The current version of my WordPress SEO plugin has a new feature: it supports post type archives in several places. It also has a bug: if your version of WordPress (ie. everything before 3.1) doesn’t support post type archives, it’ll break. Now, this is annoying and something I will fix in the next release, but…
Latest Posts
Separating frontend and admin code
In most cases, your plugin has stuff it needs to do in the admin area. It probably also has stuff it needs to do in the frontend. These two never happen at the same time, so you can actually separate the two. The easiest way of separating frontend and backend code is having a set…
Optional Styles
A WordPress plugin or theme should never have to output inline styles, especially not in the frontend. Inline styles will prevent some doctypes from validating and they are actually a factor to slow down your page loads. If your plugin outputs a piece of code that needs styling, add an ID to the output and…
Professional WordPress Plugin Development
As you might have noticed I’ve recently started reviewing WordPress plugins. I do this for free, because I think both users and developers benefit from peer reviews of plugins. I’m not saying all my plugins are perfect, they’re not. I try hard though and if someone reviews my plugin I’ll happily learn from what they…
Using a namespace for your functions and classes
An often made mistake by WordPress developers is to use to generic function and class names. For instance, if you’re building a plugin to do with YouTube, using a class name “Youtube” is bound to cause issues: if a user has multiple plugins dealing with Youtube, he or she could very well end up with…
WordPress HTTP API
Why you should want to know about the WordPress HTTP API? Well, some WordPress installs may have CURL installed for instance, others may not. On some installs you’re allowed to do file_get_contents to external URLs, on others you’re not. If you’re relying on these features to work, your plugin might not work for a lot…
Power User Tip: Custom Post Type Feeds & Google
Not many people realize the power that WordPress gives them by making feeds for everything on the site. If you register a custom post type it gets a feed by default, so for my new WordPress Plugin Review section, which is built on a custom post type for plugin reviews, there’s a custom feed here:…
Why WordPress and some of my plugins require PHP 5.2
WordPress 3.2 will require PHP 5.2 or higher, as a result of which I’ve decided that my WordPress SEO plugin, currently still in beta, will also require PHP 5.2 and I will probably start having the same requirements for future version of my other plugins. This saves me time coding and testing against a version…
WordPress Plugin Review
I’ve decided to start doing plugin reviews on this blog, I get so many questions from people asking “is this a good plugin”, “is that a good one”, “can I trust that plugin”. It’ll probably help a lot more people if I start doing these reviews publicly. So, to start this, I’ve created a form…
How Facebook likes help prevent duplicate content
Duplicate content is one of the biggest issues in SEO. I wrote an article about common causes and solutions of duplicate content recently and it was quite well received, which helped me to understand that lots of people still suffer from it. One of the issues I’ve always found with explaining the issue to site…
