Oct 28

Brief Blogs for Week Ending October 28, 2011

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  • AussieWPExpert: WP Ajax Query allows you asynchronously retrieve WordPress posts in JSON format. Same syntax as WP_Query class: http://t.co/7VeYnJJN
  • AussieWPExpert: Mini Mail Dashboard Widget lets you send/receive emails in WP admin panel and get SMS alerts when msgs/comments arrive: http://t.co/9BGBJjHu
  • AussieWPExpert: TinyFeed is a WordPress widget which retrieves and displays Twitter feeds via AJAX, which loads faster than RSS widget: http://t.co/xoUNfmWR
  • AussieWPExpert: The Ajaxize plugin makes any WordPress or plugin PHP function callable via asynchronous AJAX requests http://t.co/OVyo7VM6
  • AussieWPExpert: Security plugin WordPress File Monitor Plus detects changes to your WordPress installation and sends email alerts: http://t.co/CkUHrEIy
  • AussieWPExpert: Ad Logger for WordPress is a plugin for logging clicks on embedded iframe adverts and other social network buttons: http://t.co/9zwZVdvX
  • AussieWPExpert: Using Facebook Comments Box Social Plugin on a WP site? Make comments indexable by search engines: http://t.co/rFzK9OxN http://t.co/l0MMAaim
  • AussieWPExpert: WP Glee – a collection of useful WordPress PHP code snippets: http://t.co/sWP2NJ4T
  • AussieWPExpert: SharePress – commercially supported WP plugin that automatically publishes content to Facebook Profiles and Fan Pages: http://t.co/56lYOml5
  • AussieWPExpert: make_clickable() – WordPress function that takes a string with URLs and turns them into clickable hyperlinks: http://t.co/n3zwaV9g
  • AussieWPExpert: New blog post: Brief Blogs for Week Ending October 21, 2011 http://t.co/0DPQMEzc

Oct 21

Brief Blogs for Week Ending October 21, 2011

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Oct 18

Fix Problems Displaying Non-Latin Character Sets in WordPress

Support 2 Comments »

Are you working with foreign languages or non-Latin character sets in WordPress?

Are you experiencing this problem:

  • You write a post in a foreign language that uses a non-latin script, e.g. Chinese, Korean or Japanese. When you click ‘save’ or ‘publish’, the text is then re-displayed as unreadable garbage characters.

It is likely that your WordPress MySQL database has been created with the latin1 character set instead of the UTF8-character set which is able to correctly represent most foreign languages. Many web hosting providers have set latin1 as the default for MySQL.

I experienced this problem a while back, when I was setting up a website for a client who’s in the business of providing accommodation to international students and working holidaymakers coming to Australia. He wanted the website to have translated versions of each WordPress page in the 8 most common foreign languages spoken by his clients – French, German, Swedish, Korean, Japanese, Spanish, Portuguese and Chinese. To enable support for multiple languages in WordPress, I used the plugin WPML – The WordPress Multilingual Plugin.

Things were going well, but I hit a snag when I started to add a Korean page – it looked fine when I pasted it into the visual editor, but as soon as I saved the page and viewed it, the text rendered as unreadable garbage. After doing some research and a lot of testing and debugging, I eventually solved the problem:
Continue reading »

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Oct 18

Vlad Lasky to Present Talk on “Securing Your WordPress Website” at WordCamp 2011 – Gold Coast

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Our lead developer Vlad Lasky will be presenting a talk: “Securing Your WordPress Website” at the national WordPress conference “WordCamp 2011 – Gold Coast”, to be held on the 5th and 6th of November at Bond University, Gold Coast, Queensland:

More details can be found here:

http://2011.goldcoast.wordcamp.org/news/10/18/speaker-vlad-lasky-securing-your-wordpress-website/

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Oct 15

Join Our Campaign to Get WordPress to Support Custom Fields for Categories and Tags

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One of WordPress’s great features is the ability to assign custom fields, also known as post meta-data, to a post or page.

We are campaigning for the WordPress development team to extend this feature by allowing you to create custom fields for any of your categories, tags or custom taxonomies. To help us, please vote for our feature on the WordPress Ideas Suggestion Page by going to the site below and clicking on 5 stars underneath the “Rate This” heading on the right-hand side:

http://wordpress.org/extend/ideas/topic/custom-fields-meta-data-for-categories-and-tags-terms

Register for WordPress.org account if you don’t already have one – it will allow you to post on the discussion boards and provide feedback.

Here are some examples of useful ways you can use custom fields on categories or tags:

  • To display category images or tag images – This would allow you to display a specific banner image at the top of the page whenever a website visitor views a category or tag archive. The path to the image file could be stored in the category or tag custom field, which would be retrieved by a template tag in the theme.
  • Associating banner ads with category archive or tag pages – The banner ad code or configuration parameters could be stored in a custom field. This would also be retrieved and displayed by code within the theme.
  • Tracking the number of times that a category or tag archive page is viewed – This is similar to how custom fields are used by plugins like WP-PostViews, which track the number of times a post or page has been read.

At the moment, there is a plugin WP Category Meta that implements custom fields for terms, but it has not been updated to work with WordPress 3.2. The plugin creates an additional MySQL Database table for terms meta data, plus some PHP functions to update and access the terms meta. Their syntax is virtually identical to the ones used for post meta. This sort of functionality really belongs in the WordPress code base.

That link again is:

http://wordpress.org/extend/ideas/topic/custom-fields-meta-data-for-categories-and-tags-terms

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Oct 14

Brief Blogs for Week Ending October 14, 2011

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