Sorting out capabilities for custom post types is tricky. At least I think it is – mainly because it’s hard to figure out what you’re supposed to be doing. Both the code and the documentation seem somewhat opaque to me.

So this is my attempt at unraveling how it works – together with some different ways you might want to set up your custom post types. And it is an attempt, so if I’ve got something wrong or I’m not making sense, please let me know…

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I find admin notices are a pain. Every time I write a plugin there comes a point where I think “I’ll just add in some notices to help the user” – and two hours later…

I kept thinking, “This should be so much easier”, so finally I sat down and wrote a class that I can use in any plugin to handle pretty much every admin notice scenario I could think of. It’s available on Github for download with how-to explanatory info and examples.

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Recently I was working on a child theme of Storefront, which by default changes the colour of whichever menu item you’re hovering over. If you hover over the example menu below you’ll see what I mean.

  • Home
  • Blog
  • Contact

Works fine, right? Then I decided I’d like the selected menu to show in a different colour to help users know where they are. So for example if you’re on the home page, the menu would look like this:

  • Home
  • Blog
  • Contact

But now when you hover over the menu items, there’s a problem. Move the cursor between Home and Blog and a small gap between the menu items is glaringly obvious. The same gap is between all the items actually, but it’s not noticeable in the first example.

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I belong to a small camera club – 30 to 40 members. Our projector was several years old and had a 1024 x 768 resolution. Time to upgrade, and it fell to me to do the research and make the choice.

So here’s what I learned in case it’s useful to other camera clubs. No doubt it’ll be out of date in a few months, but anyway…

We ended up buying the Epson EB-U32 for about £600 incl sales tax. It’s much much better than what we had.

Here are various things I wrote to our club committee about various considerations at the time. Much of what I am about to summarize was excellently presented by Projector Point, from whom we ended up buying the projector.

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Fire leaf

A wet afternoon in Eastbourne, looking for odd stuff to photograph. This was the best of the lot – a leaf half-submerged in a puddle, and the lights from a nearby shop-window giving it a neat look…

I’m using Fancybox as a lightbox on this site, which was working fine for individual images. But when I posted the gallery of three images in my previous post, I realised the images weren’t linked together in a gallery in a way Fancybox understood. What’s needed is the rel attribute, and a quick google showed loads of people suggesting the same snippet to add to the functions.php file:

/**
 * Give a rel attribute to all gallery images in a post
 */
function st_add_rel_attribute( $link ) {
    return str_replace( '<a href', '<a rel="st-gallery" href', $link );
}
add_filter( 'wp_get_attachment_link', 'st_add_rel_attribute' );
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I entered these in my local camera club competition – theme “Water”. The one I liked the most (Icy stream) did worst, and the one I liked the least (Leaping Pebbles) did best, winning in fact. Shows what I know.

Just finished reading The Year without Pants by Scott Berkun, which is about his 2 year tenure at Automattic working for WordPress.com. Inspiring and worth a look, but not what I’m here to say.

Unusually for me, because it was borrowed from a friend, the book was in traditional paper form instead of downloaded to my Kindle. I love the convenience of the Kindle, but I do get it when people say to me, “It’s just not the same – I need the feel of the paper”. And as a slight aside, before my main point, I have found I need the location feature turned on when reading my Kindle. I am disconcerted that I don’t know how far I am through the book. With the paper version, I know instinctively because of the size of the wedges of paper either side of my thumb. Not so with an e-reader, and it turns out I like to know where I am in the story arc.

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