WordPress

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.

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.

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:

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’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' );