Neil Anthony Kitchens
Neil Anthony approached me in May of 2010, their brief was simple, create a site that reflected the class and high quality kitchens they designed and installed, make the site clear, crisp, informative, easy to navigate and most importnatly easy to update by the client. Iachieved all of these goals and the staff at NA who weren't particulalry PC literate regularly updat etheir site to reflect new product and special offers.
Salford City Stadium
Taken on a wet and rainy day in Salford, you can see the website for Salford City Stadium advertised from Barton Bridge on the M60.
I was lucky enough to work on the WordPress powered website last year (2011)
Using Persistent Cache in WordPress (with APC)
Ever since WordPress 2.5, the WP Cache functions haven't been persistent, so the cached objects are only available for the page load (or script run). This means that data stored in the cache resides in memory only and only for the duration of the request.
Upto version 2.5 we could have simply added define('WP_CACHE', true) to the wp-config.php and we got persistent cache features. This is no longer the case and isn't really very well documented.
The later versions need a Persistent Cache Plugin. I'm not a fan of some of the larger caching plugins like W3 Total Cache or WP Super Cache as they tend to add complexity and can cause other problems. Besides, as developers, we're better off writing the code ourselves.
Before going any furuther its probably worth pointing out WordPress has two persistent caching methods.
The first method is the WP Transients API,
- Not much documentation
- Only allows caching of objects to the database so may not be faster
- http://codex.wordpress.org/Transients_API
The second method is extending the existing WP Object Cache that is currently throughout your WordPress site already.
- Extending this object is much more flexible
- Can extend into APC, memcache or similar
- Provides a fast cache for basic WordPress functions even before you write your own code
New Site: GamerNode – WordPress Site Migration
I recently had the pleasure of working with a well respected gaming news site - GamerNode.
My challenge was to convert their existing outdated, custom coded CMS (and database) into WordPress.
I did this with a selection of custom scripts and image downloaders to help smoothly migrate from old to new.
Contact me for more information on WordPress Site Migrations.
New Site: HSS Blog
I was recently commissioned to code a new WordPress blog for the national hire company HSS Hire. Their new blog features excellent articles from DIY, gardening and hiring professionals for the job. See http://blog.hss.com/ for the new site.
WordPress Auto Install Script for cPanel
I have released version one of my WordPress Auto Install Script for cPanel.
This script can be run from /scripts/postwwwacct to automatically download, install WordPress and create the required database and database username.
No 3rd party licenses, scripts, FTP sessions. No outdated versions, always grabs the latest version from WordPress.org
This script is available upon request for £50. Get in touch for details.
WordPress/Shopp Shipping Calculator/Options Access-Control-Allow-Origin Error
I've recently been debugging a customer's WordPress/Shopp store. When the customer set the Cart & Checkout to be served over SSL the shipping calculator failed.
Serving Cart / Checkout / My Account pages over SSL is not built into Shopp for some reason. I have a post on this - SSL/HTTPS for Shopp pages or checkout process only. If you use a shipping calculator, or offer different shipping methods this will fail.
Splitting WordPress content with ‘more’ on single pages
WordPress uses the "More" button to create a small snippet of content, usually used on the blog page, to create article teasers and such. WordPress ignores the "More" function on single posts, pages and several other pages.
Here's some code of make use of the "More" function on single pages and single posts. Perhaps splitting the content into columns or hiding extra content in an accordion or pretty much anything. Look, I'm going to press the "More" button right now.
Overwriting WordPress loop parameters per page
In some instances you may want to overwrite WordPress loop parameters per page.
For example, a recent request from a client
"Can I have all my portfolio items on a single page?".
Yes, client, you can. "Portfolio" is a custom post type. Using Everett's Custom Content Type Manager. The theme is fully structured so it uses single-custom-content.php and archive-custom-content.php.
Removing l10n.js in WordPress
l10nn.js is a JavaScript library that enables localization through native JavaScript methods, gracefully degrading if the library is not present. WordPress 3.0 enables l10n.js by default and most of the time if you are working on single language, non-localised WordPress sites, you can safely disable it and save yourself a few bytes of code at each page load.
Clean code is happy code!
About Kieran
