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Tag Archives: plugin

9 years ago
by soulseekah
8 comments

Lighthouse – WordPress Performance Plugin Review

Like many rants, this one starts with a promise. One made by the developers of Lighthouse on their marketing page:

…optimize MySQL tables by removing all unused table space (both MyISAM and InnoDB)…

All unused table space for InnoDB via a PHP plugin? Suspicious, I got my hands on a copy of the plugin to see how it accomplishes this claimed feat. Well, obviously it didn’t reclaim all InnoDB tablespace, just some of it using the OPTIMIZE TABLE method (only effective when innodb_file_per_table is set to “on” which is enabled by default in MySQL 5.6.6 and higher). The ibdata file remained untouched.

Okay, no problem, not unexpected. But then I read into some of the other code and a second, much more substantial promise:

A zero-footprint tuning plugin…

…I became pretty angry. I’ve always been a skeptic of magic optimization plugins, and Lighthouse was unfortunate enough to get my review.

Published 9 years ago by soulseekah with 8 comments tagged performance, plugin, review in WordPress

9 years ago
by soulseekah
3 comments

WordPress Dashboard Autobookmarks

Here’s something I put together as a conceptual idea. WordPress Dashboard Autobookmarks keeps track of how popular a dashboard page is by counting how many times it’s been visited by an administrator and provides an Admin Bar menu with the most often used dashboard screens. This allows administrators to keep returning to their most-used dashboard screens at click of a button.

WordPress Dashboard Autobookmarks

The plugin can be found on GitHub and is at a highly experimental stage for now.

Published 9 years ago by soulseekah with 3 comments tagged plugin in WordPress

plugin WordPress

12 years ago
by soulseekah
no comments

PrestaShop Variable Shipping Carrier

Sometimes complex shipping and handling rules make it impossible for customers to place orders in PrestaShop. Lack of instant shipping quotes, huge quantities and large weights, limited shipping addresses, etc. And while PrestaShop administrators are able to create orders manually via the back-end, these manual orders are still subject to the same shipping carrier rules.

Published 12 years ago by soulseekah with no comments tagged plugin, prestashop, shipping in PHP

plugin prestashop shipping PHP

12 years ago
by soulseekah
23 comments

Bulk Reports and Digests for Gravity Forms

I have written yet another Gravity Forms plugin/addon. This time the plugin was to generate bulk reports for form entries, digests of sorts. Based on a set schedule (which can be altered using the cron_schedules filter), this addon will aggregate all new form entries it hasn’t seen yet (including very old ones) and send them out to predefined e-mail addresses.

The whole thing works best with regular single-shot notifications turned off, probably.

Download it from github now.

Published 12 years ago by soulseekah with 23 comments tagged gravity forms, plugin in WordPress

gravity forms plugin WordPress

13 years ago
by soulseekah
25 comments

Conditional Notifications Plugin for Gravity Forms

Gravity Forms is one of those plugins that many enjoy and make use of. A recent project of mine involved adding some functionality that seems as indispensable as conditional field logic – conditional notifications.

Based on the values of form fields selected notification settings are overridden, including e-mails and, more importantly content, and whether a notification is sent or not in the first place.

This Gravity Forms Addon allows users to select specific conditions that override the default notification settings. The first condition that is met will provide the settings that replace the ones that are set in the Notification area for a form. If no condition is met for a form the default Notification settings happen.

A fantastic use for this Gravity Forms Add-on would be to have an auto-responder setup for an inquiry form, where visitors select a predefined inquiry (although an FAQ would handle that in most cases). Applications to specific departments where a response arrives with that departments contact details, terms, working hours, or something. In short, should be quite useful.

Gravity Forms Conditional Notifications Add-on is available on Github.

Published 13 years ago by soulseekah with 25 comments tagged gravity forms, plugin in WordPress

gravity forms plugin WordPress

13 years ago
by soulseekah
5 comments

Custom Post Type Archives in WordPress Menus?

I was setting up a development WordPress environment under a non-root directory on a remote server this morning. Created a couple of custom post types and, as usual, was about to create separate pages for them (more on the technique later). This usually works out quite well, however, I decided to take another well-known route – use their existing archive pages via their slugs. Went over to the Menu and, obviously, found no Custom Post Type archive metabox that I could create a Menu item from. Custom Post Type posts – sure. Custom Taxonomies? Yes, Sir. Custom Post Type archives? …

And, of course, I couldn’t take the thought off my mind all day (probably won’t sleep tonight figuring out). How does one set up a proper archive page menu item? There are, generally, two approaches to this (+1 hackish one). If you know of more, do share, please.

Published 13 years ago by soulseekah with 5 comments tagged core, menus, plugin in WordPress

core menus plugin WordPress

13 years ago
by soulseekah
no comments

WordPress Command Line Fun

Many of you may have already met the WordPress Command Line tool called wp-cli by @scribu, the man who eats WordPress for breakfast, but my first encounter with the tool happened a couple of days ago. I don’t know how in the world I had missed its announcement 4 months ago.

About the tool

The WordPress Command Line tool provides a command line interface for administrative control and management, and even installation of WordPress. The tool is written in PHP and makes use of the highly flexible and powerful PHP Command Line tools library. It requires PHP CLI SAPI to be installed on the machine, which will almost always be available if you’re running WordPress on the server.

Published 13 years ago by soulseekah with no comments tagged cli, plugin, review, shell in WordPress

cli plugin review shell WordPress

13 years ago
by soulseekah
one comment

Another 7 Overlooked WordPress Helper Functions

In a previous post we looked at 7 Overlooked WordPress Helper Functions. Today I’ll dig deep and find more helpful undocumented functions that WordPress uses internally that can be of help when developing plugins and themes. Leveraging code that is already available in the core, is maintained and simply works can save you quite a bit of coding and debugging time.

Published 13 years ago by soulseekah with one comment tagged development, functions, plugin in WordPress

development functions plugin WordPress

13 years ago
by soulseekah
15 comments

The WordPress Plugin and Theme Editor Must Go

…or “How WordPress Gets Hacked”

The prelude

With so many reports of WordPress sites being hacked in one way or another, I decided to see how exactly WordPress sites are being invaded. The WordPress Codex has an excellent FAQ section titled “My site was hacked“, and it’s great. Hardening WordPress is another fantastic entry that deserves even more attention.

Not so long ago, I setup a honeypot on one of my private servers. I grabbed the latest stable version of WordPress and installed it. Waiting for any new WordPress vulnerability to be exploited would not be viable (although the TimThumb vulnerability is occasionally being attempted). I considered the latest stable version of WordPress secure, correctly setup, so I chose the single weakest link in the chain, located between the chair and the screen – the Admin.

Published 13 years ago by soulseekah with 15 comments tagged plugin, security, theme, vulnerability in WordPress

plugin security theme vulnerability WordPress

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Code, sweet, code!

About the tool

…or “How WordPress Gets Hacked”

The prelude