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’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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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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