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hints, tips, tricks and newsRemove menu link types from the WordPress menu options screen
November 13th, 2018On a client site, we wanted to restrict menu items to Custom Links, only. Thus remove all other menu types. The main drive behind this was to improve the user experience and reduce confusion, as the menu is only for Social Links. With a brief search yielding very little I set about coding a solution, […]
How to break long words using CSS @supports
November 7th, 2018Recently, I had an odd scenario where wrapping long text needed either word-wrap, overflow-wrap or word-break to achieve the same overflow pattern across different browsers. To arrive at a suitable solution I opted to use @supports to maintain control of the declarations. What is @supports? @supports is a feature query, whose associated block of statments […]
Conditionally enqueue scripts and stylesheets on specific pages
November 3rd, 2018There are many use-cases where scripts and stylesheets only need to be loaded on certain pages. One such example would be to only load the JavaScript and CSS stylesheets for Contact Form 7 (a lightweight contact form plugin) on the contact page. This article will demonstrate how to conditionally load the JS and CSS for […]
Using LD+JSON Schema to Enhance SEO for Blog Posts
November 1st, 2018Schema markup helps search engines understand your content by describing its primary purpose, in a machine-friendly way. The most recent, and in my opinion, the easiest to maintain, is ld+json, which is contained in a script tag, proving the search engines with the key data. What does ld+json markup look like? The best way to […]
Nesting CSS Media Queries
October 28th, 2018Processing styling rules based on certain criteria, such as viewport width, is achieved using the @media conditional group rules. As of October 2018, all modern browsers support nested @media queries. What’s a @media query? Here’s a simple example of a media query to make the text 10% bigger on devices with a screen (viewport) wider than 768px […]
Adding Feature Images to the WordPress RSS Feed
October 26th, 2018The WordPress RSS feed is great. We use it with third-party services, such as MailChimp. One key datum that isn’t included in the feeds by default is the featured image for posts (and pages). This article will address that with a simple ‘action‘ hook that adds the featured image to the item’s feed. /** * […]
How to trim words by character limit
October 21st, 2018We recently encountered a scenario where the client wanted to trim the news items titles to a maximum number of characters, whilst respecting words. Our research revealed that this seemingly obvious requirement wasn’t elegantly solved. As most of you will know, there are solutions for trimming by characters or trimming by words, but neither of […]
WP Code Tip: get array of post IDs
October 18th, 2018A number of times over my years developing in WordPress I’ve needed to extract the post IDs of the posts in an array. And every time I need to do this I use the wp_list_pluck() function, from WP_List_Util, the WordPress list utility class. And every time I use this really handy helper I mean to […]
Use PHP’s in_array() to compare a variable to multiple values
September 28th, 2018When comparing a variable with multiple values consider using in_array(), instead of complex if expressions. I love clean, easy-to-read code, which is why I am not a fan of if statements with complex expressions. For example, consider the following snippet, which is checking a variable against several values: if ($test_variable === 'value1' || $test_variable === […]
How to reindex spotlight on macOS to stop it closing after a few characters
September 26th, 2018This post is a somewhat off-topic, but for all those of you that are working on Macs, here’s a little tip to reset Spotlight when starts closing after just a few characters. You could try going into System Preferences and adding a drive in the Privacy tab, then removing it, but it didn’t work for […]