Christopher Ross » Support Forums

WordPress Plugin to List Posts with Pingbacks and Trackbacks

Christopher Ross — Thu, 28 May 2009 15:22:03 +0000

The plugin allows you to select the number of links to show, control how they are shown and include a link to the third party websites (with or without nofollow links) as a thank you for linking to your articles.

I wrote the plugin for my new theme and use it here on thisismyurl as part of the new magazine style format.

Download

Support forums are now online! If you have any questions, please visit http://forums.thisismyurl.com.

Support forums are now live!

Christopher Ross — Thu, 28 May 2009 14:12:43 +0000

With the new plugins now available for download, I’ve installed bbPress, the open source forum tool from WordPress to help answer questions about plugins and offer more streamed support than standard comments will allow.

The forums can be found online at http://forums.thisismyurl.com, I still have a lot of work to do on them but for now if you have any questions about my plugins please feel free to visit.

Chris

Easy Scheduled Posts for WordPress

Christopher Ross — Fri, 22 May 2009 14:05:14 +0000

While I was working on my new theme for thisismyurl.com I came across the need to publish a series of scheduled posts in the side bar and so I put together a simple plugin for WordPress. The tool works like most WordPress theme calls and features:

Customizable number of links returned
Customizable before and after to ensure you can display the results
The ability to echo or return results

To use the plugin, install it to your WordPress website and edit your theme files by placing the following code:

General results
Without passing any parameters, the plugin will return ten results or fewer depending on how many posts you have.

[source lang="php"]<?php scheduledPosts();?>[/source]

Specific number of results
If you would like to return a specific number of results as your maximum:

[source lang="php"]<?php scheduledPosts(‘count=10′);?>[/source]

Altering the before and after values
By default the plugin wraps your code in list item (

) tags but you can specify how to format the results using the following code:

[source lang="php"]<?php scheduledPosts(‘before=&after=’);?>[/source]

Echo vs. Return
Finally, if you’d like to copy the results into a variable you can return the results as follows:

[source lang="php"]<?php scheduledPosts(‘echo=false’);?> [/source]

Download the plugin

Support forums are now online! If you have any questions, please visit http://forums.thisismyurl.com.

Easy Popular Posts Plugin for WordPress

Christopher Ross — Thu, 21 May 2009 11:19:28 +0000

While I was working on my new theme for thisismyurl.com I came across the need to publish a series of popular posts in the side bar and so I put together a simple plugin for WordPress. The tool works like most WordPress theme calls and features:

Customizable number of links returned
Customizable before and after to ensure you can display the results
The ability to echo or return results
Let’s you control how popular a post should be

To use the plugin, install it to your WordPress website and edit your theme files by placing the following code:

General results
Without passing any parameters, the plugin will return ten results or fewer depending on how many posts you have.

[source lang="php"]<?php popularPosts();?>[/source]

Specific number of results
If you would like to return a specific number of results as your maximum:

[source lang="php"]<?php popularPosts(‘count=10′);?>[/source]

Altering the before and after values
By default the plugin wraps your code in list item (

) tags but you can specify how to format the results using the following code:
[source lang="php"]<?php popularPosts(‘before=&amp;after=’);?>[/source]

Echo vs. Return
Finally, if you’d like to copy the results into a variable you can return the results as follows:

[source lang="php"]<?php popularPosts(‘echo=false’);?> [/source]

Minimum Comments
To ensure you only return truly popular articles, you can limit the returned posts to posts with a minimum number of comments

[source lang="php"]<?php popularPosts(‘comments=10′);?> [/source]

Download the plugin

Support forums are now online! If you have any questions, please visit http://forums.thisismyurl.com.

Easy Random Posts Plugin for WordPress

Christopher Ross — Wed, 20 May 2009 22:37:12 +0000

While I was working on my new theme for thisismyurl.com I came across the need to publish a series of random posts in the side bar and so I put together a simple post randomizer for WordPress. The tool works like most WordPress theme calls and features:

Customizable number of links returned
Customizable before and after to ensure you can display the results
The ability to echo or return results

To use the plugin, install it to your WordPress website and edit your theme files by placing the following code:

General results
Without passing any parameters, the plugin will return ten results or fewer depending on how many posts you have.

