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The first historical reference to AJAX technique (Roman Villa at Halicarnassus, 4th century AD)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

Strategies for URL redirection in WordPress front-end pages

I know that is not a common situation but sometimes it’s necessary to redirect the current page to another URL. Inside WordPress back-end is relatively simple but from the WordPress front-end templates that shows the Posts, Pages… It’s a little more complicated.

Change direction

In this article we’ll see some strategies for redirecting the URLs, all of them based in using the WP function template_redirectContinue reading…

Changing the user’s Contact Info fields

By default, WordPress still maintains very old contact info fields for users so the most probable is that you want to improve them and, on the other hand, despite of some themes or plugins have already made this change, probably you don’t want either that these improvements depend on one installed theme or plugin but rather they always keep available.

Improving User’s Contact Info

So, in this example, we’re going to develope a simple plugin that makes three different things Continue reading…

Using wp_add_inline_script function. A Google Analytics example.

Until version version 4.4, in WordPress, there was only one way to add script files to the WordPress themes, the function wp_enqueue_script however, the new version 4.5 has introduced a new way, the function wp_add_inline_script that allows us to add javascript text scripts directly inside a template and that, in addition, it can be directly connected with other scripts. Let’s go to see how it works.

Example of using the wp_add_inline_script function

At bottom, this new function wp_add_inline_script is the equivalent for scripts files, to the wp_add_inline_script function is for CSS files. Let’s see how it works through and example based on adding the Google Analytics script to a WP theme. Continue reading…

Marking all external links for opening in a new Tab Browser

Normally, it’s while you are writting a post, when you mark the links inside the text as normal or “for opening in a new Tab or Browser” –typically the external links–; simply you mark the checkbox Open link in a new Tab in the Links Tool of WordPress Editor but what does it happen if you have already got a lot of posts non marked, or if you have changed the criteria for external links, or whatever similar situation?

Food Camera and Backchannel: MIT Media Lab lists

Well, the long solution consists of editing all posts and to locate and to correct manually the external links but, if you have more than a hundred of posts with a lot of links probably, it will be an very stressing task, and surely, you’ll forget some of them… Continue reading…