web development & photography by phil banks
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
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
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’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