[source lang="php"]<?php randomPosts();?>[/source]

Specific number of results
If you would like to return a specific number of results as your maximum:

[source lang="php"]<?php randomPosts(‘count=10′);?>[/source]

Altering the before and after values

By default the plugin wraps your code in list item (

) tags but you can specify how to format the results using the following code:

[source lang="php"]<?php randomPosts(‘before=&after=’);?>[/source]

Echo vs. Return
Finally, if you’d like to copy the results into a variable you can return the results as follows:

[source lang="php"]<?php randomPosts(‘echo=false’);?> [/source]

Download

Download the plugin.

Support forums are now online! If you have any questions, please visit http://forums.thisismyurl.com.

Easy Technorati Tags for WordPress

Christopher Ross — Tue, 28 Apr 2009 16:53:12 +0000

There are a few other Technorati Tags generators for WordPress out there but I found most of them overly complicated and fairly difficult to use, often requiring custom fields or complex processes. What this plugin does is takes the native tags from WordPress and generates a list of Technorati tags for your blog.

Usage

To use the Easy Technorati Tags for WordPress plugin, simply download and install onto your WordPress website. You can then add it to your theme by inserting the code to your blog theme files or to a sidebar widget.

Output

The tag generates a comma separated list of tags complete with Technorati links. I choose to return it as a value rather than write it directly so that if you’d like to make changes or process the results, you can do it easy.

You can download the plugin directly from the WordPress Plugin Directory. Don’t forget to rate the plugin if you’ve enjoyed it.

How You Can Help

I love developing plugins for WordPress and do my best to always keep them free but of course it take a lot of time and effort to build these plugins so if you’d like to say thanks, the best way is to take a few moments and write about the plugin on your own website, include a link to my website from your posts or download and rate the plugin on the official plugin directory.

Support forums are now online! If you have any questions, please visit http://forums.thisismyurl.com.

WordPress.com Stats Smiley Remover Plugin

Christopher Ross — Tue, 24 Mar 2009 14:01:50 +0000

When you install the WordPress.com Stats plugin from WordPress it adds a small, simple graphic to your posts which looks like a small smiley face. Generally it’s located in the footer of your theme but no matter how hard you try, you won’t be able to find it (or remove it) from the code.

Why?

The smiley face is actually being loaded through a series of JavaScript calls from a remote server, the graphic isn’t actually located on your website at all! It’s part of the WordPress.com Stats plugin and is designed to help track visitors to your website but … it’s kinda ugly and a pain in the ass so to get rid of it all you need to do is add some code to your header.php file. Specifically, open your style.css file and add the following CSS:

[source lang="css"]img#wpstats{display:none;}[/source]

If you’re absolutely petrified of opening and editing your CSS files directly you can either pay a WordPress expert to do it for you (that’s the choice that my wife always prefers) or you can download my simple plugin which can be uploaded to your website and activated, automatically adding the code to the proper place.

How to Install

Download the plugin
Log into your WordPress Admin (http://[yourwebsite]/wp-admin
Surf to Plugins -> Add New
Select the ZIP file and Install Now
Activate the Plugin

For those of you who would like to know more about the Smiley Face frustrustration, Ryan Imel wrote a great piece on it a while back and there’s also a great piece on My Digital Life.

How You Can Help

Support forums are now online! If you have any questions, please visit http://forums.thisismyurl.com.

WordPress PHPINFO() Plugin

Christopher Ross — Wed, 28 Jan 2009 12:03:20 +0000

It’s important for a non technical administrator to be able to diagnose server related problems in WordPress but also rapidly retrieve feedback regarding their web server. This simple plugin adds an option to an adminstrator’s Tools menu which displays standard phpinfo() feedback details to the user.

