Tag Archives: WordPress

Programmatically Checking if a WordPress Plugin is Installed

Oct 7, 2009 by Matt | Posted in WordPress One Comment

When writing a WordPress plugin, it can sometimes be helpful to tell if another plugin is active or not, whether to prevent conflicts or to extend another plugin that you require as a dependency.

Fortunately, there’s a conditional function built into WordPress for just this task.

if ( is_plugin_active('the-plugin/the-plugin.php') ) {
 //do stuff
}

The is_plugin_active() function accepts the relative path to the plugin (from the wp-content/plugins directory) as an argument, and returns either TRUE or FALSE.

Poll: What is Your Take on Commercial WP Plugins?

Oct 6, 2009 by Matt | Posted in Monetization 4 Comments

Gravity Forms has had some good success selling their (GPL) plugin in recent weeks, and the Shopp plugin has been going for awhile, too. I, myself, have plans to “go commercial” sometime in the coming months as well.

I’d like your opinion on the slow, but definite growth of paid WordPress plugins. Are you glad that developers are finally getting serious about developing and supporting plugins for the long term, and making a business of it? I am.

Commercial WordPress plugins...

  • ...are a great idea. It's nice to see serious businesses centered around extending WordPress. (71%, 10 Votes)
  • ...ruin WordPress for everyone! Everything should be free! (29%, 4 Votes)

Total Voters: 14

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Note: If you’re reading this in an RSS aggregator, you may have to click through to see the poll.

Personally, I think commercial plugins will greatly increase the quality of available WP plugins, just as has happened with themes.

SimplePie Ceases Development

Oct 2, 2009 by Matt | Posted in Coding One Comment

The developers behind the SimplePie RSS parser (the de facto standard for PHP RSS parsing) have announced that they are ending their work developing the project.

…effective immediately, we are ceasing development of SimplePie and shutting down the project. We will shortly be pushing all code to GitHub. The mailing list will continue to serve users for the time being, but my sincerest hope is that someone will take up the charge to fork SimplePie, fix all of its issues, and continue on with this project that’s been such a huge part of my life for the past 5 years.

WP Tavern pointed out that WordPress recently incorporated SimplePie into the core for anything related to RSS parsing (such as Dashboard and sidebar widgets). This means it’s in the WordPress project should definitely be keeping an eye on this issue.

I think that either the SimplePie community needs to take it upon themselves to continue development, or fork the project with long-term intentions. (Perhaps the Automattic people could create a fork and maintain it along with WordPress?)

EDIT: Ryan McCue, an ex developer of SimplePie, has created a new fork and he and Matt Mullenweg are trying to pick up the SimplePie domain name. (Mullenweg has offered to pay for hosting and domain renewals.) So, the short story is: development of SimplePie will continue.

Poll: Have You Ever Bought a Premium Theme?

Sep 18, 2009 by Matt | Posted in WordPress No Comments

Here’s an interesting question: Have you ever paid for a WordPress theme? Be it Thesis or a more traditional “design-oriented” theme, have you ever paid for a pre-made theme, rather than making one yourself, hiring someone to do it for you, or simply downloading a free theme?

Have you ever paid for a premium WordPress theme?

  • Yes (41%, 16 Votes)
  • No, I make my own themes (31%, 12 Votes)
  • No, I just use free themes (28%, 11 Votes)
  • No, I hire a designer (0%, 0 Votes)

Total Voters: 39

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WordPress Theme of the Month: Visiting Card

Sep 14, 2009 by Matt | Posted in WordPress 2 Comments

Famous designer TimVanDamme designed his mini site and everyone praised it a lot for unique, beautiful concept. Usually it happens when you are really active on social media sites, you blog less. And his design was perfect solution for those who have a domain name but don’t need/want much content on the website.

The concept has caught on of late, and I quite like the idea. If you’re looking to create something similar yourself, but you want a plug-and-play solution, check out the free Visiting Card theme by PremiumThemes.net.

visiting-card-theme

The theme puts your social media links (and links to your websites if you’re so inclined) front-and-center, while having dynamic tabs along the top for content such as an About page for contact details.

