Tag: plugin

How-To: Reset WordPress Database to Default Settings

Easily Reset WordPress Database

WordPress Database Reset is a WordPress plugin I recently came across that will at some point prove very, very useful to me.

It’s not often that I need to reset a production WordPress database to it’s default settings, but this plugin will make the task a whole lot easier. Chris Berthe, the author, describes the plugin like this:

WordPress Database Reset is a secure and easy way to reinitialize your WordPress database back to its default settings without actually having to reinstall WordPress yourself.

I can see this being crazy useful for WordPress plugin and theme developers. We frequently need a fresh database to work with, so I’ll be adopting this plugin in my WordPress plugin and theme development workflow from here on.

WordPress Database Reset requires WordPress 3.0+ and can be installed just like any other WordPress plugin. It’s in the WordPress Plugin directory, and can also be found on GitHub.

It even integrates with WP-CLI, a command line tool for interacting with WordPress. This allows you to do things like select which tables you want to reset:

wp reset database --tables='users, posts, comments, options'

Here’s a list of features:

  • Extremely fast one click process to reset the WordPress database
  • Choose to reset the entire database or specific database tables
  • Secure and super simple to use
  • Prefer the command line? Reset the database in one command
  • Excellent for theme and plugin developers who need to clean the database of any unnecessary content quickly

If you’re a WordPress theme or plugin developer, you should definitely check it out.

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Version 0.0.3 of jQuery Sticky Alerts Plugin Now Available

I’ve released version 0.0.3 of my Sticky Alerts jQuery plugin. It’s available on GitHub and is now indexed at plugins.jquery.com.

I’ve added a feature to remember if the bar has been closed or not. This is done via cookies, and there’s an option to set. The option, cookieRememberDays, default to 2. If you want to disable it (ie: bar will appear every time the page is loaded no matter what), you need to set cookieRememberDays to a value of 0.

To keep the bar closed for 7 days, do something like this:

$('#alert-container').stickyalert({
  barFontColor:'#eee',
  barColor:'#222',
  barFontSize: '1.1rem',
  barText:'Hey, need some web work done? Give me a shout!',
  barTextLink:'http://longren.io/work-with-me/',
  cookieRememberDays: '7'
});

To keep it as-is, and make the bar open on every page load, do this:

$('#alert-container').stickyalert({
  barFontColor:'#eee',
  barColor:'#222',
  barFontSize: '1.1rem',
  barText:'Hey, need some web work done? Give me a shout!',
  barTextLink:'http://longren.io/work-with-me/',
  cookieRememberDays: '0'
});

Head on over to GitHub for a download link, or click here to download version 0.0.3 directly from the GitHub tag.

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WordPress: Sending Correct HTTP Status Code on Login Failure

For some reason, WordPress will send a 200 HTTP response status code, or OK, when a login attempt has failed. Why not send a 403 status code, which is designed specifically to say you can’t be here, or forbidden, actually. There’s even a better alternative to 403, but stay with me.

I came about this bit of information while reading this post by Konstantin Kovshenin. And was able to confirm it myself by logging into this site incorrectly, as you can see in the featured image above. wp-login.php is returned as 200 OK and is circled in red.

So, as Konstantin suggested, we can use this code to send a proper 403 Forbidden status code on a failed login attempt:

<?php
function my_login_failed_403() {
    status_header( 403 );
}
add_action( 'wp_login_failed', 'my_login_failed_403' )
?>

But why send a 403, which is Forbidden? It’s not truly a forbidden page, as people have a legit reason to be there, even if they can’t remember their password.

So, sending 401 Unauthorized as the HTTP response status code may be even better.

<?php
function my_login_failed_401() {
    status_header( 401 );
}
add_action( 'wp_login_failed', 'my_login_failed_401' );
?>

So, you can use either of those, the first chunk to send a 403 Forbidden response, and the second for sending a 401 Unauthorized response code.

On login failure, send "401 Unauthorized" or "403 Forbidden" HTTP response code?

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Either could go in the functions.php file for your theme, or more likely, in your WordPress functionality plugin.

You can find a good list of HTTP response codes at the Mozilla Developer Network site.

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Creating A WordPress Functionality Plugin

Keep your customizations in place, like that driftwood up there

A functionality plugin is a WordPress plugin that is specific to your site, and contains the additional functionality you need your site to have. This is a much better option than adding features to your theme’s functions.php file, because it allows you to change themes at will, yet keep your customizations via the plugin.

