Marcus etc.

mainly just another WordPress site



Multilingual wordpress sites are not as straight-foward to create as you may think (unless you’re using multi-site). There are various plugins that make this easier, although they all lack something or other (my favourite is qTranslate so far). It gets tricky when you add custom text to sidebars, other plugins, or your themes. It’s not really the fault of the translation plugins either, because it’s literally impossible to reliably force plugin outputs to be translated in a user-friendly manner.

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WordPress has a set of restricted filetypes it will allow you to upload via the media library. Whilst this is a great security feature, there may be times where you’d like to add other files that are restricted by default, or maybe even the opposite where you’d only like to allow a few extensions to be uploaded. Fortunately, WordPress makes this dead easy with a small snippet of PHP code.

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When choosing WordPress plugins, you need to keep in mind that these are open source, therefore each plugin is maintained by someone for free, so some plugins are made by people that aren’t experienced coders (which may result in the plugin preventing your site from loading), or may not have time or resources to maintain the plugin to keep up with new WordPress releases.

This becomes especially important when considering the crucial and complex plugins that make your site work the way you need, as finding a replacement in the future may be prove to be much more laborious than doing a little due diligence beforehand. Imagine, for example, if your photo gallery stopped working when you upgrade to the latest version of WordPress!

Due to this, it’s important to take certain things into consideration when choosing a plugin, and if keep these in mind you’ll probably find that your selected plugins get updated with the new WP releases and are regularly improved. There’s lots of factors that you need to consider when choosing a plugin. Below are some of the major things to think about:

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Security is Relative


Posted on Apr 17, 2010 in Other, Wordpress


Matt posted a small bit regarding the recent alert NetworkSolutions put up claiming that there was a vulnerability (not giving a link either, undeserved). Turns out that the issue had nothing to do with wordpress, and more to do with their file permissions. His aptly titled post, Secure File Permissions Matter raises a good point about security in general…. your site is as secure as your server, which is actually as secure as where your server is kept.

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Disable User Gravatar


Posted on Dec 8, 2009 in Plugins


[wp-readme-parser url=”http://svn.wp-plugins.org/disable-user-gravatar/trunk/readme.txt” download=”http://downloads.wordpress.org/plugin/disable-user-gravatar.zip”]

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BuddyPress Expand Activity


Posted on Dec 7, 2009 in Other


[wp-readme-parser url=”http://svn.wp-plugins.org/bp-expand-activity/trunk/readme.txt” download=”http://downloads.wordpress.org/plugin/bp-expand-activity.zip”]

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I found a little niggle in WordPress when creating a custom form using shortcodes and plain PHP/HTML for processing. Turns out if your form uses $_POST[‘name’] in your form, WP does not like that and serves a Not Found (404) page. Changing that input field name to a different one, say surname, fixed the problem immediately. Took me a good 30 minutes to figure that out!

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