More Than Scratch The Surface » WordPress

WordPress Optimization Myth: Saving Database Calls

Stephen Cronin — Thu, 08 Dec 2011 14:04:56 +0000

Tonight I read an article on WPTuts+ titled 10 Quick Tips: Optimizing & Speeding Up Your WordPress Site. For the most part it’s a good article with lots of great tips, but there is one tip which is just plain incorrect:

Using a constant instead of get_option('home'); saves a database call.
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Fetch_feed Not Working With URLs Containing & Symbol

Stephen Cronin — Wed, 30 Nov 2011 12:06:22 +0000

I recently came across a strange problem with the fetch_feed function in WordPress not working with URLs containing the & symbol. The URL was being passed to fetch_feed via a shortcode parameter, but fetch_feed couldn’t find the feed.
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Clearing The Cache When A Widget Is Saved

Stephen Cronin — Wed, 30 Nov 2011 08:14:22 +0000

WP Super Cache has a setting which allows the cache to be cleared when a post is saved. I needed to clear the cache when a widget is saved. It turned out to be surprisingly easy.
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Remove Widget Titles

Stephen Cronin — Wed, 23 Nov 2011 11:14:00 +0000

Current version: 1.0 (November 23, 2011)
Download: Download (downloaded 323 times)
Requires: WordPress v2.6.0 or higher
Compatible up to: WordPress v3.2.1
WordPress Plugin Directory
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Remove Widget Titles is a simple WordPress plugin, which removes the title from any widget that has a title starting with the “!” character.

Why Use It

This allows you to give widgets a title in the backend for convenience – so you can quickly see which widget is which, rather than having to open them to work out what they are for – without having to show the title on the front end.

How To Use (once plugin is installed)

If you have a widget for which you do not want the title to appear … [visit site to read more]

How To Change The WordPress Post Template Via URL Parameter

Stephen Cronin — Wed, 27 Jul 2011 09:06:00 +0000

Have you ever wanted to be able to serve up an alternative version of your posts, perhaps tweaking the layout or even the content of the posts? Not all the time, just in certain circumstances?

I’ve had two cases recently where I’ve needed to do this. My solution: to change the post template when a certain URL parameter is added to the URL. … [visit site to read more]

How To Add Site Speed For Google Analytics In WordPress

Stephen Cronin — Thu, 05 May 2011 07:28:07 +0000

Yesterday, Google announced the addition of Site Speed to Google Analytics, which adds a page load time dimension across a range of reports. Great! Lets get it working with our WordPress sites.
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Thoughts On The New WordPress Podcast – daWPshow

Stephen Cronin — Wed, 09 Feb 2011 11:51:00 +0000

In case you missed it, there’s a new WordPress podcast in town: daWPshow. Fantastic! I think it’s great that people are willing to put their time into creating content about WordPress! Now, with that out of the way, I’m going to lay down some tough love for the show.

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Shorter Shortlinks – If You Have WWW In Your Domain

Stephen Cronin — Fri, 17 Sep 2010 14:08:59 +0000

Earlier today, I read a post by Stephanie Leary about the shortlink functionality introduced in WordPress 3.0. Afterwards, I felt I should share the code snippet that I use to make my shortlinks even shorter.

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WordPress Caching Plugins For Shared Hosting: W3 Total Cache vs WP Super Cache vs Hyper Cache

Stephen Cronin — Mon, 30 Aug 2010 12:56:53 +0000

I recently was faced with a decision: which WordPress caching plugin to use on my shared hosting account. The choice was between WP Super Cache, W3 Total Cache and Hyper Cache. This article documents my admittedly limited testing of these plugins and the decision I made as a result.

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Practical Theme Support For WordPress 3.0 Menus

Stephen Cronin — Mon, 21 Jun 2010 06:50:51 +0000

I’ve read quite a few articles on theme support for the new Menu functionality introduced in WordPress 3.0. However, these have all been theoretical rather than practical. I wanted a real life, working example, including support for users on older versions of WordPress. In the end, I wrote it myself.

WordPress Theme developers, listen up! When updating your themes to work with the new menu functionality, you need to make sure that it still works with older versions of WordPress.

… [visit site to read more]