This is one reason why some of us prefer to keep plugin overhead to a minimum, and find alternative solutions that we have better control over where possible.

Do you use many plugins? How many plugins are currently active on your WordPress site? Take the poll below and feel free to share your thoughts on plugin use.

Recommended for you

Here are a few tutorials on how some commonly used WordPress plugins can be easily replaced by adding new functions to your theme:

• How to Add WordPress Pagination without a Plugin [Enhanced]
• How to Add WordPress Paged Comments without a Plugin (plus CSS Styling)
• How to Display Most Commented Posts in WordPress without a Plugin
• How to Display Every User’s Comment Count in WordPress without a Plugin

WordPress 3.3 has just been released today! You can download or update inside your WordPress dashboard immediately.

Here on Sparklette, we usually make use of the brilliant one-click update within WordPress to do the upgrade. Only in our case we actually have the multisite feature enabled so there’s an additional click to Update Network. Within minutes, we’re all set.

Have you updated your site to the latest WordPress 3.3 yet? Check out what’s new:

Highlights

• Easier Uploading
  • File Type Detection – A single upload button.
  • Drag-and-Drop Media Uploader
• Dashboard Design
  • New Toolbar in the dashboard, combining the Admin Bar and admin header
  • Responsive design for some screens, including iPad/tablet support
  • Flyout menus, providing single-click access to any screen
• New User Experience
  • New feature pointers, helping users navigate new features
  • Post-update About screen
  • Dashboard welcome area for new installs
• Content Tools
  • Better co-editing that releases post locks immediately
  • Tumblr Importer
  • Don’t lose widgets when switching themes
• Under the Hood improvements
  • Use the postname permalink structure without a performance penalty
  • Improved Editor API
  • is_main_query() function and WP_Query method
  • Remove a number of funky characters from post slugs
  • jQuery 1.7.1 and jQuery UI 1.8.16
  • A new Screen API for adding help documentation and adapting to screen contexts
  • Improved metadata API
• Performance improvements and hundreds of bug fixes

User Features

General

• Admin doctype changed to HTML5 (#18202)
• Show admin bar in backend by default (#17899)
• Drag and drop multi-file uploading (except older IE)
• Fix Press This editors
• Switch admin menus to flyouts from dropdowns
• WebMatrix support
• Improve cron locking; avoid multiple cron processes looping over the same events
• Add pointers feature, and pointer to admin bar
• Introduce help tabs and WP_Screen
• Style tweaks to the update nag

Dashboard

• Ensure text in the dashboard recent comments widget wraps up properly

Posts

• When inserting a Gallery to be ordered by Date/Time use the post_date field for ordering rather than ID
• Rename ‘Post Tags’ to ‘Tags’
• Make DFW content width match exactly the reported width from the theme
• Improve the image drag-resize detection in the visual editor (supported in FF and IE only), remove the size-* class if the image is soft-resized
• Add TinyMCE command to handle opening of the upload/insert popup, fix the shortcut “Alt+Shift+M”, fix the “image” button in DFW
• Allow Apostrophes in Post Passwords
• Add post formats to quick edit and bulk edit
• Hide post title field in DFW if title is not supported by the current post type or missing
• Clean up remnants from having negative Post_ID

Media

• Merge media buttons into one
• Add the styling for “drop area” to Media->Add New
• Add support for rar and 7z file uploading

Comments

• Use WP_Editor when editing or replying to comments
• Use ‘View Post’ instead of ‘#’ for view post links in comment rows

Appearance

• Use the Settings fields/sections API in Twenty Eleven
• Load all Parent theme stylesheets before Child theme stylesheets in the TinyMCE Editor
• Clean up Plugin/Theme uploads after successfully installing them
• Improved Theme upload and validation
• Avoid losing widgets when switching themes
• Make Distraction Free Writing content width match exactly the reported width from the theme
• Allow current_theme_supports() to be used to check for specific post formats
• Improved Menus
• Contextual help for Twenty Eleven theme options page

Plugins

• Improved Plugin upload and validation
• Stop remembering the last viewed plugins screen; always show all plugins when returning to plugins.php

Tools

• Add the Tumblr importer to the Importers List
• Add wxr_export_skip_postmeta filter for skipping postmeta in exports

