How To Add the “Add Media” Button When Using wp.editor.initialize()

February 17th, 2023

This is just a quick note for anyone who runs into the same issue. If you use wp.editor.initialize() to dynamically create an instance of the WordPress visual editor, the editor will be missing the “Add Media” button by default. To fix that, you need to do two things: 1. Add mediaButtons: true to the setting […]

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WordPress Hook Order

November 11th, 2022

I’ve made a site that shows actions and filters executed during different WordPress requests. Why? When I’m writing a plugin, I sometimes need to know not just what a hook does, but also when it runs in relation to other hooks. The official WordPress documentation has a list of common actions, but it’s out of […]

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Plugin Updates: Securing Download Links

March 19th, 2013

Ever since the release of the Plugin Update Checker library, one of the most common questions asked has been this: “How can I secure my download links so that only users who have purchased my plugin can download an update?” In this post I’ll try to answer that question in the context of using WP […]

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WordPress Update Server

March 12th, 2013

It’s been a long time coming, but I’ve finally released an external update API server for WordPress plugins and themes. Check it out on GitHub. This is the server component to my plugin update checker and theme update checker client libraries. Features Provide updates for private or commercial plugins and themes. From the users’ perspective, the […]

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How to Pre-Select a Category for a New Post

November 20th, 2012

Lets say you have a category called “X”, and you want to create a link which when clicked will take the user to the “Add New Post” screen with the “X” category already selected. This could be used to simplify posting for non-technical users, or even as a way to implement “poor-man’s custom post types” […]

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Magic Quotes in WordPress, and How To Get Rid of Them

November 13th, 2012

One thing that many developers are not aware of is that WordPress automatically adds magic quotes to request variables. This means that all quotes, backslashes and null-byte characters will be escaped with a backslash. Even if you disable magic quotes in php.ini, WordPress will apply them to $_GET, $_POST, $_COOKIE and other superglobals anyway. If […]

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Plugin Update Checker 1.2 Released

October 30th, 2012

After a long delay, a new version of my PluginUpdateChecker library is finally ready for release. Read on to find out what’s new, or go straight to the download page. For those of you not familiar with this library, here’s a short summary: You can use it to add automatic update support to any WordPress plugin. Especially […]

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Tell Your Users Where Your Plugin Puts Its Menu Pages

October 23rd, 2012

There’s one thing that always annoys me when installing new plugins: No matter how popular or obscure the plugin, the first few seconds (or minutes) are usually wasted on trying to figure out where it put its settings page. We’ve all been there. Trawling the admin menu, looking for that elusive link that will actually […]

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How To Add Separators To The Admin Menu

October 16th, 2012

As you may already know, WordPress stores top-level menus in a global $menu array. The array indexes correspond to menu positions, and each array item contains the properties of a single menu – the menu title, required capability, URL, and so on. Separator items are structured just like normal menus, except they also have a […]

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How To Hide WordPress Plugins From Some Users

October 9th, 2012

You can use the undocumented all_plugins filter to control what plugins will show up on the “Plugins” page. WordPress applies this filter to the list of all installed plugins just before sorting it into “active”, “inactive”, “update available” and other categories and displaying it to the user. The list of plugins is an array indexed […]

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10+ Great Plugins For Debugging And Development

October 2nd, 2012

WordPress Console Adds an interactive PHP console (REPL) to the WordPress admin. You can run arbitrary PHP code and access any function, class or variable defined by WordPress or active plugins. Amazing for debugging and exploration. Note: At the time of this writing, the plugin directory listing says this plugin is only “compatible up to […]

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8 Useful Snippets For Working With WordPress Hooks

September 25th, 2012

Add your hook before or after another hook Sometimes you need to ensure your function will get executed before or after another function that’s attached to the same hook (e.g. to fix a plugin conflict). The most reliable way to do this is to use has_action() to get the priority of the other hook and […]

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Top 100 WordPress Plugin Authors (Updated)

September 17th, 2012

I had some free time this weekend, so I built an automatically updated list of Top 100 WordPress plugin developers. The rankings are based on the number of times each developers’ plugins have been downloaded from the WordPress.org plugin directory. A short PHP script updates the list several times per day. Check it out. Bonus: Compare […]

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How To Remove Anonymous Object And Anonymous Function Hooks

September 11th, 2012

If you’re at all familiar with WordPress development, you already know how to remove a normal hook: just call remove_action or remove_filter and pass it the hook name, the name of the hook callback you want to remove and the priority. But what if the callback has no fixed name because it’s an anonymous function […]

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20+ Useful But Often Overlooked Utility Functions In WordPress

September 4th, 2012

Today I bring you 20+ handy built-in WordPress functions. Some of them you may already know and use every day, while others you’ve probably never heard of as they’re usually not mentioned in WP tutorials or even the WordPress Codex. Being aware of these functions and knowing how to use them will save you time […]

