web development & photography by phil banks
Fancy sending your WordPress site back (or forward) in time for a day? Thanks to the multitude of filters it only takes a few lines of code. In this example I’m just going to filter the_time(), but in a future post I will also show you how to put together a more comprehensive function that… Read more Sending your WordPress posts back / forward in time
Jump to the bottom if you want to go straight to the script I recently set up a new VPS on DigitalOcean and chose to manage the web stack and sites with EasyEngine. I’m very impressed with EashEngine, but the fact it makes deploying sites so easy shows up how much overhead there is in… Read more Managing multiple WordPress installs with bash and WP CLI
WordPress has a handy get_terms() function that retrives a list of all the terms for a taxonomy – this is great if you are, for example, building a <select> box for filtering a custom post type listing page. But there’s one big problem, if you use this on a shared taxonomy, it will show all… Read more Get terms from a shared taxonomy used on a single post type
Garlic.js is a great library – it uses localStorage to save the state of forms, so if your users accidentally close the tab or browser before submitting, their entry isn’t lost. This works seemlessly for almost all form elements, however WYSIWYG editors like TinyMCE present problems. Luckily it isn’t hard to fix – there’s a… Read more Using Garlic.js with TinyMCE WYSIWYG editor
There are two things that designers will throw out quite often – box grids with rows, and repeating background colours. Sounds easy – but go and try it within the WordPress loop (or any other). It can get ugly quickly, but the solution is actually simple: Modulus. In PHP it’s the % sign. To see… Read more Uses of modulus – rows for grids and background colours
I decided to write a short follow up from the post from last week about the performance of this site, but framed more as a “how to quickly speed up my site”. Even if you can’t or don’t want to go down the line of changing themes (or writing your own), profiling plugins to find… Read more Performance revisited – 3 easy steps to speed up your site
How many sites do you visit that are full of indecipherable jargon? Littered with cringe worthy stock images, confusing layouts, and slow to load? Beautiful but functionally flawed. How many of the sites you’ve built are like that? Own up – we’ve all done it… (although hopefully not ticking all those boxes at once!) We’re… Read more Accessibility fundamentals. AKA building, designing and writing for real people.
Custom Creative has had a bit of a makeover. Now my time is largely spent on projects at Helpful Technology I have decided to move the focus of this site from marketing my services to the blog content. With this comes a renewed commitment to write more… good intentions at least. While restructuring the site… Read more New look – a focus on text and speed
Recently at Helpful Technology I was working on the new Foreign Office Blogs website – collapsing their massive WordPress multisite instance down into a standard single site install. When I say massive… it was 161 sites with 448 users spread across ~4500(!) database tables and nearly 5GB of files. Oh, and it’s multilingual too. One… Read more Showing an Author only their comments in WordPress
I’ve been using Cloudflare recently and overall it’s extremely straightforward, but there was one small fly in the ointment – the firewall settings. Currently you can only enter single IPv4 addresses at once (ranges like x.x.x.x-x aren’t valid either). Luckily they have a very easy to use API so I put together a quick form… Read more Bulk updating Cloudflare’s firewall rules