First, find the location where you want to display the link. A good place to put it is either just before, or just after the main content of the page.

I look for the following code in the /wp-content/YourThemeName/page.php (or single.php) file:

<?php the_content(); ?>

and place the following code just after it:

<?php edit_post_link('[edit this page]', '<p>', '</p>'); ?>

That displays [edit this page] in it’s own paragraph so it shouldn’t mess up your page formatting on you! Hope this helps.

First, we need to enable support within the theme. To do that, open the /wp-content/themes/YourThemeName/functions.php file and add this line of code to the bottom (before the closing “?>”):

add_theme_support( 'menus' );

Now the theme knows it can support custom menus. Next we need to tell the theme where it can put them – we do this by placing calls to the wp_nav_menu() function where we want the menus to appear.

Usual locations for menus are in the header near the top of the page, in a sidebar, and in the page footer. What I normally do for smaller sites is put a limited menu in the banner, which only contains the main pages of the site and doesn’t change when new pages are added. Then for the sidebar I add a full list of all pages, which grows as pages are added. Depending on the site, sometimes you want to show child pages, on others parent pages only.

Let’s get to the code already! Here’s a typical menu. Note the ‘menu’ => ‘menu-sidebar’ code is what identifies the menu by name within the WordPress 3 menu system, and the ‘container_class’ => ‘menu-sidebar’ bit is what creates the class=”menu-sidebar” bit so you can style each menu invidually within CSS.


<!--sidebar.php-->
<h2>Site Navigation</h2>
<?php wp_nav_menu( array( 'sort_column' => 'menu_order', 'container_class' => 'menu-sidebar', 'menu' => 'menu-sidebar') ); ?>


And here’s a header menu – I’ve left in the h1 header for context, but the  wp_nav_menu() is the relevant bit for us.


<div id="header">
<h1><a href="<?php echo get_settings('home'); ?>/"><?php bloginfo('name'); ?></a></h1>
<h2><?php bloginfo('description'); ?></h2>
</div>

<div id="menudiv">
<?php wp_nav_menu( array( 'sort_column' => 'menu_order', 'container_class' => 'menu-header', 'menu' => 'menu-header' ) ); ?>
</div>


That’s it – adding custom menu support to your WordPress theme is pretty easy, eh? Your suggestions or questions are very welcome in the comments section below.

I’ll write up a post sometime detailing how the whole thing works, I think it’s pretty cool.

I was recently asked about using custom fields in WordPress and I thought it was worthy of a quick blog post. I’ve seen custom fields used for many different things from review ratings (e.g “3/5 stars“) to mood messages (“Today I feel like listening to  loud metal and shouting at my housemates“), etc. For this example, let’s use a very simple real case we recently dealt with.

We wanted to have an image appear at the top of the WordPress Page or Post, under the headline but above the text. We wanted the image to be shown whenever we supplied one. Here’s how we implemented it.

First off, we want to put it after the header, but before the title. We did a “View Source” on one of the pages and saw code that looked like this for the headline and content:

<div class="content">
<h2 class="title">Case Studies</h2>
<p>What follows are real life examples of recent work we carried our. We have chosen 3 examples representing vastly different business verticals and company age. If you would like to ask us more about these please contact us.</p>
<p><a class="post-edit-link" href="http://www.oursite.tld/wp-admin/post.php?post=476&amp;action=edit" title="Edit Page">Edit this entry.</a></p>
</div>

So we now roughly what the code that we want to find in the theme looks like. We found it in the page.php file (www.oursite.tld/wp-content/themes/our-theme-name/page.php). Here’s what it looked like:

<?php if (have_posts()) : while (have_posts()) : the_post(); ?>
<h2><?php the_title(); ?></h2>
<?php the_content('<p>Read the rest of this page &raquo;</p>'); ?>
<?php wp_link_pages(array('before' => '<p><strong>Pages:</strong> ', 'after' => '</p>', 'next_or_number' => 'number')); ?>
<?php endwhile; endif; ?>
<?php edit_post_link('Edit this entry.', '<p>', '</p>'); ?>

Now we’re getting places – we want to add our custom image after the <h2>”the_title()”</h2> header, and before the call to “the_content()”. Let’s build the code we want to add.

First of all, we’ve decided to call our custom field “‘custom-post-image” to reflect its usage. We need to check the custom fields array to find out if that exists using the get_post_meta() function like so:

$themeta = get_post_meta($post->ID, $customfieldkey, TRUE);

Now all we want to do is check if it’s empty (or rather, if it’s not):

if($themeta != '') {}

And finally, if it’s not empty, build the <img> tag based on the custom field contents:

echo '<img class= "custom-post-image" src="';
echo $themeta;
echo'" />  ';

Here’s the complete code – rather simple really!

