After a long wait WordCamp is happening in Pune this weekend ie on 23rd and 24th Feb 2013, from 10.00 AM – 6.00 PM.
Day one is focused on Developers and Day 2 is focused on users.
For more details check the website for the event.
Hope to see you there 🙂
If you are starting with WordPress Plugin or theme development, or want to know where to start then here is a small list of articles that you should read, some of them should be always open in your browser, and some of them in your RSS reader.
Documentation and Help
1) http://codex.wordpress.org/Function_Reference: This article list almost all the core functions that are available for a plugin developer.
2) http://codex.wordpress.org/Plugin_API/Action_Reference: This article is a complete list of the action hooks available for use in plugin development.
3) http://codex.wordpress.org/Plugin_API/Filter_Reference: This article is a complete list of the filter hooks available for use in plugin development.
4) http://codex.wordpress.org/Data_Validation: This article is list all the function are available in WordPress core to help us with data sanitization and validation
5) http://codex.wordpress.org/Site_Architecture_1.5: This article describes the general site architecture of a WordPress theme to help you understand it.
6) http://wordpress.stackexchange.com: This is *the* place to ask questions related to WordPress development, and off course give answers as well.
7) http://iwebask.com/blog/2011/03/16/75rss-feeds-for-web-developers-wordpress-bloggers/: Whole bunch of links that you should follow on your RSS reader, so that you can stay in sync with latest WordPress tips and tricks.
8) http://www.w3avenue.com/2009/09/28/definitive-list-of-free-wordpress-theme-frameworks/: This article list whole bunch of theme frameworks that you can use for your themes.
WordPress Core Community
1) http://wpdevel.wordpress.com/ : This is the place where people in the core hang out, read it so that you are upto date with latest happenings about WordPress
2) http://make.wordpress.org/themes/: This is where people who review themes submitted in the wordpress.org theme repository hang out.
Well these are the links that i have found very useful, and I spend most of my time there. If you have any such useful link please share in the comments below.
P.S. We are hiring WordPress developers, email me your resumes if you are interested to become part of the team.
Update : This plugin is not available any more. You may want to check http://pluginbuddy.com/purchase/backupbuddy/
We all have heard of importance of regular backups, but for a long time I had neglected it for my blog. But recently things happened that prompted me to take backups.
While I was looking for option to keep backups, I found Rackspace Cloud Files to be a very affordable option, this prompted me to write wpSimpleBackup a WordpPress plug-in that will take the backups to cloud files, and then I also added support to take backup to Amazon S3 or FTP to another server. But unlike my other plugins, this one is not free.
Last Sunday I got to work on a very interesting problem in WordPress which I initially thought could be solved in like 5 mins, but alas it took me almost 7 hours before I found and fixed the problem.
Let me describe the problem, I was running a simple xml parsing script whose task was to parse the xml file and insert the content into WordPress database as a post, everything was working fine except the ‘INSERT’ statement was failing with out any errors. Basically everything would run but nothing would get inserted into database and no errors. We had used the ‘wp_insert_post’ function in ‘post.php’ file to handle the insertion of post, which was returning ‘0’ instead.
After lot’s of time spend checking and cross checking the sql statements for error and PHP code logic, i finally found the problem which was a small kinda cryptic error ‘MySQL server has gone away’ for every single query that was getting executed in the script.
Well, a quick google search took me to MySQL manual page where it list bunch of possibilities on why the error might be coming.
To me the most logical one were
I investigated each one but it turned out that because a query was taking a bit to long to execute MySQL closed the connection and refused all further request from the client.
So you might be wondering what was the Solution to this problem.
Well Rob of Rob’s notebook had the almost perfect solution for it. He created a replacement file for ‘wpdb.php’ which takes care of this problem, yeah it is temporary and you have to remember to replace this file every time you do an WordPress upgrade but it works.
If you are facing this problem go download it and replace you ‘wpdb’ file and save yourself some time.
Most probably you will be knowing about all these skills already, it is common sense, still I have found so many developers who just know just one server side language(usually java or .net) and then they think themselves as superman/superwoman.
In web application development, that is just one thing. You need to know about lot more things before you can consider yourself successful.
