Author Archive for Adam White

WP 3.2 and Custom Field Queries

Friday, February 25th, 2011

If you make extensive use of custom fields in your WordPress theme then you may want to hold off on upgrading to 3.2 until you have had someone look over your theme. They have deprecated the query structure for querying custom field data in a loop. In laymen terms, if somewhere on your theme you show all the posts that have a custom key or value then that query may stop working when you upgrade to 3.2. Any query of this sort needs to be updated to the new format before you upgrade to 3.2.

See the codex notes here.

http://codex.wordpress.org/Function_Reference/query_posts#Custom_Field_Parameters

So what should you do?

Although the old code is already deprecated in 3.1, it still works. So you don’t have to act immediately, but judging by the rate at which WordPress keeps offering upgrades, you will need to deal with this before the fall of 2011.  The important thing would be to not forget. This is one of those little noticed issues that will be a major headache to a lot of people who have become comfortable with doing automatic upgrades, so don’t wait until the last minute. If you are running 3.1 now then go ahead and make plans now to update your themes.

Categories : WordPress

Searching Custom Fields

Friday, July 2nd, 2010

I was disappointed the other day when looking into the query that happens on WordPress searches. It seems that WordPress by default will only search for your keyword or phrase in the title and body of the post. Not in related category or other taxonomies and not in custom fields. This could pose to be a problem for some users and how they layout their content.

With the latest release of WordPress (3.x) offering both custom post types as well as custom taxonomies, there will be a lot of users wanting to take full advantage of these features along with custom fields to create unique content along side their blog and static page content. I have found a plugin that has been around for a while now, but with the latest revisions to the core of WordPress, will become more and more essential to people utilizing these new features.

If you want someone to be able to search your custom fields and other taxonomies though the built in WordPress search then you need the plugin called “Search Everything” by Dan Cameron of Sprout Venture. It’s a simple and well executed method of adding specific elements to the main WordPress search query.

Search Everything’s Plugin Site

Categories : WordPress Plugins

WordPress + Facebook App = Synergy

Tuesday, September 29th, 2009

If you are a facebook user, you may not appreciate the flood of apps and surveys that overwhelm your news feed every day. It’s true that the most popular apps are probably the most worthless. I recently had a project come up where we wanted to have better control over a facebook page, and have it feed directly from website data so the user wouldn’t have to keep up the content in different systems. The solutions came to me while reading the facebook app developer documentation. Read More→

Multilingual Websites With WordPress

Tuesday, July 21st, 2009

flagsThere are a few different ways to offer multiple language translations for your website.  Though new plugins may come out, the options simply break down into three types of solutions.

  1. Automatic Translation
    With this option you completely rely on software based translation to convert your content. Although it is an easy quick fix, these software based translations can produce translations that are not always accurate or in some cases, make no sense at all. This works best if you don’t care so much about how readable your site will be in other languages, but you want to increase visability or at least your perceived visibility. Read More→

wordpressMany businesses wonder what the benefit is of adding a blog to their site. How is a blog different then the content I currently have on my site. The truth is, that to the outside world, it isn’t all that different.  The main difference is the timeliness of the content. A blog allows you provide a constant flow of content to your site. Although, in order to do this, the content will probably not be as high of quaility as what you may be used to. For this reason, most blogs are written in first person and the author is identified in the post. It’s easier to compose content in first person and allows you to worry less about the composition and more about the content. When you are able to focus wholly on the content then you are able to contour your content around your keywords that you are wanting to be found under. The other element involved in blogging is the comments that you allow on your blog posts. Comments and ping-backs show the search engines that site visitors are interested in your content and gives you more credibility for the topic of that particular blog post. There are many different platforms on which you can blog, but the best system for SEO and customizable flexibility is WordPress.  As you think about blogging, here are a few tips to go by. Read More→