Posts Tagged ‘Wordpress’

SB Twitter Plugin

November 21st, 2009

Let’s get this straight, I hate Twitter with a vengence on account of it being a pointless waste of time. However, I can see that some people enjoy using it and also want to share their exciting lives with other people.

I have just had the need to develop a very basic plugin to put a Twitter widget (not a Wordpress widget) on a website. I didn’t see the point in forcing the user to put masses of code onto their page each time they wanted to include the widget so created a shortcode to do the same job.

I have rather imaginatively called it SB Twitter and it allows the user of a shortcode to put the Twitter flash widget onto a post or a page.

Usage

[sb_twitter name="you_user_name"]

You can optionally include width=”" and/or height=”" to manipulate the size of the box.

Download

The download file contains a readme which essentially says to upload the file to your plugins directory, activate it and use the shortcode provided.

SB Twitter (2.29 KB)

Screenshots

Example output of SB Twitter plugin

Spammers go funny!

October 7th, 2009

Just a quick one today but I had to comment on the hilarity of the steps that spammers take these days. It appears it has only been the last few weeks but a new technique I have noticed in my Wordpress spam has been jokes! The general content of the comments is still rubbish and they still link back to some malicious site however after the silly content is ‘here is a joke for you…’.

I must admit I haven’t enjoyed checking my spam comments as much as I have recently. Spammers, your comments arent getting through but they do deserve a good chuckle now and again. Here are a few I have had recently:

What geometric figure represents a lost parrot? A polygon – My Favourite

What goes black and white, black and white, black and white, boom? A nun falling down the stairs.

What is three feet long? A yard.

What do sea monsters eat for lunch? Fish and ships.

What lies at the bottom of the ocean and twitches? A nervous wreck.

Why do turkeys eat so little? Because they are always stuffed!

What do you get when you have a cow and a duck? Milk and quackers.

Why did the big moron fall off the roof and the little moron didn’t? Because he was a little more on.

Did you hear about the flasher who was thinking of retiring? He decided to stick it out for one more year!

What insect does well in school? A spelling bee.

What kind of bird can write? A penguin.

Why did the bald man put a bunny on his head? He wanted a full head of hare.

Why wouldn’t the bike move very fast?? It was too tired!!

What do the letters D.N.A. stand for? National Dyslexics Association.

What kind of shoes do lazy people wear? Loafers.

Why did the man put wheels on his rocking chair? He wanted to rock and roll.

What do you call cheese that isn’t yours? Nacho cheese.

Where does a bird go when it loses its tail? The retail store.

What do Eskimos get from sitting on the ice too long? Polaroids.

Did you hear about the red ship and the blue ship that collided? The survivors were marooned.

SB Pay Me

July 22nd, 2009

No that isn’t a request although feel free if you like :)

SB Pay Me is a new plugin that I have written along the same lines as those ‘Donate’ plugins you see everywhere. Well I decided that plugins like ‘Buy Me Beer’ and other similar donation type things weren’t really very professional so I wrote my own.

Features

The SB Pay Me plugin is designed to use the Wordpress shortcode API (using rather predictibly sb_pay_me as a hook) to provide a very simple to integrate payment form. It is fully templated so you can very easily decide how you want it to look. I have integrated a couple of Paypal images by default but you can add your own with no problems what so ever. The currency, payment amount and description are all configurable. The latter two can be setup to be edited by the user on your site instead of sending them to Paypal and getting them to do it there. The admin interface is fully commented and straightforward to allow even the most basic of users to be able to user it.

Example

Send Money
Just a working example of the plugin.
Amount GBP
Payment For

Screenshots

Default Template

Default Template

Modified Template

Modified Template

Admin Page

Admin Page

Download
I intend to release the plugin into the extend directory but at the time of writing it was down. Use this link to get the most recent version: SB Pay Me (10.27 KB)

Welcome Email Editor for Wordpress

April 20th, 2009

Something which regular readers might be aware of is that Wordpress has taken up most of my attention for the last year or so. It seems a very flexible Blogging engine come CMS that can almost deal with anything… almost. When you begin to use it you think wow great flashy AJAX everywhere but when you take a look at getting it work with a site you start to see where it’s downfalls lie. I am, however, not a Wordpress hater. In fact it’s the opposite, I love it! Wordpress really comes into it’s own with it’s fantastic plugin API. It means that anyone can write their own noddy (technical term :) ) bit of code and get it to do something in no time. Or so I thought…

One of the least customisable parts of Wordpress is the Login/Register process. The register page seems unmoveable without a bit of copy and pasting of the code and the email you get when you register is very dire indeed. There are no hooks for editing the welcome email text or Wordpress admin page for updating the from address or headers.

Well, as it stood I needed to be able to edit the welcome email and registration process for work so I went about writing a standalone registration system (to follow) and Welcome Email Editor. Unfortunately the copy/paste method was required for the registration widget but the Welcome Email Editor is done properly.

As there were no hooks for the welcome email I had to override the wp_new_user_notification function and write my own then simply converted it to use Options and wrote a nice admin page for it. Let me know if I can extend it at all or if you find any bugs..

Download Wordpress Welcome Email Editor (14.03 KB)

Admin Email Received

Admin Email Received

Admin Page for Plugin

Admin Page for Plugin

Email Received By User

Email Received By User