filesize( $zipname ) ); readfile(… Read more Avoiding permissions problems when creating Zip files in PHP
One gap in the abilities of WP CLI at the moment is the ability to modify an already existing wp-config.php file. v1.2 introduced the –force flag to overwrite an existing one, but that is the sledgehammer option – so I started working on it myself. I have put a very initial version on GitHub and… Read more Extending WP CLI – wp config update
VPNs and proxies are great – but almost always limited to funnelling all traffic through them. But what if you want to access only a single site/domain without affecting the rest of your browsing? Perhaps to access a staging site not publically available. While what I discuss below could be used as a privacy measure,… Read more Automatic SOCKS proxy for a single domain on Mac
Updated 02 – 05 – 18: plugins object is now returned as an array. On a whim this May bank holiday, tucked up on the sofa watching movies, I decided to create a plugin to display my favourited plugins on WordPress.org. After a bit of digging I found you can use the plugins_api() function and… Read more Displaying you WordPress.org favourite plugins
Just to be clear – there are no affiliate links, sponsored content or anything similar in this post. Recently I started taking the JavaScript for WordPress course and would highly recommend it. Not long after I received an email from them promoting their affiliate system – help advertise the course and you get a kick-back.… Read more Affiliated or sponsored content – disclaimers, ethics and styling