Users

• Removed user option to disable Toolbar (admin-bar in 3.2) in the Dashboard

Settings

• Add postname to Settings > Permalinks and remove the help text talking about permalink performance; make the slugs (and /archives/ rewrite base) translatable
• Clarify Settings > Privacy
• Use title case in Settings > General
• Disallow indexing wp-admin and wp-includes in robots.txt

Multisite

• Allow creating sites with IDN domains
• Move network/settings.php POST handling out of network/edit.php
• Dissolve wp-admin/network/edit.php
• Add ‘Network Enable’ link after installing a theme in the network admin
• Use update_blog_details() in wpmu_update_blogs_date()
• Change Network Settings to just Settings
• Implement bulk update for network/themes.php
• Fix inviting existing users to a site with email confirmation
• Check for plugin/theme updates every hour when hitting update-core.php, not just themes.php/plugins.php

Development, Themes, Plugins

• Abstract word-trimming from wp_trim_excerpt() into wp_trim_words()
• Add wp_unique_post_slug filter
• Add _doing_it_wrong() when a plugin or theme accesses $wp_scripts or $wp_styles too early (also fixes localization)
• Add a filter to is_multi_author()
• Add a general filter to wp_unique_post_slug to allow for full customisation of the uniqueness functionality
• Add filter for the args into wp_dropdown_pages() in the page attributes box; give the list_pages filter the context of the post object
• Add filter so the users can select custom image sizes added by themes and plugin
• Add filters for install/upgrade queries, so that unit tests installer can force creating InnoDB tables, so that we can use transactions to revert the database to its initial state after each test
• Add inflation support for java.util.zip.Deflater in WP_Http_Encoding::compatible_gzinflate()
• Add magic get/set/isset methods to WP_User to avoid data duplication; standardize on WP_User::ID
• Add pre_ent2ncr filter
• add_site_option should not update existing options, should return a boolean and should only run actions on success
• Allow get_blog_option(null,…) to hit the cache for the current blog; new return values for add_blog_option, update_blog_option, delete_blog_option; don’t set the cache in those functions if add/update/delete_option failed
• Allow ‘id’ to work in get_bookmarks(); add link_notes even though such sorting is a bad idea
• Allow sorting by id in get_bookmarks()
• Allow the text parameter in wp_trim_excerpt() to be omitted altogether, instead of requiring a blank string
• Automatically set ‘compare’ => ‘IN’ in WP_Meta_Query::get_sql() when the meta value is an array
• Change month dropdown display in date pickers to include month number
• Completely remove wp_add_script_data()
• Consolidate update count code into wp_get_update_data()
• Count only published posts when updating term counts; fire term count updates on transition_post_status
• Deprecate favorite_actions(), add_contextual_help(), add_screen_option(), move meta_box_prefs() and get_screen_icon() in WP_Screen
• Deprecate get_userdatabylogin() and get_user_by_email()
• Deprecate media_upload_(image|audio|video|file)(), type_url_form_(image|audio|video|file)(); these now wrap wp_media_upload_handler() and wp_media_insert_url_form()
• Deprecate RSS 0.92 feed and 301 it to the default feed
• Deprecate screen_options(), screen_layout(), screen_meta()
• Deprecate wpmu_admin_redirect_add_updated_param() and wpmu_admin_do_redirect()
• Eliminate verbose rewrite rules for ambiguous rewrite structures, resulting in massive performance gains
• Fix back compat issues with delete_postmeta and deleted_postmeta actions as these should be passed the meta ID
• Fix QTags.closeAllTags(), replace ‘tb’ with ‘ed’ in quicktags,js to make it clear it is the editor instance not the toolbar, small comments quick edit fixes
• Fix typos in documentation
• Fix wp_update_user() so it doesn’t stomp meta fields
• Force display_errors to off when WP_DEBUG_DISPLAY == false; technically a backwards incompatible change so if you want the passthrough to php.ini (which false used to provide) then use WP_DEBUG_DISPLAY === null
• Harden up is_user_logged_in() against empty $current_user instances to prevent PHP Notices on XML-RPC requests
• Have dbDelta() loop through tables it knows about, rather than loop through a potentially expensive and definitely unnecessary SHOW TABLES
• Improve _wp_menu_output()
• Improve the parsing of email addresses in wp_mail to re-support RFC2822 nameless “<address@…>” style
