Archive for the ‘Wordpress & plugins’ Category

WordPress Download Monitor is my popular plugin for managing files available for download in WordPress – version 3.3 is a major update containing many new features and improvements.
Version 3.3 (beta) is now available for beta testing to ensure this is a hassle free update when released officially. I would appreciate any feedback, praise and bug reports in the comments. Read more about the new features and grab it after the break.


The Wordress Snippets series of posts will give you some useful code snippets for use in your projects – just copy and paste (but try to understand how they work!).
This snippet will add a stylesheet to your login page so that you can style it fully, and also change the default Wordpress logo link (to wordpress.org) and title text to something of your choosing. Add it to functions.php in your template.


The Wordress Snippets series of posts will give you some useful code snippets for use in your projects – just copy and paste (but try to understand how they work!).
This snippet will add rel="nofollow" to the links in your blogroll, or those outputted by wp_list_bookmarks. Add to functions.php or your links template.


I have had some requests asking me to improve the Wordpress Download Monitor documentation, so I decided to write (and maintain) this post explaining the ins-and-outs of configuring and using the plugin. Hopefully it will help you guys use the plugin, and also reveal more of its power and flexibility.
Don’t forget, if you love download monitor please make a small donation and/or rate it on the wordpress plugins directory. I also appreciate your contributions to the development of the plugin, so feel free to email me any code or your suggestions. Your support is very welcome!
Links: Download Monitor Page | Plugin Directory Page


Download Monitor 3 is upon us. Download Monitor is a plugin for uploading and managing downloads, tracking download hits, and displaying links. So far it has been downloaded over 45,000 times!
New features in version 3 include shortcodes, better template tags, daily stats, download logs and more! Download monitor 3 requires at least Wordpress version 2.5.
Links: Download Monitor Documenation | Plugin Directory Page


‘Shortcodes’ are a feature of wordpress used for executing custom functions by inserting a small snippit of code into a post. For example, my download monitor plugin now uses shortcodes; by entering [download id="1"] into a post, the plugin will output a download link.
The shortcode syntax varies, here are some examples:
[shortcode]
[shortcode atribute="value"]
[shortcode]Text[/shortcode]
Shortcodes can be created to perform a handful of useful functions. To use any of the shortcodes in this post I recommend adding the functions to your functions.php theme file (create it if it does not exist!). Ill show shortcodes ranging from showing adsense to speaking pirate! (written for wordpress 2.7)


If you have ever tried to include code in a wordpress post you may have gone through hell trying to get it to output correctly; Wordpress’ built in functions for formatting text (autop and texturize) mangle your code making it non-functional.
I’ve tried many solutions in the past, such as disabling wordpress’ formatting functions, however, this is not ideal -especially if you rely on them to clean up your text and properly encode characters. On top of that its not even valid to include certain things such as CSS in the body of a xHTML document.
The solution? Custom fields. This post will show you how.

At last! My sidebar login widget has evolved into ‘Sidebar Login’ which has both a widget and a template tag to allow you to have a login form in the sidebar of your wordpress powered blog.
It lets users login, and then redirects them back to the page they logged in from rather than the backend, it also shows error messages. Read more for more information and the download link.

This plugin has now been replaced by an updated version which you can find here. This version is good for wordpress versions below 2.5 and can be obtained here.

It’s here! The new improved download monitor plugin for wordpress is ready for use, and ready for wordpress 2.5 which is set to be released soon. This new version, aside form the wordpress 2.5 support, contains many bug fixes and is now much more efficient.
Download Monitor is a plugin for uploading and managing downloads, tracking download hits, and displaying links. Version 1 had a total of over 6000 downloads, lets hope this new release proves just as popular. Read more for the download link, the list of fixes, and usage/upgrade instructions.

This plugin has now been replaced by an updated version which you can find here
A number of users were experiencing errors with the sidebar login widget I created, issues such as bugs with cookies and headers sent. In a bid to stop these errors I have created a new version, compatible with wordpress 2.3.
This version is different to the others because rather than redirecting to the normal wordpress login page to log the user in, it has the code for login built into it, thus (in theory) solving the cookie/headers problems. Hoorar. Read more about the widget after the break.
