Category: Geek (page 13 of 36)

My participation in the WordPress support forums was never overly ambitious. I would generally aim for questions that I could either respond to quickly or I had the time for. But for the last few months I have been refraining from picking up threads. Mostly because the questions fall under these categories:

1. Something broke please help me fix it! (User provides no info to find out what happened, gets belligerent when asked for more info)
2. How do I make my site look like this one? (User points to professionally made site that may not be running WordPress)
3. I can do this on WordPress.COM, it should/must/has to work on WordPress.ORG’s version. (User points to feature that requires one or more plugins and was never built-in)
4. Demands that !!WordPress!! fix! this! NOW!!! (Who do they actually mean? Automattic?)
5. Philosophical debates re GPL and commercial success.

You get the idea. These are not new types of questions and the support forum has had these from day one.

What’s new is that the volume of these questions obscure the really good support problems that are out there. It’s like there is a vast tidal wave of people who really do not know that they are running a roll-your-own version of WordPress. They don’t know about requirements, reasonable expectations, or how to troubleshoot their own server. Sounds like a problem alright! But it’s not.

This is confirmation that WordPress is wildly successful.

WordPress has moved from being a PHP hackers pet blogging software and into a mainstream software product. These new users in such huge quantity means that WordPress “made it”. These users are along for the ride and the WordPress forum regulars (moderators and support ninjas) have these requests well in hand.

The support forums continue to evolve and will deal with the flood of new users. Everything moves and changes happen all the time to make the support experience better. I have just one request.

Can the WordPress support forums please lose the new default user icons? The MonsterIDs are freaking me out.

Twitter announced their own Tweet Button and have provided a page for creating a button on your web site. You enter some info and you get the HTML code to add.

Extending WordPress has always been easy. You can add what you want via a plugin, or you can put the functionality into your theme’s function.php file.

I wanted to play around with adding this to my blog, so I went to their page and created my button. I then used the generated code as a template for what I wanted to do.

There is no way I’m savvy enough to write a plugin, but adding a filter to my theme’s function.php file is within my reach.

This is from an idea I got when I read WP Beginner’s post on how to add post thumbnails to your RSS feed. I used his code to do this.

function tweet_button($content) {
        global $post;
        // Your Twitter ID goes here
        $twitterid = 'jan_dembowski';
        $tweetbutton = '<div class="tweet-button">';
        $tweetbutton = $tweetbutton . '<a href="http://twitter.com/share" class="twitter-share-button" data-url="' . get_permalink() .'" data-text="' . get_the_title() .'" data-count="horizontal" data-via="' . $twitterid . '">Tweet</a><script type="text/javascript" src="http://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js"></script>';
        $tweetbutton = $tweetbutton . '</div>';
        // $content = $content . $tweetbutton;
        $content = $tweetbutton . $content;
        return $content;
        }
add_filter('the_content', 'tweet_button');

You can download the code via this text file link.

It’s not exactly user friendly, but it gets the job done. I wrapped it in a <div> so I can style it later. If you want the button at the end instead of the beginning, then comment out line 9 and un-comment out line 8.

It’s a fun hack for me and I am sure that soon there will be a plugin to do this. If you do decide to do this then make sure you backup your theme’s function.php file. Any typo’s or mistakes will make your WordPress blog stop working.