Add new post meta data on ‘Add New’ page programmatically

How to add post meta data before it has been saved or published? Can’t use transitional hooks. After digging through code, you have to use add_meta_boxes action.

Let’s say you have a custom post type book. Each book has several properties (meta data), such as the author, the publisher and the publication date. Now, WordPress has a nice feature called Custom Fields. It is an interface for adding meta data to your posts: a meta key on left and meta value on right. When a new book is created, however, Custom Fields are empty because no meta data has been added to the book yet. The question is: how can we add custom meta data to a post (book) before it has been saved as a draft or published?
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Change WordPress admin TinyMCE settings

Recently, I had to modify the default WordPress admin post editor (TinyMCE) configuration on a specific post type. I wanted to remove a few buttons, Quicktags, limit the number of rows and so on. At first, I was puzzled over which hook I should use. In the end, it turned out to be pretty easy to accomplish that.

Modified TinyMCE editor
Modified TinyMCE editor

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WordPress Contribution Day in Slovakia

During Contribution Day, WordPress enthusiasts get together in a coworking space and work on various WordPress-related tasks such as translations, fixing Core tickets and others. Yesterday, we had a first-ever Contribution Day in Slovakia as the part of WordCamp. It was awesome! Why?

Contribution Day Slovakia 2015

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Tools for better writing

Although writing articles on your blog is not directly related to WordPress development, it helps you in many aspects. Similar to having a multitude of tools empowering your programming endeavors, having some of them while writing an article can make your task easier and the result better, especially if English is not your mother tongue. In today’s post, I’m going to describe some of them. Continue reading “Tools for better writing”

Securing your WordPress site running on Nginx

Nginx is a modern and fast web server software. If you are not familiar with Nginx, you might be familiar with the Apache HTTP web server software. Both of them can serve your WordPress-powered site, though there are notable differences in performance and the way they work. I won’t be comparing them in this article, we’ll do it the other day. Instead, I’m going to show you some useful Nginx server configuration for having a more secure WordPress site. Continue reading “Securing your WordPress site running on Nginx”

Submitting your Composer-powered plugin to Packagist.org

Are you working on a new super useful WordPress plugin? Do you want it to be developer-friendly? Define it as a Composer package and submit it to the official Composer package repository: Packagist.org. Other programmers can then require your plugin as a dependency to their projects. You’ll make their lives much better and they’ll give you a hug.
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Why use Sage starter theme for your next web app

When thinking about your new WordPress web site or application, developers usually look for the best prebuilt WordPress theme. Some reasons for doing so:

  • To save as much time as possible.
  • Learn best practices from fellow skillful web developers.
  • Explore new areas.

Sage — a starter theme from the Roots.io guys — belongs to the more technical and refined ones. In today’s article, we’ll look at a few key points making Sage the perfect starter theme for you. Continue reading “Why use Sage starter theme for your next web app”

Automated WordPress installation with Ansible

In the second article of the Ansible and WordPress series, we discussed the basic Ansible project structure and setting up WP-CLI and PHP. Today, I’ll walk you through creating a new database, adding a new user with correct permissions to this database, downloading WordPress with WP-CLI and configuring it properly to use our newly created database. You can find complete source code of these series at my wordpress-ansible GitHub repo. Continue reading “Automated WordPress installation with Ansible”

Ansible and WordPress: roles and playbooks

Since writing the article on why you should use Ansible for managing your WordPress deploys on VPS servers, I’ve added some basic configurations to my GitHub repo about this topic. In this article, we’ll be discussing how the standard Ansible project folder structure looks like and I’ll show you how to set up simple roles for PHP and WP-CLI installation on your VPS server. Continue reading “Ansible and WordPress: roles and playbooks”