While catching up on some old podcasts, specifically Episode 82 of WordPress Weekly, I came across a discussion about WordPress beta testing. The discussion centers around the problem of bugs not being caught during beta testing because there just aren’t enough beta testers.

To me, the solution seems straightforward – but that may be because I worked in the software industry for 10 years and have experience in software release management, so I’ll take the long path and set the scene properly.

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Go to Posts -> Edit in the WordPress Admin area and you’ll see a list of all the posts you have. There is a dropdown list called View all categories, which allows you to select a single category to view posts from. But…

What if you want to view posts from more than one category, or better yet, want to exclude posts from certain categories? Can’t do it right? Well not through the WordPress interface, but you can do it through URL parameters.

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Happy New Year to all! A year ago, after looking at my Google Analytics stats for the year, I wrote a post reviewing 2008. I figure I may as well do it again for 2009 and also take the opportunity to explain the direction of this site.

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After listening to recent episodes of the WordPress Weekly podcast (episodes 67 and 68), I was surprised to learn that in future versions of WordPress, the Delete link will be replaced with Trash. (more…)

This is perhaps my most overdue post ever – a review of Vladimir Prelovac’s book, WordPress Plugin Development (Beginner’s Guide) (more…)

Earlier today I received an email from an irate commentator, accusing me of spamming him and threatening to report me. He was receiving emails from my blog, via the Subscribe To Comments plugin, but he thought couldn’t unsubscribe. The cause: my wp-admin folder is password protected.

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Note: Not long after writing this post, I discovered that the best way to load external CSS files is by using the wp_enqueue_style function. Similarly, the best way to load JavaScript files is by using the wp_enqueue_script function. The method outlined below is not necessary – although it may still be useful for other things to be added to the head section.

Custom page templates are a powerful feature of WordPress that can be used to make pages (not posts) do something different from normal. You can make them do pretty much anything. Obviously, this can greatly increase the flexibility of your site.

Amongst other things, I’ve used custom page templates to create a basic photo wall and a dynamic listing of jobs in China.

However, because of the way most WordPress themes are created, calling an external CSS file from a custom page template is not straightforward. Here, I explain the problem, look at the options and explain how to use ‘plugin functionality’ to overcome the problem.

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So far, my WordPress development work has consisted of writing WordPress plugins and occasionally hacking themes. I’ve always said that I wanted to write a WordPress theme from scratch, but never had time to do so. One of my sites is going to need a redesign shortly, so here’s my big opportunity.

However, with the rise of the WordPress theme framework and the limited time available to me, I’ve started thinking that the sensible thing to do is use a theme framework. But which one?

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When I’m working on WordPress related development (ie themes and plugins), I like to run WordPress locally. This is great for trying things out before it goes live and also lets me squeeze in some development time in on the train!

My web server package of choice is XAMMP Lite, the Apache distribution that contains PHP and MySQL. Works great in general, but I had some problems with WordPress permalinks and XAMMP Lite. Here’s the solution.

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First let me wish you all a very Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year! I hope you all accept my best wishes, even if you don’t celebrate Christmas.

December has been a very busy month for me and I haven’t had much time for posting. I may not get another post out this year, so I thought I’d take the opportunity to update you on some of the projects I’m working on.

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