J.me

Sort by latest post for wp_list_categories

One of my developer friend asked me if we could sort by last post using wp_list_categories function for WordPress. By default, wp_list_categories accept arguments for order by ID, name, slug, count or term_group. Order by latest post is not possible by default, but with a little of tweak using filter hook, we can. 🙂

First, we’ll looking at the function wp_list_categories. This function made call to get_categories to get the list of categories, which made another call to get_terms. Categories in WordPress is basically terms with category taxonomy. Finally, looking on the get_terms function, we will find some delicious filter hook that suitable for our customization.

WordPress Snippets part 1

Well, this will be a short list of WordPress snippets that we could use. This snippets is collected from my daily work on WordPress and should be useful for daily basis.

WordPress mail snippets

WordPress has its own improved function for sending email, it is wp_mail. We should always use this function if we wanted to send email within WordPress. With this function, we don’t need to worry much about the mail header and stuff. More over, there is plenty of filter we can use to customize it.

Customize Custom Post Type Landing Page with Clean URL

WordPress has been long capable on using custom post type. Since WordPress 3.0, we are now easier to create a custom post type. I have blogged some tips about it.

However, many didn’t know that the custom post type already had it’s own landing page, though, you will need to pass the post type variable to the URL. This post will guide you to the step by step on customizing the post type landing page, as well as adding a new rewrite rule for a cleaner URL.

The Basics to Write a Secure PHP Web Application

Securing your application is the most important things when building an application. This is the basic that every programmer should follow, it’s a must. However, sometime programmer might forgot the basic, and the more complex your application is, the harder it is to maintain and looking for security holes. While securing your application doesn’t mean that you will be totally safe from a hack, since there is many factor of why a web can be hacked, but reduce the possibility is always a good practice.

This article will give you walkthrough on the basics of creating a secured PHP application. I will give some step by step to filtering input, keep your code up to date and standard. I’ll also give you some good practice I always do.

Filter get_terms to return only terms with published post

So you are using custom taxonomy. You add terms to the taxonomy, and add the terms to your posts. Then, you use get_terms and list all your terms. Everything works fine, terms that doesn’t have any posts will not be returned if you set hide_empty argument to true. Now you move some of your posts to draft and you get a problem. Terms that doesn’t have any published posts still returned. This lead to 404 error when you click on the link of this term. It doesn’t look good now, we need to remove term that doesn’t have any published post.

So how to do that? The answer is by using WordPress filter. This piece of code below will solve the problem.

CSS Captcha 0.2 beta

Here I update the CSS Captcha, it is now on 0.2 beta! Thank you for the response of the previous version. While this can work nicely on major new browser, the compatibility with older browser is still minimum. Some mobile browser also haven’t implement some of CSS3 functionality, such as Opera Mini and Opera Mobile. So this is still experimental and shouldn’t be used yet on production website.

Please read the older version information here.

This update is merely a security update. The inline style is randomized now, which make it more difficult for bot to read. The order of the character is also randomized. Sure, it still doesn’t prevent the bot to read or make it impossible to read at all, but it should give more difficulty on creating such bot. 🙂

Still, no support for IE browser at all. 🙁

Change log 0.2b:
– Automatically randomize inline style
– Automatically randomize character order

Demonstration
Download

Enjoy! Any comment is appreciated.

Some useful tips for WordPress custom post type and taxonomy

Custom post type is one of the most powerful WordPress feature. It allows us to create just any content we need, combined with custom taxonomy, the possibility is just endless. WordPress have allowed to have custom post type and taxonomy for some while, but with WordPress 3, everything is far more easier. We have register_post_type and register_taxonomy created specifically for this purpose.

While this two combined to be a wonderful addition for your WordPress blog, there is still a lot of things that is not yet documented. Here is a few useful tips I collected when working with custom post type and taxonomy.

CSS Captcha 0.1 beta

With coming of the CSS 3, it is now possible to draw using merely HTML and CSS. After seeing some awesome work that can be done with CSS 3, one of my friend suddenly get an idea to create a captcha. Thinking that bot today might haven’t able to pass this kind of captcha, I created this, CSS Captcha. The captcha that didn’t use any image. It just simply using HTML and CSS to draw characters in your screen. I might be not the first one to create this though. 🙂

Click here for demonstration

Installing Aptana Studio on Ubuntu 9.04

aptana

Aptana Studio is a powerful IDE for web development. It supports HTML, CSS, Javascript and the server side script such as PHP, Ruby and Python. Even more, it support a wide variety of Javascript library. It based on Eclipse and available as a standalone application or as a plugin for Eclipse. Aptana Studio is available on Windows, Mac and Linux. And the best of all is, Aptana Studio is free. Here I will post how I install the recent version of standalone Aptana Studio, 1.5, on 32 bit Ubuntu 9.04 Jaunty Jackalope.

First of all, download the Aptana Studio on http://www.aptana.org, choose the Linux and 32 bit version, or change it accordingly to suit your machine. Before we start installing the Aptana Studio, we need to ensure we have installed the sun-java6-jre and sun-java6-plugin. To do that, simply type this in terminal

If the WordPress automatic update failed

This problem encountered since I moved my server to IIX, which has less bandwidth for international user, and for that reason too, the downstream is too small to download whole WordPress package that used for updating. That’s why, I always get timeout error. So, I’m simply unable to automatically update my WordPress.

However, the solution is actually simple, by increasing the timeout so the download can be completed. Once it is, the updating will going smoothly. So this is how to do it, in manual way.. 🙂