Tag Archives: plugins

Columns for WordPress

Sometimes you need to split your content into two or more columns, perhaps for a list of features on your front page. Unfortunately the standard WordPress editor does not support that out of the box (yet) so you turn to plugins.

With quite a few options available, it’s not easy to make the right choice, plus, there’s almost always a learning curve involved, especially with shortcodes like:

[fourcol_two_last]

I crafted an experimental columns plugin quite a while ago, which hopefully simplifies the shortcodes to a bare minimum, and makes them look slightly more like HTML. Put as much columns as you want into a column group, and it can figure out the rest:

[column-group]
    [column]This is my first column[/column]
    [column]This is my second column[/column]
[/column-group]

Hopefully this is much easier than memorizing cryptic shortcode names, and even if you end up deactivating the plugin in the future, you can always run a (fairly) simple regex search and replace to “lock yourself out.”

I recently released the plugin for public use. It’s called Columns (duh!) and it’s available at the WordPress.org plugins directory. Give it a spin and let me know what you think!

Double Titles when Sharing on Google+

If you’ve got double titles when sharing your WordPress posts on Google+, it’s probably due to duplicate OpenGraph tags, which might have been caused by the latest update to Jetpack, which added OpenGraph tags in version 2.0. If you’re already running a plugin that outputs the “og:” tags in your document head, you’ll have to disable one or the other.

For example, to have WordPress SEO by Yoast not output the OpenGraph tags, go to SEO – Social and disable Facebook OpenGraph. If you’d like to disable Jetpack’s OpenGraph support, you’ll have to write some code, preferably in a plugin file:

add_filter( 'jetpack_enable_open_graph', '__return_false' );

Other plugins might be different, but you get the idea.

WordPress Plugin Review Discussion

Otto, Brian Krogsgard, Ben Lobaugh, Erick Hitter, Jake Goldman, Kailey Lampert, Shane Pearlman, John Hawkins, Patrick Garman, Ryan Frankel, Andrew Norcross. Google Hangouts seemed to work pretty well!

I don’t have a strong opinion about any of the points they discussed, but I would love to see an option to flag a particular plugin with a security issue, and obviously, write what the issue is, and how it could (or should) be resolved.

Updating Plugins Feels Good

I have updated two plugins I wrote a long time ago, which haven’t been updated in years, and were not fully compatible with the recent versions of WordPress. It felt very good, especially since I managed to rewrite both plugins in only a few hours, and looking at my old code made me realize how much I have learned.

I feel like I should do this more often.

Convert NextGen Galleries to WordPress Galleries

I was using NextGen Gallery for quite some time here on my blog, and it was all going well until WordPress introduced its own gallery shortcode, custom post types and more, which NextGen never adapted to. After migrating the blog a couple of times I was tired of all the conflicts, so I stopped using galleries, disable the plugin and lived happily even after, until…

Until Jetpack Carousel came along and because it’s so cool an sexy, it made me wanna use galleries again, so I (finally) decided to write a script to migrate my old NextGen Galleries to native WordPress galleries, so they can be used with Jetpack Carousel, or any other carousel or lightbox plugins, which:

  • Don’t create their own shortcode
  • Don’t create their own file structure
  • Don’t create their own database tables

Unfortunately NextGen Gallery does all the above, making it quite tricky to escape, or “lock yourself out.” My script started as a simple Gist on GitHub, but finally made it into its own repo, which I called Escape NextGen Gallery.

It’s far from a complete migration plugin, but it worked for moving my galleries over, and finally getting rid of the database tables and file structure I always hated. Your setup might differ from mine, so you’ll probably have to fine-tune that script, and if you do, don’t hesitate to submit a pull request or fork if you wish.

WordPress as an Issue Tracker

With the recently updated P2 Resolved Posts plugin, your WordPress blog can now be a full-blown issue tracker, given that it’s running the awesome P2 Theme.

You can see it in action on make.wordpress.org/systems, where red posts are unresolved issues, and green posts are resolved. Sidebar widgets can also help list all your current unresolved posts as well as recently resolved ones, filterable by tags. And don’t forget about the already existing features in P2, like @mentions and to-do lists!