• Instantiate some MS variables as objects before using them
• Introduce ->mysql to allow drop-ins to declare themselves as MySQL and therefore allow minimum version checks to still apply
• Introduce is_main_query() that compares the query object against $wp_the_query
• Introduce metadata_exists(), WP_User::get_data_by(), WP_User::get(), WP_User::has_prop(). Don’t fill user objects with meta
• Introduce new hooks, registered_post_type for register_post_type, and registered_taxonomy for register_taxonomy
• Introduce register_meta(), get_metadata_by_mid(), and *_post_meta capabilities
• Introduce wp_allowed_protocols() for use in wp_kses() and esc_url()
• Introduce wp_cache_incr() and wp_cache_decr()
• Introduce WP_Dependencies::get_data() method, change scripts and styles priority to follow the “natural” order in HTML, i.e. the last one wins
• Introduce wp_get_db_schema() for retrieving various flavors of db schema; eliminates need to use global; allows multiple calls to wpmu_create_blog()
• Introduce wp_suspend_cache_addition() to allow reduced memory usage when cache additions aren’t useful
• Make check_theme_switched() run an action so plugins and themes authors can avoid losing widgets when switching themes
• Optimise get_term to not query for term_id = 0 and improve the prepared query to use %d for the term_id
• Optimize parse_request for the home page
• Performance improvement for wp_list_pluck()
• Properly handle display of Order, Template, and Parent page attributes in Quick/Bulk Edit
• Properly handle nested arrays in wp_list_filter()
• Recognize urls that start with a question mark as relative urls that do not require a scheme to be prepended
• Refactor Quicktags
• Remove return by ref from get_role()
• Remove support for <link rel=start>, end, up, and index. These rel=”" values have been dropped by the HTML Working Group
• Remove the old root feed files, but don’t add these files to old_files to leave them on existing installs
• Require show_ui rather than public for a taxonomy’s parent post type
• Rework get_hidden_meta_boxes() to leverage a full WP_Screen object; prevents custom post types from having their explicitly supported meta boxes being hidden by default
• Set up the post global variable in the comment feed loops so that any calls to post related template tags work correctly
• Store screen help and options as static data against WP_Screen; individual screen objects no longer hold data it can’t re-generate on construction or otherwise fetch; convert_to_screen() now returns a WP_Screen object; various globals are gone; introduces WP_Screen::get_option(); allows for a formal factory to be introduced later
• Support an array or comma-seperated list of excluded category IDs in get_adjacent_post()
• Support for using wp_enqueue_script() and wp_enqueue_style() in the HTML body; all scripts and styles are added in the footer
• Sync pomo library with the current GlotPress version
• Turn delete_meta() , get_post_meta_by_id(), update_meta(), delete_post_meta_by_key() into wrappers around the Metadata API; add back compat *_postmeta actions to Metadata API
• Turn is_blog_user() into a convenience wrapper around get_blogs_of_user(); fixes is_blog_user() for blog prefixes that do not contain a blog ID
• Update blog last_updated time only on publish_post; both private_to_published and publish_phone are overly broad and otherwise redundant
• Update jQuery to 1.7.1
• Update jQuery UI to 1.8.16
• Update Plupload to 1.5.1.1
• Update quicktags.js (HTML editor)
• Update TinyMCE to 3.4.5
• Use add_option() method, introduce add_option_context() method for adding specific text above the screen options
• Use get_template_directory() instead of TEMPLATEPATH in Twentys Ten and Eleven
• Use json_encode() for adding script data (formerly l10n); add the same functionality to WP_Styles for adding inline css after a stylesheet has been outputted
• Use wp_print_scripts() in install.php
• Various PHPdoc updates including: for all_items, menu_name, WP_List_Table::views(), cache.php, get_option(), wpdb::prepare(), get_template_part(), esc_url(), get_meta_sql(), WP_Screen, WP_Http_Encoding::compatible_gzinflate(), zeroise(), wp_add_script_before(), wp_editor()
• WP_Filesystem_*::mkdir() untrailingslash path consistently, don’t waste time attempting to create an “empty” path

Sunny landscape: Click to enlarge

Let it snow, let it snow, let it snow!

Wintry landscape: Click to enlarge

Have you done anything to your site design lately? There’s never a better time to do this than at Christmas.