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Fixing “You do not have sufficient permissions to access this page” Errors

August 21st, 2012

Chances are, you’ve run into this WordPress error at one time or another: That’s a pretty unhelpful error message, isn’t it? Not only does it tell you nothing about what the exact problem is or how it occurred, but it’s also sometimes just plain wrong. Pretty often, it has nothing to do with insufficient permissions. […]

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WordPress Sample Content For Testing

August 8th, 2012

For all your theme testing and plugin development needs, here’s a huge list of WordPress sample content collections and dummy content generators. Export Files See How to import WordPress export files for instructions on how to import the files listed in this section on your site. Theme Unit Test Data from WordPress.org 22 Posts Sticky post […]

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Automatic Versioning Of JS And CSS Files In WordPress

July 30th, 2012

If you’re a WordPress developer, this will probably sound familiar: you make a change to  one of your scripts or style sheets, reload the page you’re working on to see the result, and… everything stays the same. Of course, after a moment of confusion, you realise that you didn’t update the $version argument in your […]

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How To Use The Default Admin Menu Icons In Your Plugin

July 10th, 2012

As you probably know, you can use the add_menu_page() function to create a top level admin menu for your WordPress plugin or theme. This function allows you to specify a menu icon by passing an image URL as the $icon_url argument. But what if you want to use one of the default admin icons – […]

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List Of WordPress Plugin Frameworks

June 26th, 2012

For plugin developers desiring an easier way to perform common tasks, a little more structure in their code, or perhaps even a dash of MVC goodness, here is a list of WordPress plugin frameworks. This list is intended to be comprehensive. If you find an actively maintained plugin framework that’s not listed here, let me […]

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How To Create A Table Of Contents Shortcode

June 19th, 2012

It’s time for another WordPress plugin development tutorial 🙂 In this post, I will provide a step-by-step explanation of how to create a WordPress plugin that lets the user add an automatically generated table of contents (TOC) to their posts by using a simple shortcode. The completed plugin will support the following syntax: For example, […]

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How To Easily Stop Your Site From Being Loaded In A Frame

June 7th, 2012

As of WordPress 3.1.3, it’s really easy to prevent unscrupulous web developers from displaying your site in a frame. Just add this one-liner to your functions.php file: Now any other site that tries to load your WP blog in a frame will get this instead: (The actual error message will vary depending on the browser. […]

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Adding A Notification Bubble To An Admin Menu Item

May 3rd, 2012

You’ve probably seen the small notification bubble that shows up in the Dashboard menu when a new update is available. Here’s how you can add a menu bubble to your own custom menu: The resulting menu will look like this:

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Security Tip: Block Direct Access To Plugin PHP Files

April 27th, 2012

Plugins are usually loaded and executed along with the rest of WordPress. However, since each plugin is physically just set of .php, .css and .js files, it is also possible for someone to bypass the normal load order and execute the plugin files directly.  They just need to type the right URL in the address […]

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Cleaning Up Stale Transients

April 17th, 2012

WordPress transients are very similar to DB options but they also support expiration times. The Transients API documentation states: Our transient will die naturally of old age once $expiration seconds have passed since we last ran set_transient() What you might not know if you haven’t explored the source code of the transients API is that […]

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How To Convert Your WordPress Blog To A Static Site

February 2nd, 2011

Recently, I found this old question on WordPress StackExchange: I am starting a new WordPress blog, and no longer updating an old one. […] How can I lock the installation of WordPress down so I don’t need to maintain it? I have seen someone suggest making a static version, which sounds like a lot of […]

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Lazy-Load Avatars

January 31st, 2011

In my previous post, The Quest For Speed, I mentioned that lazy-loading avatars is a good way to improve your site performance: The overwhelming majority of visitors never leave a comment. Chances are, most don’t even scroll down to the comments section. So why waste their time and bandwidth by loading avatars that they’ll never […]

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The Quest For Speed

January 18th, 2011

A little more than a month ago, I logged into my Google Webmaster Tools account and to check if Google had detected any crawl errors or any other problems with my site. Finding everything in good order, I was just about to close the browser tab when I noticed a sidebar link that had somehow […]

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Where Did That JS/CSS Come From?

December 14th, 2010

If you run a WordPress site, chances are that you use plugins. If you use plugins, chances are that some of those plugins add their JavaScript or CSS files to your pages. And if there’s lots of JS/CSS on your pages, chances are that your site isn’t as fast as it could be, and that […]

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Extracting Plugin Metadata

September 15th, 2010

Have you ever dreamed of extracting useful metadata from WordPress plugins? Probably you haven’t. But if you ever need a way to parse a plugin’s readme.txt, or want to simplify metadata generation for the custom update checker, here’s a couple of utility functions that may come in handy. I originally wrote them for internal use, […]

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