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WP-DBManager is a handy plugin that can, among other things, make periodic database backups and send them to a specified email address. I installed it on this blog months ago and up until a week ago everything was working perfectly. Then one day the backup emails simply stopped coming. What Went Wrong? A quick check […]

When it comes to creating and updating database tables, WordPress has what appears to be a very handy utility function – dbDelta. In theory, this function can take one or more CREATE TABLE queries, compare them to the tables already in the database and automatically figure out how to bring them up to date, adding […]

Continuing from yesterday’s post about adding custom settings to the “Screen Options” panel in WP, I will now show you how to add your own buttons alongside “Screen Options” and “Help”. But first, here are a few screenshots – to whet your appetite, so to speak. Want those neat buttons in your plugin? Read on. […]

The Screen Options pull-down is the perfect place for those “rarely used but nice to have” settings. It’s unobtrusive and saves screen space. Some plugins could even put all of their settings in this panel and avoid cluttering the Dashboard menu with yet another “Settings” page. While Screen Options were already present in older WP […]

WordPress has numerous hooks for filtering posts, comments, feed items and more, but no built-in filter that would let you intercept and modify an entire page. However, you can do that fairly easily with PHP’s output buffering functions. Today I’m going to show you how. Crash-Course In Output Buffering As the name implies, output buffering […]