So, if you know them already that’s good, you don’t need to read any further otherwise continue reading to know why each of these skills are important for you(the web developer).
Here are the skills
With these three skill you have ability to become the super cool static website developer or a front end developer
These two skill will make you a web developer.
All five of these skills will make you a most prized web developer, in your organization.
I always strive for simple solutions to all my problems, akWpLightBox plugin is result of one such endeavor.
For quite some time now I was looking for a plugin which is lightweight, and can show images in lightbox like effect, in my blog.
The effort of creating a javascript functionality for that was putting me off, then few days back I saw the prettyPhoto, it is a jQuery based plugin for creating the lightbox effects for the images.
This made my job pretty easier, now I can have my lightbox effect, all i needed to was convert it into a wordpress plugin. So I did some modifications to the prettyPhoto to suite my needs, and here is the result of my work. Check out an working example below.
I am assuming you know how to write a WordPress plugin, and now you are wondering how to use ajax to add that sexy feature that will make your plugin look a bit kool.
I faced the same problem, with my akWpUploder plugin. I googled but could not find anything interesting, or should I say, simple way of adding ajax to my plugin. So I dig into the WordPress code base for solution, as auto-saving feature of WordPress was one such thing that I wanted to use.
There I found what I was really looking for, a very simple way of using Ajax to get things done.
Problem: How to use WordPress functions in your plugin when using ajax
Let me explain the problem first, while I was working on my plugin I needed to insert the photo data into the database. To do this I needed to use WordPress database functions, but the way I knew to use ajax(i.e. creating a separate PHP file that handles the ajax request), it was bit difficult and messy. It would have involved either making a direct connection with the database or including the WordPress config file.
I was not happy with either of these options, I needed a simpler solution.
For those in hurry, download the latest version of [download#2#nohits] from wordpress plugin page.
UPDATE (25 August 2009): I have released the version 1.1.0 and made it comaptible with WordPress 2.8.
UPDATE: I have released 0.7.1 of this plugin, with this i consider it to be good enough for general uses, Please help me test it so that we can together release version 1.0 of this plugin soon.
I was fed up with the wordpress image uploader’s inability to properly resize the images. I was posting pictures of Rangpanchami in my office blog but image would just not resize properly.
So i decided to create this akWpUploader: alternative image uploader for wordpress which uses Flickr.com’s web services to attach images on the blog post. Initially i wanted to use rss feed that Flickr provides, but found it very restrictive so i went ahead to use flickr Api, which has been simplified by Dan Coulter who wrote easy to use phpFlickr wrapper class. This plugin is not meant to replace the original uploader but to complement it by providing additional missing functionalities. Their was a need for some such plugin as is evident from following wordpress feature enhancement request Idea:Image Handling.
All you need to do is type your Flickr user id and it will fetch all the photographs that you have published on the Flickr, you click on the image that you want to insert into the editor, select the option for image size to include in the editor. It will take the title, description form Flickr and attach image from Flickr in the editor. Simple isn’t ? 😉
I have cheated here 😉 Cheating, No More 🙂
Update : their is one more additional step involved now, you first select type the username, akWpuploader will fetch the tags and photo sets that you have created, once you select the option you can get the images from the Flickr.
This is very simple task, just upload the “akwpuploader-alternative-wordpress-image-uploader” folder to “wp-content/plugins/” folder, care must be taken to ensure that folder name is kept as it is.
Then go to plugins section of the website and activate the plugin and you are done.
This plugin shows itself when you create new post, just below the editor in wordpress 2.3 and below, It shows itself between Advanced options and categories in wordpress 2.5.
As it is a Beta release it may have bugs, it still lacks some features and it may crash.
If you have any ideas that you want to see with this plugin please let me know.
Fixed : Just released a new version to fix the issues mentioned by matthew and kimharding in comments please help me test it further so that i can release a stable version soon.
Fixed : With release of 0.7.1, i have fixed the issue mentioned by kimchi39 in comments.
Update(5th July 2008) : Released 1.0.0 a stable version after lot’s of testing.
Update (25 August 2009): I have released the version 1.1.0 and made it comaptible with WordPress 2.8.