<?php if (have_posts()) : while (have_posts()) : the_post(); ?>
<h2><?php the_title(); ?></h2>
<?php
/*     check if custom-post-image custom field exists,
if it does, display an image, if not, do nothing */
$customfieldkey = 'custom-post-image';
$themeta = get_post_meta($post->ID, $customfieldkey, TRUE);
if($themeta != '') {
echo '<img class= "custom-post-image" src="';
echo $themeta;
echo'" />  ';
}
?>
<?php the_content('<p>Read the rest of this page &raquo;</p>'); ?>

That’s the code all done! Now all we need to do is add the custom field, and populate it. That’s very easy to do also. From under the edit box in your Write Page scroll down to the Custom Fields box. Click on “Enter new” (highlighted below):

Now add your custom field using the same name that you used in your code – above we used “custom-post-image”. Select it from the drop-down, then fill in a value for the image location – e.g. “/images/our-example-image.png”:

You’re done:

Enjoy playing with WordPress custom fields!

A while back I built a website for Dene Hickey, a “qualified neuromuscular therapist”. I hadn’t a clue what ” neuromuscular therapy” meant at the time, but it sounded impressive. I recently met Dene about another website for his growing sports massage business.

When I not so subtly mentioned the acute back pain I was suffering Dene immediately offered me a free deep tissue massage where he would “de-activate” the trigger points. I’ve had sports massages before and I’ve noticed that the masseuse or masseur rarely goes hard enough on the troublesome muscles. No such trouble with Dene, he’s a strong guy who works on amateur and semi-pro rugby players regularly, but as well as just going in strong, he really found the pain points and sorted them out.

As he was working on the muscles, one of the interesting things for me was learning a bit about Trigger Points. I won’t try to explain it here – click through the link to Wikipedia or Dene’s trigger points therapy page.

I felt an order of magnitude times better after the session, the acute back pain was greatly diminished almost to non-existance. If you’re suffering from chronic muscular spasm or pain, from sports or even from office chairs, then I highly recommend you find a massage clinic specialising in deep tissue massage and trigger point therapy. If you’re in the Dublin area, I don’t think you could do much better than to give Dene a call.

• Deep Tissue Massage
• Dene Hickey

Stay tuned.

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Hello Wordcamp Ireland attendees!

The Wordcamp organisers have asked me to speak on the topic of plugins – the suggested title is “10 Must Have Wordpress Plugins”, and it’s in the “Bloggers” track.

My plan is to look at some great plugins, and list some particularly valuable ones, and also to touch on some fantastic alternatives like using themes with built-in features, and if we have enough geeks in the audience, maybe take a quick look at coding some of the simpler plugin functionality yourself.

I would like the talk to be useful and interesting for you guys, so what I’d like to find out is if you have any particular topics you’d like to cover, and if you would like me to show you some basic PHP code, or keep it at a higher non-technical level.

Please leave a comment below or tweet a message including the hashtag #amdtalk

I’ll also be watching that hashtag during the talk and will take any questions or comments from there (as well as any asked in person, of course)!

These guys have been spamming my sports blog for nigh on 10 years now, with pretty much the exact same message year in, year out. (My thanks to Askimet for nuking 99.9% of their submissions.)

I was bloody annoyed at first, but after a certain number of years, you have to admire certain spammers for their consistency and bloody-minded perseverance.

In tribute, here is their spam in full:

Dear Sir,

We introduce ourselves to you as an old, established and well-experienced manufacturers and exporters in Pakistan for the following range of Products. We have our own Tannery Unit and Production Unit and given such up-to-date manufacturing arrangements, our qualities are authentic, durable and fast-selling in an international market .

Please submit us any enquiries for the following items so that we may send you our Catalogue Pictures with best competitive export prices for your study and selection.

SUMMER MOTORBIKE GLOVES, MOTOCROSS GLOVES, CYCLING GLOVES, CROSS COUNTRY GLOVES, NEOPRENE GLOVES, FLEECE GLOVES AND LEATHER GARMENTS etc.

If you needs any thing, please feel free to contact us, we assure you that we will supply you the best quality products at extremely reasonable prices. Yours prompt reply would be highly appereciated.

Best Regards,

Maryam Ali
(Export Manager)