Are Premium WordPress Themes Going Out of Style?

Sep 11, 2009 by Matt | Posted in WordPress No Comments

There has been some interesting discussion about WPblogger about premium WordPress themes. The author of the original post says “Premium WordPress Themes are Dead.”

Ben Cook suggests that people aren’t really interested in buying an individual theme so much as a highly configurable theme that acts more like a framework. A foundation that they can build upon, tweaking it to look how they want through a backend menu. Essentially, Thesis.

Sure it’s nice that companies like iThemes keep turning out new themes, but they’re fighting a losing battle.

People don’t want to purchase a different theme for every new site they create or every time they want to redesign their site. We want a framework that allows us to make a vast array of design changes as quickly and easily as possible.

Personally, I don’t believe this to be the case. I’m not really a Thesis fan myself, preferring to build my sites’ themes “the real way.” I think people still want to buy themes for the design, not just for a tweakable platform. That’s not to say people don’t want customization, far from it. WooThemes is a prime example. Their themes are primarily design-oriented, but they have plenty of customization options in the backend, albeit less than Thesis. I believe that the two points will converge in the future, bringing more and more customization options to more design-oriented themes.

Though I wonder if frameworks like Hybrid and Thematic will gain similar customization options to Thesis, bringing about a similar result. With customization options in the core of a theme framework like Thematic, and a large community of child theme makers, you have the convergence point I predict, no?

Gravity Forms

Sep 8, 2009 by Matt | Posted in WordPress No Comments

Gravity Forms

There has been a lot of talk about a new WordPress plugin called Gravity Forms lately. It’s one of the first major premium WordPress plugins, costing $39 for a single-site license and $99 for multi-site.

What does it do? It’s a bit like the ever-popular cForms plugin, but with a lot more polish, and plenty more features. The interface is a breeze to use, letting you create new forms with ease. You just click a button to add a new form field, then you can adjust it live in the form preview.

Continue reading →

Security Alert: Upgrade to WordPress 2.8.4

Sep 7, 2009 by Matt | Posted in WordPress No Comments

Are you running a version of WordPress prior to 2.8.4? If so, you should upgrade now. There’s a major attack going around that targets older versions of WordPress. Lorelle has the full details.

There are two clues that your WordPress site has been attacked.

There are strange additions to the pretty permalinks, such as example.com/category/post-title/%&(%7B$%7Beval(base64_decode($_SERVER%5BHTTP_REFERER%5D))%7D%7D|.+)&%/. The keywords are “eval” and “base64_decode.”

The second clue is that a “back door” was created by a “hidden” Administrator. Check your site users for “Administrator (2)” or a name you do not recognize.

In case once wasn’t enough, upgrade your copy of WordPress if the version is less than 2.8.4. This security flaw, of which details are lacking, applies to any version of WP prior to 2.8.4, and any site running the older software is at risk.

WP-LESS: Leaner CSS For WordPress

Aug 28, 2009 by Matt | Posted in WordPress One Comment

You may have heard of LESS. It’s a Ruby Gem that allows you to write CSS files with variables, nested rules, operations, and “mixins,” which are akin to custom functions in a programming language. The LESS files are compiled into pure CSS before going into use.

WP-LESS is a plugin that, using the lessphp library, brings LESS to WordPress. I have yet to try it for myself, but it certainly sounds intriguing.

The plugin watches for edits to your LESS source code, then recompiles and caches it as plain CSS, which is served up to your visitors.

LESS

Turn Off Caching in the BuySellAds WordPress Plugin!

Aug 26, 2009 by Matt | Posted in WordPress No Comments

If you use Thaya Kareeson’s BuySellAds WordPress plugin, turn off the caching feature! To do so, set the JavaScript cache time setting to zero.

BuySellAds Plugin Cache Setting

This is because Buy Sell Ads network is now also tracking the number of times the ads themselves get requested (not just the tracking pixel). If the ads are cached on your server, then they are not going to count in your Buy Sell Ads statistics whenever it is being displayed (lowering your impression count).

The caching mechanism is being taken out currently, but in the meantime you should simply disable it.