Gutenberg or how to convert the experience of writing a post in a nightmare. The text processing point of view.

The WordPress lords had a dream they named Gutenberg however, for now, that is just a nightmare… And talking from the point of view of writing, a great and dark nightmare. But, how could something created as a step forward become a nightmare?

Lock

The answer is very easy. The idea that lies at the heart of this new invention is just the layout of the text, its visual structure of text thinking in paragraph and block of content but not in the text itself and thus, Gutenberg is a tool that allows you to format a finished text in blocks, but does not allow to treat the text as a word processor in no way, in other words, all features related to text processing have been lost. Continue reading…

How to add Categories and Tags to wp Pages

Historically, categories and tags have always been associated only with wp publications; they are one of the pillars of the classification and search of information in wp, and normally this approach is more than enough for most websites. However, when talking about medium and large size websites, the lack of this technique applied to standard wp pages is not a good scenario.

line markers

The pages, habitually static information not subject to a date (unlike posts), hardly ever need to be classified or searched… they have mostly been accessed through menus but what can we do if we need to add Categories, Tags or even custom taxonomies to Pages? Continue reading…

Showing the Last Updated Date in wp Posts or Pages

One of the most important things currently is to be up to date, offering contrasted information and, above all, that has not become obsolete. Most WP themes show the date on which an article was created but … How can a visitor know if that content is up to date?

Computer Tapes

The answer is to show, in addition to the date of creation, the date of the last modification of any wp content. In this post I’m going to show how we can do it in a very simple way. Continue reading…

How to create an AJAX call in WordPress step by step

WordPress essentially works thanks to PHP language that gets the requests from users and admins, processes these requests and finally constructs the results as HTML pages, ie, PHP sends to you the pages that you see in the browser. Request, process, results; it’s simple. Sometimes however, you need control some elements of the screen after the HTML page has been sent and displayed: a special message on the screen after a checkbox has been checked, the change of an image depending on a select field, etc. and you don’t want to make a new request again. You want that these little elements change on the screen without repeat the whole process of request, process, results… In these cases you need to use the AJAX technique.

The first historical reference to AJAX technique (Roman Villa at Halicarnassus, 4th century AD)

Beyond this more than dubious historical reference of the previous illustration 🙂 , AJAX is a technology of developement supported by javascript and designed precisely for doing these kind of tasks, ie, to comunicate the client site to the server side silently, without a complete requests, just with the execution of a concrete funcion or module on the server side with a few concrete results. Continue reading…

Creating a Table of Contents for your Pages

WordPress has got the hability to work with nuclear posts and also with posts that can contain other posts, ie, posts with hierarchical structure, the pages. Today we’re going to see how to create a hierarchical list of the second ones, as an index of pages, Table of contents (TOC), etc.

Panzerbaum

As default, WordPress supports two different kinds of elements: posts and pages. The basic difference between them is that the first ones are treated as individual elements and thus, when WordPress displays a collection of them, this will be just a long linear list of elements (like the natural numbers 1, 2, 3, 4, for example) meanwhile the second ones have got a hierachical structure, ie, each element can contain (to point to) elements that have also got hierarchical structure and can contain (to point to) other elements and so on, in consequence, when WordPress displays a collection of them, it should be always presented as a tree and never as a list. Continue reading…

Creating WP help tabs in admin, plugins or themes pages

WordPress has got a help manager very simple, just a couple of functions, so you can easily use it for creating help screen for your own developements. Learn you step by step how the WP help manager works, and how to use it.

Creating WP helps for your plugins and themes

But before beginning to create our own WP help pages, first we should see the internal structure of the WP help manager that, basically has just got two modules. Continue reading…

Plugin reCAPTCHA in WP comments form plugin

reCAPTCHA in WP comments form plugin is an ANTISPAM tool that adds a Google reCAPTCHA field inside the comments form of your WP theme when the user is not logged in preventing fraudulent or deceptive comments.

The plugin also introduces a second verification process that detects the unauthorized direct accesses by spam robots to the WP comments system and allows you to decide what you want to do with those comments.

Finally, the plugin has got an optional forced javascript output mode that lets you to add a reCAPTCHA field also in old WP themes that didn’t use the new WP form comments functions but they make a direct output of its own comments form.

 See plugin details »

How to detect when get_template_part() WordPress function fails

Nowadays, in most of modern WordPress themes, the function get_template_part() is one of their essential elements. It just takes review the structure of, for example the last official themes (…, Fourteen, Fifteen, Sixteen), to realize that WordPress themes have evolved, from a structure quite monolitic to a structure driven by content and formats. And one of the keys to this evolution is the get_template_part () function.

silent diversity

get_template_part() it’s actually an invaluable element of any modern WordPress theme that through its two parameters allows us to select dynamically what .php file (what part) is going to be loaded for displaying the current page (see the official documentation for further information) however, one of its characteristics is that Continue reading…