This a very simple script, designed to help the non technical user get immediate feedback about their blog.

It’s very easy to run a phpinfo() session without running a plugin and I can already hear a lot of people pointed out that this is a little like swatting a fly with a bulldozer but recently I’ve been working with a lot of charities and not-for-profits who lack in-house technical support and the simple process of running a phpinfo() query was daunting.

For those of you who want to run this as a page rather than a plugin, you can upload a php script to your website with the following code:

Once you upload the code, simply access the page via the URL. On the other hand, if what I just typed made no sense what-so-ever …

How You Can Help

I love developing plugins for WordPress and do my best to always keep them free but of course it take a lot of time and effort to build these plugins so if you’d like to say thanks, the best way is to take a few moments and write about the plugin on your own website, include a link to my website from your posts or download and rate the plugin on the official plugin directory.

Support forums are now online! If you have any questions, please visit http://forums.thisismyurl.com.

No More Frames Plugin for WordPress

Christopher Ross — Sun, 25 Jan 2009 15:41:48 +0000

Many websites try to load your content into their own frame, to help sell ads on their sites. This simple plugin ensure your site is protect from this using a simple piece of code in your document header.

It works by placing a small JavaScript in the header of your document.

=== Plugin Name ===

Contributors: christopherross
Plugin URI: http://www.thisismyurl.com/wordpress/plugins/no-more-frames
Tags: frames
Requires at least: 2.0.0
Tested up to: 2.7.0
Stable tag: 0.5.1

Many websites try to load your content into their own frame, to help sell ads on their sites. This simple plugin ensure your site is protect from this using a simple piece of code in your document header.

== Description ==

Many websites try to load your content into their own frame, to help sell ads on their sites. This simple plugin ensure your site is protect from this using a simple piece of code in your document header.

== Installation ==

To install the plugin, please upload the ourprogess folder to your plugins folder and active the plugin.

== Updates ==

Updates to the plugin will be posted here, to [thisismyurl](http://www.thisismyurl.com/plugins/no-more-frames)

== Donations ==

If you would like to donate to help support future development of this tool, please visit [thisismyurl](http://www.thisismyurl.com/)

How You Can Help

Support forums are now online! If you have any questions, please visit http://forums.thisismyurl.com.

WordPress Plugin to automatically update the copyright notice.

Christopher Ross — Wed, 21 Jan 2009 16:35:05 +0000

What is this WordPress plugin?

This plugin automatically generates a copyright notice from the first post in your blog to the current year. The Auto Copyright notice plugin fetches the first and last year of posts from the database and displays the results as a copyright notice on your website.

This process allows blog owners to add content retroactively, knowing that the website will automatically find the first date a post is published as well as the last published date or the current year (whichever is later).

To use the plugin, simply download it and add the code to your website where you’d like the copyright notice to appear.

How You Can Help

Support forums are now online! If you have any questions, please visit http://forums.thisismyurl.com.

Fundraising Thermometer Plugin for Wordpress

Christopher Ross — Fri, 26 Dec 2008 18:27:20 +0000

Features

The fund raising tool is a true WordPress plug-in, testing with WordPress 2.7 and fully functional. It features:

W3C compliant Cascading Style Sheets (CSS)
Dynamically updated text including target and current fund status
Money formating options for use internationally
Theme options, allowing designers to customize the look of the thermometer
Call either the graphic or a formated number to display in text.

Admin Features

The new interface allows uses to set both the current amount (what has been raised) as well as the target amount (what you want to raise). The script automatically generates the ten steps in between and displays them for the user.

The plugin auto detects if the money_format() function is present and will use it automatically if found, otherwise it will display the currency using the number format function automatically.

How It Works

To display the current amount of money raised (in currently format) place the following code in your theme:

For a graphical version (by default the thermometer), include the following code:

Where to Get It

The plugin can be downloaded from the official WordPress repository:

How You Can Help

Support forums are now online! If you have any questions, please visit http://forums.thisismyurl.com.