If you use links to navigate to other elements on the same page, it’s generally a good idea to animate the scrolling so you don’t disorientate your users. This snippet will make that easy for you.
Tag Archives: Snippets
Totally simple jQuery method for selecting all checkboxes in a form
It’s a common problem with a dozen different solutions – if you’ve ever needed to add a ‘select all’ checkbox to a form in order to make your users’ lives easier then you’ll have searched for a simple way to do it. If you’re using jQuery here’s a very simple method.
WordPress 101: Create a new widget area
Most WordPress themes come with a few useful widget areas where you can place any widgets you like. Sometimes, however, you need to add your own widget area because the theme you’re using doesn’t quite cut it. Paste this snippet in your theme’s functions.php file to create a new widget area.
WordPress: Add plugin settings link to Plugins page
When building a plugin that has its own settings page, it’s often handy to create a link to the settings page straight from the Plugins list – this saves users the time it takes to find where exactly your plugin appears in the admin menu. Here is a simple code snippet that creates the settings link for you – all you need to do is tell it where to go.
Some handy WordPress debugging tips
If something goes wrong with your WordPress install due to a faulty plugin or some bad PHP code, it can often be tricky to work out exactly what the issue is an how to fix it. Here are a couple of helpful functions and snippets that you can use to fix a number of WordPress issues.
Find duplicate field values in MySQL
I recently had to clean up a database table of user data because it had the same email addresses assigned to multiple users. The first step was putting together a query that pulled only the duplicate email addresses and also told me how many times they occurred – this simple query looked something like this.
Two methods for vertical centering in CSS
Vertical centering has always been a fairly elusive goal when dong CSS layouts, but it’s actually easier to achieve than you might think. Here are the two simplest methods that I know of to achieve this goal.
WordPress: Add featured image to RSS feed
In order to minimise the amount of plugins your site uses, here’s a simple function I use to show a post’s featured image in the RSS feed (something WordPress does not do by default).
Make your WordPress content editor use HTML by default
A quick line of code to ensure that your WordPress content editor will always land on the HTML tab by default. This will ensure that your HTML tags & attributes are never stripped automatically.
Simple way to generate a random password in PHP
When creating web apps, there’s often a need to generate a random password for your users. There are a number of ways to do this, but in needing to do this recently I came up with this very simple function that will generate a password (or other random string) of whatever length you wish.
Creating shortcodes in WordPress
WordPress shortcodes are a handy way to add standardised or dynamic content to any post or page. Once you have used them for a bit you will start to realise just how powerful they really are. Here is a guide on how to create shortcodes that you (or your clients) can use.
Loop through each character in a string in PHP
The other day I was working on a project that required me to extract a numeric ID from the current page’s URL. The problem was that the ID could either be at the end of the URL string or in the middle, depending if there were any parameters added on or not. Here is how I worked around the problem by looping through each character of the string.