WordPress Development

If you’re like me and manage dozens of WordPress sites, you’ve probably got a shared code base which allows you to upgrade the WordPress filesystem easily.. But most likely you’ve also found it painful to have to visit each wp-admin individually and click the “Update WordPress Database” button. Ever wanted to script this task to run from the command line? Here you go 🙂

As a WordPress theme developer, it’s very useful to be able to define CSS classes in a theme’s stylesheet, then allow them to be assigned to elements by the user with the Visual editor. Classic examples would be special classes to style links, lists and images.

I find using the wp_enqueue_script function a nice tidy way to include javascript files in my theme. Especially when using scripts that come bundled with WordPress, such as jQuery, script.aculo.us, etc. However I recently had an issue with the very cool Fancybox jQuery plugin not playing nice with the version of jQuery that shipped with WordPress. Here’s the solution.

Here’s a handy little function to check if the page you’re currently viewing is a specific page or a descendant of it (child, grandchild, etc). I’ve come across a few simliar functions: is_child(), is_subpage(), is_descendant(), etc; but none that met my needs exactly.

Strangely, the <hr> tag (horizontal rule) button isn’t enabled by default in the WordPress Visual Editor (TinyMCE). Here’s how to turn it on, along with any other buttons you want to use.