This is an annoying bug that has plagued WordPress for as long as I can remember, it’s rare that I run into it because I rarely need to have individual parts of a site control the number of posts I need to display with paging.
The Problem: I have a custom post type called “project” as well as a blog section which just uses the default “post” post type. For projects I enabled archive support and then created a custom archive file called archive-project.php. I want to limit the number of projects being displayed per page to just 1 without changing the value in the WordPress reading options screen because I need that for the blog section, so naturally you’d expect to be able to do the following before the loop.
When I say popular I mean 17,000 visitors a month which to me is a lot of traffic for a blog I sometimes don’t update for a week or two at a time, I am of course talking about the music blog Kill Hipsters of which I designed and built all by myself and I’m not even a designer. In the space of roughly a year and a half I’ve managed to take Kill Hipsters from just another music blog to something decent without any promotion or effort, just commitment.
A while ago I wrote a blog post comparing Codeigniter with FuelPHP (a framework that was spurn from some popular Codeigniter developers), that article has since become outdated so I thought I would do a follow-up to my original post to see if anything has changed and the gap has been lessened between the two frameworks.
Since I wrote that post I’ve used FuelPHP for quite a few personal client projects in place of WordPress. I’ve also used Laravel and even attempted to revisit Kohana which I’ve never been a fan of in the time-frame since writing the original comparison.
It’s no secret that adding in custom fields functionality to a premium theme (if you’re a premium theme developer) is sometimes a pain in the ass, especially if you’re not using some kind of third party custom fields framework.
The Advanced Custom Fields plugin for WordPress gives you unrivalled custom fields functionality for an alarmingly low price of $0. There is also the option of buying addons for the plugin which cost $25 each and allow for unlimited use/bundling with a plugin.
WordPress already has an in-built function for determining if the current page is using a particular page template using the function “is_page_template()” while this function definitely serves a purpose.
Sometimes in an instance where you are using one loop file as opposed to multiple loop files you want to check if you’re on a page that is using a page template but don’t care what type of page template it is, this is where the function I’ve created below comes in.
WordPress is an amazing free content management system but it is also the target of every single kind of attack you can think of, it’s the Windows of the open source content management world. While it’s impossible to prevent attacks completely, you can mitigate and track bad activity. Not only can you secure your blog but there are a plethora of plugins out there that make your life a whole lot easier instead of reinventing the wheel each time.
So you’ve just installed a shiny new copy of WordPress via command line on your even shinier Linode box and the helpful guides Linode provide for setting up a database and your initial WordPress install went well. If you’re used to installing plugins from within WordPress instead of manually you most likely would have run into the issue of WordPress asking you for FTP connection details to install the plugin.
I can hear the Rails purists slicing open the soft flesh of their vitamin D-less wrists now. Are you crazy? PHP sucks, lets all build applications using Ruby on Rails because it is after all the better language right? This is not a language debate, this isn’t about one language being better than the other.
Recently I’ve had this obsession with browsing through various RoR projects on Github and came to a realistion about a week ago. The Codeigniter PHP framework which I am an avid user of (as most of you know) is based on the same kind of structure as Ruby on Rails, so I got to thinking — why not learn other RoR projects?
With all of this App.net talk and Twitter fucking over third party developers I keep seeing comments like, “what about Identi.ca?” and “We don’t need a new service, Identi.ca already exists so lets just use that” first and foremost Identi.ca is the biggest steaming pile of shit you will ever lay your eyes upon and use.
My first thoughts upon visiting Identi.ca’s site are, “This site looks like shit” functionality aside, it’s the UX that matters in my opinion. People won’t use your service if it looks like junk, especially when sites like Twitter look far more attractive and user friendly. If you’re going to clone Twitter, do it right not half-assed and gross looking like a salad without dressing, it’s a salad but it’s not an awesome salad with tasty and zesty home made dressing like Twitter.
I love Google Chrome, it’s been my browser for a very long time now especially since Firefox failed to address the severe memory leaking issues it has had for years and only just recently did something about it.
One thing that taints the greatness of Google Chrome is the embedded copy of Flash that it comes installed with. The embedded version which has the filename, “pepflashplayer.dll” doesn’t work.
It seems the issue which has been one that comes and goes with each update has been happening for the last couple of weeks or so. Flashplayer uses minimum 25% of CPU, usually 50% and for some it uses 100% CPU. You can fix the issue by disabling the bundled version in Chrome via the chrome://plugins page but this only temporarily fixes the problem.