Monthly Archives: March 2009

Fast WordPress Function and Template Tag Lookups

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If you are like me, then you are often referring to the function and template tag documentation on the WordPress Codex. My friend, Andy Stratton, got tired of having to open google, typing in the function name and then clicking on the link to the codex returned in the search results. To make his life easier he wrote WPLookup. WPLookup gives you a simple search box that will redirect you to the documentation for the function or if it doesn’t exist, redirect you to the WordPress.org search where you can see documents containing the function or text you are looking for.

To make the service even better you can integrate it into your web browsers search bar for even faster lookups.

I have taken his service one step further and written an IRC bot that is currelty sitting in the WordPress IRC Channel. To use this bot type something in the form of .codex get_pages and it will query WPLookup and return the resulting URL back to the channel.

See the following links for his release announcements about this new service:

  1. Find WordPress Function and Template Tag Documentation – Fast
  2. New WPLookup Features – Set WPLookup as a browser search engine

Lightview JS Removed Due to Licensing

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I was recently contacted by Nick Stackenburg in regards to my Lightview JS WordPress plugin. It seems as although the license stated that I was allowed to freely distribute the Lightview code, there was a per domain license involved as well. Since I am in conflict with his license I am removing the Lightview JS plugin completely from the WordPress Plugin Repository as all versions have contained the Lightview code.

For the users of my Lightview JS plugin I am recommending that you switch to either my Shadowbox JS plugin or to the Lightview Plus plugin written by Thorsten Puzich. Users switching to the Lightview Plus plugin should purchase the domain license from the Lightview project page.

Adding Additional Links to the Output from wp_list_pages

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One common question in the WordPress IRC Channel is how to add external links, or links to content other than pages, to the output of wp_list_pages, usually not that exactly but that is what they mean. You can of course modify your theme by inserting <li><a href="http://example.org">Example.org</a></li> immediately following the wp_list_pages function however, this is not always the best solution. In my case I am working on developing a theme for distribution and testing it in the best way possible by running it as my main theme on my site. Since I want extra links to appear there and I don’t want to have content in the theme that will not be distributed to users, filtering the output of wp_list_pages works wonderfully.

You can put this following code in your themes functions.php, or in a plugin. Since I am trying to keep from modifying my theme, a plugin is the better option.

add_filter('wp_list_pages', 'add_forum_link');
function add_forum_link($output) {
        $output .= '<li><a href="http://forum.example.org/">Forum</a></li>';
        return $output;
}

The above code will add a link to a forum at http://forum.example.org/.

Enjoy!