Widgets are actually pretty damn cool

I used to think they were stupid, which is why I hard coded the sections pulling data for this blog. If you read my last post though, you will know I am building a theme for work and I had to use widgets. I gotta say, these things are handy. Now the client will be able to stick whatever he wants wherever he wants it. I did run into a problem though, which took me a while to solve.

I needed to get a widgetized sidebar onto a specific page, without showing up on any of the other pages. Luckily it was the blog page, which uses the index.php file within your theme folder, and not something where I would have to create a custom page for. I started the theme off of ‘TwentyTen’, and pretty much deleted all the content in all the theme files, meaning all I had left was the php that calls the header, footer, and sidebar. The function file remained the same other than adding the code to call jQuery from Google’s server, and renaming all the function names from ‘twentyten’ to ‘mythemename’ (not posting what it was really called, because it is irrelevant).

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I plugged it in, but it didn’t go to 11

Today I was going to write about an awesome plugin a coworker found and is using, which I tried out. The problem is, that it didn’t work for me, but I don’t believe it is the plugin’s fault. We deal with a lot of custom things at my work place, and I believe something could have been interfering with it. Not sure though. I did see it in action though and it worked incredibly well for him. It’s called Page.ly MultiEdit and works with 2.9 and higher.

Ever need multiple places for a customer to be able to edit, that uses the same editor for posts and such? With this plugin it really makes WordPress a great CMS for regular sites, not just blogs. Not that it wasn’t before, this just makes it easier. To see screens, and instructions, visit there site. It was easy to install, and place the code, I just don’t think the environment I am working in played well with it. I’ll have to test it out in the project theme I am building.

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I thought sharing what plugins we all use in WordPress would make a good post. So as the title says, I’ll show you my plugins, if you show me yours.

Let’s start with the most important:

Akismet - If you are NOT using this plugin, you are…not…smart. That is the least insulting I can be with that. This thing has caught more spam than you can imagine. I mean a LOT. 488 spam comments to be exact. I’m talking viagra, porn, random crazy…you name it, it has caught it.

WP-Spam Free – Along the same lines as the above. Guess how many this one has caught? 511 as of this post. Insane right? I highly recommend these two more than you can know.

Login LockDown – This is a security plugin. Two things: if you login with admin as the username…you are again, an idiot. Create a new admin account with a different user name, then delete that one. Google it for more info. This plugin adds another step of security. It restricts the number of failed logins that can be attempted from a given IP range. Mine is set very low. I’m paranoid about this kind of thing, but I recommend it.

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I was making some changes to my blog, and one of them was to change the version of jQuery I was using. I wanted to go to 1.4.2, but to make sure I had the most updated copy of my functions page (cause I do stuff to it on multiple computers), I downloaded the page. I was using Dreamweaver to do the ftp, cause it was a quick thing. Well the formatting was off in code, but I didn’t think anything of it. I made my change, and re-uploaded it.

BAD IDEA. REALLY, REALLY BAD.

Because when i logged in, instead of going to dashboard, I got redirected to a completely blank page. This has happened to others apparently. I renamed my theme so it would it would load the default one. That worked, so I knew it was within the Web Machine theme. Then uploaded my old copy of the functions page, with the original formatting, and bam everything was fixed. But how do you know it was not something you coded? Because all I changed was a number, and after I figured out the formatting thing, I again changed the number and it was fixed. Scared the hell out of me though.