Birnam Designs is a quality web design and development agency in Virginia

Archive for the 'wordpress' Category

WordPress contact form plugin modification

Wednesday, October 18th, 2006

Douglas Karr has been kind enough to provide a modified version of the WP-ContactForm plugin that I’ve been using to manage my contact form. It’s a simple change to implement, and if you get any spam through your WP-ContactForm, this will save you a lot of headache. It’s a much simpler concept than a CAPTCHA image — it verifies humanitity through a simple challenge question. By default, this is “2 + 2 =” (4). Easy enough for anyone to answer — except for bots! Recommended.

CustomMore v0.2 Wordpress plugin: customizing ‘more’ links

Monday, January 23rd, 2006

(Currently, available only for users with Visual Rich Editor turned off)

v0.2

WordPress makes it easy to divide content into an introduction section and an extended content section by simply clicking on the “more” button. The introduction section is displayed in the main blog page, while the extended content is added to that section on the permalink page. This is great for those of us who have a tendency for writing lengthy posts. (ahem)

The only problem is that every post with extended content gets the same link, saying “Read the rest of this entry »” or (more…), depending on which version of Wordpress you’re using. Wouldn’t it be nice if you can customize what that says?

Now you can! CustomMore is a small plugin that asks for the text you want to use to link to the extended content. In the composition page of the WP admin, it looks like the same old “more” button (note: only available if the Visual Rich Editor is turned off), but when you click it, a box will pop up asking for the link text. It will appear in your document in modified form of the WordPress default more tag.

To install, just unzip the file into your wp-content/plugins/ directory. (You will be uploading the entire bd_custommore directory as a sub-directory of the plugins directory).

Download CustomMore v0.2 here.

Feedburner, Wordpress 2.0, and mod_rewrite - Oh My!

Wednesday, January 18th, 2006

Wordpress 2.0 was released a couple of weeks ago with much huzzah, and once again the Wordpress team has managed to make their software even simpler and even more powerful to install and use than ever before. I don’t know how they pull it off. It took me, literally, about 25 minutes to learn that 2.0 was released, download the new version, read about the installation, update my old Wordpress installation, and reinstall all of the plugins I was using with 1.5 — all without a single hiccup. I was ecstatic!

A few days after the upgrade, I noticed a problem with my Feedburner statistics. They weren’t coming in anymore. I looked a little closer and realized that a very fundamental change had occurred in the way that Wordpress read URLs.

(more…)