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 […] Continue Reading…


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 […] Continue Reading…


8 Great Tools For Working With JSON

November 6th, 2012

JSONLint – Validate Your JSON

JSONLint is an online JSON validator and formatter. It will check your JSON for syntax errors and format it with proper indentation and line breaks to make it more human-readable (this can be very handy when analysing complex JSON documents). You can either paste your […] Continue Reading…


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 […] Continue Reading…


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 […] Continue Reading…