After running the WordPress export/import tool to move a blog, I noticed the excerpts were not showing up on the blog archive pages. Usually, WordPress will auto-generate an excerpt for posts if a custom excerpt does not exist. The problem was that the export/import tools were leaving whitespace characters (tabs, spaces, line breaks) in the […]
Development Blog
WordPress Excerpts Empty but Post Has Content
Mar 08, 2019
In Gravity Forms (a popular WordPress forms plugin), the Pricing Fields > Option output shows the option price when the form loads. When a selection is made, the pricing for all the options in that group update to show the relative pricing for each option (how it affects total price, plus or minus). Instead, I needed […]
Flat Flashlights from Mock-Epic LLC
Nov 10, 2014
Last week we launched a new retail e-commerce website from our sister company, Mock-Epic LLC. I really like this product – magnetic flat flashlights with bright LED bulbs and full color artwork on a high-quality plastic label. They are from the SmashLight® family of products from Bentcil®, and we’re making them available retail, in small […]
New eCommerce Site: TwistedPens.com
Mar 04, 2014
We’re launching a new custom Joomla eCommerce site this week. I’m especially excited about this one, because it’s one of my own ventures, via Mock-Epic LLC. The first retail site is TwistedPens.com, which sells twisted pens (some of which we make here in-house). We hope to have a total of three retail sites online before […]
I’ve been experimenting with modifying a copy of the Joomla “profile” plugin (/plugins/users/profile) and adding custom profile fields to use in other Components. Retrieving those stored profile values required some research, but it turns out it’s pretty straight-forward: $User = JFactory::getUser(); $Profile = JUserHelper::getProfile(User->id); From there, it may be easiest to just use the print_r() […]
WordPress Custom Post Types and 404 Error
Nov 02, 2013
If you’re working on a custom post type in WordPress and make a change to the post type or category slug (or add a new one), and you’re getting 404 errors when visiting the pages at the new address, chances are you just need to refresh the WordPress rewrite rules for permalinks. You can do […]
PHP: Round Number to Minimum Precision
Dec 22, 2012
While working on an e-commerce system, I needed to use PHP to round a number to a minimum number of decimal places, but allow for more if needed. For instance, if the value was 1.2, I’d want it rendered as $1.20, but if it was 1.256, I’d want it to keep the precision and render […]
Joomla 2.5 Component Categories Sub-Nav
Dec 21, 2012
I recently found Joomla’s feature to easily add custom component-specific nested Categories. It makes for a quick way to create categories similar to what is used in com_content and an interface to manage those categories without having to build it all manually. You can use JForm to easily add a select menu of your custom […]
Joomla! 2.5 Toolbar Popup Link Icon
Sep 08, 2012
Today I needed to add a new toolbar button to a custom Joomla! component. In the past, I’ve used a more convoluted method of overriding the submitbutton() (or Joomla.submitbutton) JavaScript function and triggering the modal popup manually, but stumbled upon a better solution.
Thoughts on Coda 2 (initial release)
Jun 01, 2012
I should start out by mentioning that I’ve been a big fan of Panic for years – I’ve used Transmit since Mac OS 9 days, and Coda since its initial release. Since then, Coda has been my primary web development application. I should also mention that I’m not someone who avoids change, particularly in the […]