WPCandy has a great write-up on creating a functionality plugin and does a great job of explaining why you’d want to use one, and also what kind of things belong in a functionality plugin. Here’s one of my favorite pieces from that WPCandy article:

To decide what belongs in a functions.php file and what belongs in a functionality plugin, think long term. Rather than thinking about how your website will look and behave this week, think about how it will look and behave five years from now. With few exceptions, I bet all of our sites will have new and upgraded themes in five years’ time.

If a feature is theme-specific, such as sidebars or menus, is should go into your functions.php file. If the feature interacts with content of any type, it belongs in a functionality plugin.

Creating The Plugin

This piece is so easy, we’re essentially creating our own WordPress plugin. First, create a new folder called functionality-plugin. Create it inside the plugins folder for your WordPress site.

Next, we just need to create the PHP file and save it in the functionality-plugin folder. Your plugin needs to have some specific content in the comments at the top of the file for WordPress to recognize it as a plugin, you can see those in the functionality plugin example below. Our functionality plugin will load a JavaScript file that your site relies on ALL the time, no matter what theme is currently in use.

<?php
/*
Plugin Name: Tyler's Functionality Plugin
Description: Everything to run my site.
Version: 1.0
License: GPL
Author: Tyler Longren
Author URI: http://longren.io/
*/

function load_site_scripts() {
    // load javascript
    wp_enqueue_script( 'photo-service-script', 'http://thisphotoservice.com/script.js' );
 
}
add_action( 'wp_enqueue_scripts', 'load_site_scripts' );

?>

So, with that, as long as this plugin is enabled, your site will always load that necessary JavaScript file, http://thisphotoservice.com/script.js.

You can safely use that code as a starting point for your own functionality plugin. Just make sure to save that code in the functionality-plugin folder.

The filename doesn’t matter, just make sure to save it with a .php extension. Navigate in your web browser to your WordPress Dashboard, go to Plugins, and enable your plugin just like you would any other plugin. That’s it!

Really, most of what I know about functionality plugins came from Ryan Imel and his article at WPCandy, so a LOT of credit is owed to Ryan.

Do you use a functionality plugin?

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There’s this plugin at WordPress.org, too, called Functionality. It’s essentially a plugin for creating a functionality plugin it looks like, but I’m really not sure. Anybody used it before? Comments are open below.

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Embed MarkDown in WordPress Posts

Easily embed markdown into WordPress posts and pages.

There’s lots of plugins to enable your entire post to be composed of Markdown, but what if you only want a piece of your post to be in Markdown? I shortcode sure would come in handy.

This is where the Inline Markdown plugin comes in to play. Just write your WordPress post as usual, and wrap any Markdown content in the

shortcode.

As an example, here’s a portion of the README from my Rootdip WordPress theme, that’s written in Markdown. Inline Markdown is an excellent tool for displaying entire README’s or portions of them from GitHub repos.

The md shortcode starts immediately following this line:
[md]Other Considerations

A majority of the images included in RootDip are from the iconic icon set by P.J. Onori. Images from Iconic are the tag, sticky post identifier, link post format identifier, status post format identifier, quote post format identifier and left and right arrows. I will likely use more images from Iconic as I add additional features/post formats to RootDip.

How To Contribute

  1. Fork it
  2. Create your feature branch (git checkout -b my-new-feature)
  3. Commit your changes (git commit -am 'Add some feature')
  4. Push to the branch (git push origin my-new-feature)
  5. Create new Pull Request

And that’s it, end of the md shortcode is on the line above. I used the md shortcode like so to achieve that:

Other Considerations


A majority of the images included in RootDip are from the iconic icon set by P.J. Onori. Images from Iconic are the tag, sticky post identifier, link post format identifier, status post format identifier, quote post format identifier and left and right arrows. I will likely use more images from Iconic as I add additional features/post formats to RootDip.


How To Contribute


    

  1. Fork it
    2. 

  2. Create your feature branch (git checkout -b my-new-feature)
    3. 

  3. Commit your changes (git commit -am 'Add some feature')
    4. 

  4. Push to the branch (git push origin my-new-feature)
    5. 

  5. Create new Pull Request
    6.

Pretty easy to do and really useful for embedding markdown from GitHub readme’s directly in your WordPress posts.

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