Marcel's weblog

If you have been traveling to developing countries, like India, you may have experienced that using WordPress on slow connections and/or slow computers can be an exercise in patience. To solve this problem I wrote another new WordPress plugin “Light Post” that allows you to publish and edit posts a lot quicker in such circumstances. The price is that you can only edit HTML and that you only have a basic set of features available, like choosing the title, category and tags. Availability of JavaScript and Flash is not required, but when JavaScript is enabled you can upload and insert images. To prevent loading of the chunky WordPress administration panel, the plugin redirects the browser directly after logging in to an alternate post management screen outside the normal WordPress environment (this can be turned off with a setting). Just one click brings you back to the normal WordPress rich edit screen and visa versa (look in the ‘Publish’ meta box for a link).

Install now

Recently I installed the simple, but beautiful Suffusion theme by Sayontan Sinha. This theme is using the funtions.php file extensively, the same place where my shortcode definitions were stored. Sayontan will probably fix this in the near future by including a custom functions.php file from another location. I also used some PHP code in two sidebar widgets that was executed by the Exec-PHP plugin.

I thought, why not use a plugin to define shortcodes and execute PHP code snippets? I couldn’t find one, so I wrote one myself. You can find it in the WordPress repository as Shortcode Exec PHP.

Example shortcode to print your age:

extract(shortcode_atts(array('birthdate' => 'Jan 1, 1980'), $atts));
return floor((time() - strtotime($birthdate)) / (60 * 60 * 24 * 365.2425));

If you named the shortcode age, you can execute it in pages, posts, comments, widgets and/or RSS feeds like this:

[age birthdate="Mar 20, 2010"]

Please, use the forum for questions, bug reports and feature requests.

If you know a nice shortcode, you can leave it in the forum too.

Install now

Listing posts

If you want to list posts or pages on a post, page or in a widget, you can use the code below.

// Prevent recursion
global $outerPost;
if ($outerPost)
	return '';
 
// Parse parameters
extract(shortcode_atts(array('query' => 'post_type=post'), $atts));
$query = html_entity_decode($query);
 
// Create new post loop
global $post;
$outerPost = $post;
$my_query = new WP_Query($query);
while ($my_query->have_posts()) {
	$my_query->the_post();
	setup_postdata($my_query->post);
 
	// Process post
	echo '<em>'; the_title(); echo '</em>';
	echo '<div style="font-size: xx-small; border: 1px solid;">';
	the_content();
	echo '<div>';
}
$post = $outerPost;
$outerPost = null;
setup_postdata($post);

Example usage:

[list_posts query="author_name=marcel"]

Look here for possible query parameters.
Be sure the shortcode option ‘Output echoed‘ is checked.

Using forms

Example of form handling:

if (isset($_POST['form_select']))
	echo 'You selected ' . $_POST['form_select'] . '<br />';
?>
<form method="post">
<select name="form_select">
<option selected="selected" value="1">one</option>
<option value="2">two</option>
<option value="3">three</option>
</select>
<input type="submit" value="Submit" />
</form>

Be sure the shortcode option ‘Output echoed‘ is checked.

For various reasons it is sometimes handy to have short URLs to my posts. After reading this post and some surfing around I selected Cli.gs as short URL service.

I couldn’t find a simple WordPress plugin to create and display Cli.gs short URLs, so I wrote Cli.gs and Tweet. As the name suggests this plugin can send a customizable Twitter message containing the created short URL too. This plugin can also inserts code into the page header for short url auto-discovery.

There is no setup required if you only want to automatically create short URLs when saving posts and display them above your posts. If you want to send Twitter messages, you just have to enter your Twitter user name and password. The appearance can be modified by some settings and/or by modifying a style sheet.

This plugin requires PHP 4.3.0 only.

I wanted to show the number of visits per post using the statistics recorded by the CyStat plugin. This appeared to be quite simple, because there exists a suitable template function. I just added the following line to my WordPress theme to make it working:

<div><span>< ?php cystats_getPostVisitsByID($post->ID, $showmode=TRUE); ?> Visits</span></div>

For developing the website leren.arabisch.nu, I wanted to display the last date and time any page was updated. Because currently no plugin exists that can do this, I used the following shortcode definition:

add_shortcode('mb_last_modified', 'mb_last_modified_func');
 
function mb_last_modified_func($atts) {
	global $wpdb;
	$last_modified = $wpdb->get_var("SELECT MAX($wpdb->posts.post_modified) FROM $wpdb->posts WHERE $wpdb->posts.post_status = 'publish'");
	return date(get_option("date_format") . " " . get_option("time_format"), strtotime($last_modified));
}

If you want to use this shortcode, put the code in the file functions.php of your theme. Create this file if it does not exist; WordPress will automatically find and use it. After that you can use the shortcode [mb_last_modified] anywhere in your posts and/or pages. If you want to use the shortcode in a widget just like I did, you have to add the following line of code too:

add_filter('widget_text', 'do_shortcode');

After uploading an image to WordPress (version 2.3.3) the thumbnail of the image was not displaying. This was because the thumbnail had the wrong permissions (660). More people seem to have this problem. I fixed this problem by setting the permissions of the thumbnail after it has been move to its target.

The file to fix is wp-admin/includes/image.php. After inserting the following code at line 93 the problem is solved:

if (!chmod($thumbpath, 0644))
	$error = __( "Setting thumbnail permissions failed" );

Update: This problem has been solved in WordPress 2.5