Ever since WordPress 2.5 was released, we’ve been pushing the boundaries of WordPress as a comprehensive CMS.
WordPress offers a wealth of plug-ins that extend the limitations of its reasonably light core; we’ve even contribued a couple of our own back to the community. But if you like to make slim, fast websites – like we do – you know that sometimes the plug-ins, and their overhead, are overkill.
Here are five power tips for template developers that address common CMS implementation challenges with solutions that are not well documented or not entirely intuitive. Please note that all of the code here was written for and tested with the latest version of WordPress (2.7.1). Some of the functions may not be compatible with older versions, or may require some initialization (i.e. global $post).
Continue reading WordPress as a CMS: 5 8 Power Tips for Template Developers
The sample API code provided by PayPal has not been updated in some time. When it comes to recent versions of Microsoft’s .NET platform, not only is PayPal missing some DLLs needed to use it ‘out of the box’, the sample functions are actually wrong!
We discovered the problem while working on a custom built .NET web application for the Council of Public Relations Firms that includes integrated eCommerce. Thankfully, with some sleuthing and tinkering, we were able to update the necessary DLLs and correct the functions.
Continue reading PayPal API and .NET 2.0 compatibility fix
Although there’s a lack of good documentation, adding a function that takes parameters (i.e. Function_Name(Parameter)) to one of JavaScript’s standard ‘On’ events (i.e. ‘OnClick‘ or ‘onKeyDown‘) is relatively simple for JavaScript coders. Advanced programmers might refer to this as dynamic runtime event assignment with functions using parameters passed.
Confused? Here’s a practical example.
Let’s say we have a text area field on a web page, and we want to execute some function every time they make a keystroke inside that field. In our real world example, we wanted to count the number of characters, so we could let the user know how close they were to the limit, and warn them when they exceed the limit. To capture keystrokes, we need to hook into JavaScript’s ‘onKeyUp‘ and ‘onKeyDown‘ events.
Continue reading JavaScript Tutorial: Hooking Events at Runtime with Parameter Functions
