Change localized strings in the WordPress admin
The other day, I ran into an interesting issue with a feature on a WordPress-powered site I was building for a client. Essentially, we're using the WordPress' default structure and functioning of posts, categories and tags in order to make it something different. Think of it like this lyrics site where categories are artist names and post titles are song titles. It's one of the reason WordPress implemented custom post types. Since the platform I'm building for this client doesn't really allow for other types of posts, I decided not to add a layer of posts on top of hiding the default things,
I wanted to rename the "Posts" menu in the WordPress admin.
In the example I've described above, I wanted to rename the "Posts" to "Songs" and "Categories" to "Artists". The problem with that is that those are hardcoded in the a WordPress file and no hooks are defined, so we can't dynamically change it. It's also useless to manipulate the $menu variable which contains the admin sidebar items since "Posts" is also displayed on pages and at a bunch of other places. So how to efficiently turn that into a different string without hacking up the core?
The solution I came up with was to use WordPress' built-in localization mechanism. When theme and plugin developers want to output a string, they can enclose it in the__('string'); function, which calls up a gettext parser to translate. I'm not a fan of the system, it obliges you to compile a new language file for every version of your theme/plugin - and add one more for every language. But it's what WordPress uses, so we'll deal with it.
Hacking WordPress: Introduction to custom plugins and advanced templating
For those of you who don't know (which may very well be all of you right now), I will be presenting a talk at WordCamp Montreal July 12th. The title of the presentation, if you haven't guessed, is "Hacking WordPress: Introduction to custom plugins and advanced templating". I'll explain how you can use your own plugins and functions to make your WordPress site sing. In other words, it will basically be a relatively improvised primer on the following things:
- Introduction to creating WordPress plugins
- Managing your sidebars and widgets
- Using WordPress' Codex and API documentation
- Hacking up your templates to use all the power provided by WordPress
If you're not registered yet, you have until July 9th to do so on EventBrite. For more information regarding WordPress Montreal 2009, check out the official site, mailing list, blog, Facebook group and Twitter account or see what's going on by looking up the #wcmtl tag.
WP-prettyPhoto Technical Information and Usage Instructions
Lots has changed since the last article I made about WP-prettyPhoto usage, and so it is time to revamp the instructions, explain new features and hopefully be a bit more thorough. First off, let me first mention the following thing: prettyPhoto is written by Stéphane Caron. Here are some related links to avoid repeating them throughout this article: Stéphane's blog, prettyPhoto's project page, prettyPhoto on GitHub, Stéphane on Twitter, WP-prettyPhoto at WordPress Extend, WP-prettyPhoto Support Forum.
Revision History: This article is intended to document the current WP-prettyPhoto (1.5.1) & prettyPhoto (2.5.2) versions.
Konami Code Hook for your WordPress blog!
Soooo... I was bored earlier today and decided to code a plugin just for kicks. So, lo and behold, I give you WP-Konami! Hey I never said it was useful. WP-Konami uses jQuery to add a hook listening for a Konami Code input sequence, and redirects successful sequences to a URL you specify in the options. You can get your site listed at Konami Code Sites once you have it installed, too!
Enjoy!
WP-prettyPhoto 1.2 released!
It's been a while since any activity has happened with prettyPhoto and WP-prettyPhoto. I was waiting for some changes to the prettyPhoto code to release a new version, and Stéphane Caron has released version 2.3 of his prettyPhoto jQuery plugin recently, so it was time to roll out a new WP-prettyPhoto version, 1.2, with all the changes and features that have been suggested since the last release. To skip the blah blah and go straight to downloading, head over to WordPress Extend.
Make your WordPress plugins use a different version of a bundled JavaScript library
I've recently coded my first WordPress plugin, for the fun of it. I've been using WordPress for some time, and I know PHP quite well, so I figured it'd be fun. WordPress has a weird/interesting way of being extendable. I won't go into too much technical details about that, but suffices to say that it's easy yet complicated to perform tasks you want to. Yeah, that weird.
All that being said, I upgraded my WordPress from 2.7 to 2.7.1 in the middle of coding some new features for the latest release of WP-prettyphoto, 1.1. That made me realize that updating WordPress' core also updates the installed JavaScript modules, namely jQuery (among many others). When I first coded WP-prettyphoto, when things weren't working I just replaced the jQuery I had with the latest official stable release and things worked fine. I didn't give it much thought. So when I updated WordPress, all hell broke loose and WP-prettyphoto was metaphorically crying in agony because jQuery wasn't man enough for it. I then tried performing the same manual updating procedure, and without really surprising anyone -- I was alone anyway -- WP-prettyphoto was back prettyfying my stuff like a starving fat kid eats a cheesecake.
