Competition Dynamics

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I recently completed a site design overhaul for Competition Dynamics.  They hold world-class, cutting-edge competitive practical shooting events with an unmatched level of professionalism and operational excellence. They bring new practical and field competition concepts to reality. Their staff has a proven track record of running challenging, safe, and fair 3-Gun, multi-gun, and long-range matches. They have been involved in administering many of the most influential field matches of the last decade and have redefined what field challenges can be applied to a competition format. They have the expertise and experience to run world-class practical shooting events.

The site is not built with WordPress, but I installed WordPress for the blog.  I created a WordPress API that allows these articles to be pulled onto the CD site on the homepage and on full article pages.  It allows for pulling specific post types, postmeta, and taxonomies.

Updated Admin Post Searching Plugin

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I just want to say that for any of you that use my admin post searching plugin (link), i have updated it to search not only on the post title, but also the post id. I was watching a client look for a post by ID and it him me that i could just add this functionality to the search plugin.

U Choose Slider Plugin

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This is a WordPress plugin I wrote that stores information about slider images in the database.  It also gives you a template tag that you can use to loop over the images and implement your own JS Slider in your theme.  It has a management page in the wp-admin dashboard so that you can add a title, description, link to follow, image url, and the ability to make it active or inactive.

Reduce the number of requests in your WordPress theme

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This simple code will allow you to load all of your themes css files into one request without a plugin.  I have not yet found a plugin that works with other plugins nicely as not all plugin authors play by the rules when enqueueing scripts and styles.  So i figured that I would start with my theme.  I wrote my own theme for this site based on the Twitter Bootstrap.  On its own, there would be a request for the bootstrap css file and one custom one for my theme.  And the javascripts would be one for the bootstrap and one for my custom js.

Fun with WordPress Transients

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It has been awhile since I have written, but I wanted to detail how and when to use WordPress transients. First off, what are transients? WordPress has a great API for storing data that might be either the results of an expensive/complex query, or data that does not change that often. The rationale behind these is to make the pages load faster without having to do the expensive queries for every user that visits your site. They offer us an expiration date so that the data can be regenerated on a schedule.

I have two examples in the full article for you to review. Hopefully they will help you make your site more efficient.

Collapsable Categories in Post Editor

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So you have a ton of categories and there are a lot of child categories at the list and the post editor has become unruly? In order to change a posts' category or to add it to a new one the list is unmanageable. Here is a jQuery code snippet that you can use to make the categories collapsable. It removes the label functionality. You cannot click on the name to select the item's checkbox, but it now allows you to click on the name to expand the categories.

Resize Image on the Fly to Fit in a Square Box

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This simple image class will allow you to get an image from your server to dynamically resize it and center it top/bottom and left/right in a square box. If you have some images that are all good kb size but are a bit random in their dimensions, you can use this class to make them fit dynamically in a box. It will make images that are larger than the bounds of the box smaller, but will not adjust the size of images that are smaller than then bounds. That would make them blurry, so instead it just makes them centered in the box.

I am using this in a scenario where there are images that have been uploaded to the server that are very small 200x200 and rather large 1000x1200. The size of my display box in this example is 400x400.

Here is a demo: http://www.matthewaprice.com/image-resize-demo/

WordPressFeeder.com – Embed Your Feeds

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Introducing a new tool! This site lets you create a snippet that you can embed or give to someone else to display your blog articles outside of your site. I built this as there are some hosted shopping cart solutions where you cannot run PHP, and you cannot style elements in an iFrame not from your own site. By creating WordPressFeeder.com, I got around both of these issues. The generated code creates stylable elements on your external site.

Here is a demo of this in action view demo

Feel free to let me know any suggestions, feature requests, or issues you may have with this by commenting on this post.

The first step is to simply put in a link to your feed and choose from the following options:

  • Article content character limit
  • You can choose what you want your article titles to be wrapped in: h1 ,h2, span, div, etc
  • How many posts do you want to show
  • Read more link customization. You can pick from up to 9 options
  • and...Whether or not you want to display The Post Thumbnail

Simple WordPress Accordion Menu

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So when WordPress introduced the wp_nav_menu() function, it made it easier to create navigation menus for the average user. You can create dropdown navigation simply moving the items around in the admin -> appearance -> menu section of your dashboard. This tutorial requires jQuery, but is not a jQuery plugin.

Hyperspatial

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I just want to write about a great resource that i contribute to and use a lot. Hyperspatial has a code collective of snippets and frequently used code that is a good tool to use to find commonly used little tid bits. Here is a link to the code that i have submitted over there. http://code.hyperspatial.com

WP Stop Profanity

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This plugin allows you to enter in a set of words that are unacceptable for your site. If a user either writes a blog post, or comments, this plugin will replace the text with bullets. The settings page is in the Tools Menu. There will be more options regarding settings in future releases. This is a simple way to manage unacceptable words on your site. It is in a very simple form as I built this for a client who needed a very simple way to manage profanity on their site in "the_content", "comments_text', and 'the_title' all the time.

WP Activate Users

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NOTE: There is currently a bug in a Buddypress MU Installs. It works fine in NON-MU installs of Buddpyress.

This plugin is for BuddyPress and BuddyPress MU Installs and allows you to manually activate users who have not activated their account via the email link. This can be used if the email doesn’t get to the user for any reason…ie spam filtering, email host etc. It places a menu in the Users menu in the wp-admin area of your site.

Wordpress Category Menu Integration with wp_list_pages();

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Here is a bit of code that you can use to put a category dropdown menu that allows for complete customization. I have wanted to put a category drop down menu in the middle of wp_list_pages(); for a while and this does the trick for me. Basically, if you want a navigation structure like this:

About (regular page)
Category (with children)
Services (regular page)
Products (regular page)

This method also allows you to use your existing CSS for your wp_list_pages(); Meaning that you don't have to use an additional set of rules for your category menu

View Demo

WP Database Optimizer

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Ever wished that you could take some measure to speed up your Wordpress site? Have you created and deleted a lot of posts as well as experimented with plugins? All these deleted entries leave overhead on the database that should be routinely cleared out. This plugin allows you to have your Wordpress tables to be optimized on a schedule. It uses the Wordpress Database Class to do the work, and you can set the number of days in between optimizations.

Jump Menu of Child Pages for Wordpress

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Here is a small bit of code to place on your page.php template. If the page id is the parent page that has child pages, this code will generate a dropdown menu of those children only on the pages that meet that criteria.

Multiple Values Wordpress Custom Fields

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So i had a client who needed to enter into their site a list of the manufactures that they sell in their store. In the past, i have set up a category called "Manufacturers" and then told them to create a new post for each one. The following client, just wanted the manufacturer name, logo, and website. So i created 1 wordpress page called "manufacturers" and created a custom field on that page called "manufacturer info."

Wordpress Custom Fields Tip

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I was working on a Wordpress site where I had in excess of 10 custom fields across the site. Not all of them are used on every post. Also, sometimes even on a specific category not all of the normal ones were being used. For example, an address section of a post that has the following custom fields...






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