Tech

Once you eliminate the impossible, whatever remains, no matter how improbable, must be the truth.

Sherlock Holmes

Over the years I’ve learned it’s always my fault. If something isn’t doing what I expect it to, then I’ve messed up somewhere – so I look to my code, and the most recent changes, to see where the problem is.

In adapting a twitter feed plugin to my needs, I came across a weird problem where transients wouldn’t save, and worse, it was intermittent. I at last isolated the problem to emojis, and found this post on the subject which explained the problem.

One of my Bulk Attachment Download users suggested I make it work for grid view as well as list view, and since this was entirely sensible and something I should have looked at sooner, off I went. Most of the work was relatively straightforward, but I hit a bump when trying to respond to users selecting attachments for download.

Although I could get a jQuery function to react to a click event on the image, nothing would happen when clicking on the check / uncheck icon at the top right of each image.

When I’m developing a site I always have an st_error_log( $var ) function that writes to an error log so I can dump variable data there to figure what’s going. On three separate occasions now I’ve had a wtf moment when it seems as though a filter or action has been firing twice for a single page load.

I have a gallery of sites on my Showcase page, and I wanted it so that clicking on that gallery would take you through to my Showcase Sites page.

Not obvious.

A few years back I wrote about how to get Fancybox 1 working on WP galleries – specifically how to add a rel tag to an image anchor tag so that images would appear grouped in their correct galleries.

That all became obsolete with the introduction of the Gutenberg block editor, as images and galleries are now inserted into posts and pages in completely different ways.

Before, there were plenty of filters available to change image and wrapping anchor tags relatively easily, but my attempts to do something server-side and php-based with the block editor met with total failure. Instead I ended up upgrading to Fancybox 3 and using jQuery to sort pretty much everything out.

A while back I noticed some warnings appearing on my development site for my Bulk Attachment Download plugin, specifically the Illegal string offset PHP warning, and it seemed to be linked to the retrieval of user meta using get_user_meta().

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…

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.