Happy holidays everyone!

Since version 3.0, WordPress supports multisite features, allowing you to run multiple websites on one single installation.

If you have already enabled multisite functionality and would like to switch from subdomains to subfolders, here’s how.

1. Open wp-config.php in a text editor.
2. Look for the line define('SUBDOMAIN_INSTALL', true);. Change true to false. Save the file and upload it back to your server.
3. With the structural change, you would need to update your .htaccess file with new rules. You can get these rules by going to Network Admin > Settings > Network Setup

Voila! You’re done. You should be able to create new sites in subfolders now. I am not sure if these steps work vice versa, ie. changing subfolders to subdomains. If anyone tries it, drop us a note in the comments section.

Last night, I updated a client’s site from WordPress 2.8 to the current WordPress 3.1.1. The 2.x to 3.x update is a major one and I was expecting to hit some stumbling blocks, especially with the custom plugins written by their previous developer.

As expected, the custom plugins’ settings pages yielded the dreaded blank screen with the “You do not have sufficient permissions to access this page” error message. The error occurs because it is looking for a page that doesn’t actually exist.

…/wp-admin/options-general.php?page=reallycoolplugin instead of
…/wp-admin/options-general.php?page=really cool plugin.

WordPress 3 strips out the spaces in the plugin slug name, hence resulting in the broken URL.

Thankfully, solving it is easy enough. If you encounter the same issue, this may fix it.

1. Edit the problematic plugin file on a text editor. Look for the add_options_page function. It would look something like this:

   add_options_page('My Plugin Options', 'My Plugin', 'manage_options', 'my unique identifier', 'my_plugin_options');
   

2. Rename the menu slug, “my unique identifier” in this case, so that it does not have spaces in it. For example:

   add_options_page('My Plugin Options', 'My Plugin', 'manage_options', 'my-unique-identifier', 'my_plugin_options');
   

There are many possible causes for the “You do not have sufficient permissions to access this page” error message and this is just one example. If you have encountered the same error and managed to solve it in a different way, leave a comment here to share with us.

Whilst browsing the financial analysis website seekingalpha.com, I noticed that every time someone leaves a comment on any article, his total comment count would show up next to his name. This is pretty neat as it gives a community vibe to the site. In fact most discussion forums already have such a feature built in, displaying each user’s total number of posts.

In WordPress, you can do the exact same thing by adding the function below. It checks the commenter’s email address and displays the total number of comments that he has left on your website from past to present. It will work even if the person is not a registered user of the site.

Note: If you are using the Akismet plugin, you may have noticed the new option “Show the number of comments you’ve approved beside each comment author” available since version 2.5. Turning on this option displays the total comment count of each comment author as well, but only within the WordPress admin panel. In our case, we are going to make the comment count publicly viewable.

Display User/Visitor Comment Count without a Plugin

1. Open your functions.php template file and add the following function.

   function commentCount() {
   	global $wpdb;
   	$count = $wpdb->get_var('SELECT COUNT(comment_ID) FROM ' . $wpdb->comments. ' WHERE comment_author_email = "' . get_comment_author_email() . '"');
   	echo $count . ' comments';
   }
   

2. Call the function in your comments template (usually comments.php) where you want it to appear, for eg. next to the nickname.

   <?php commentCount(); ?>
   

Since the WordPress 3.1 update, there is a new Admin Bar (known as toolbar since WordPress 3.3) that gives you a one-click access to frequently used dashboard pages. When you are logged in, this bar shows up at the top of your website and in the dashboard by default. As nifty as it is, some of us prefer to do without it, especially when it doesn’t play nice with the theme.

There is a very easy way to disable and remove the Admin Bar. To hide the bar, go to your Profile page, typically http://yourdomain.com/wp-admin/profile.php. Under the Toolbar option, you can choose whether or not to Show Toolbar when viewing site.

Note that that this method would hide the admin bar only for your own user account. If you are the web developer and would like to hide the bar from all users, open your functions.php template file and add the following line.

show_admin_bar(false);

For those of you that run a WordPress site, you may wish to display a list of posts with the most number of comments. This is typically achieved by using a plugin/widget. But did you know that you can easily do this without a plugin too?

You can use the query_posts() function to display your most commented posts without a plugin, thanks to the new comment_count orderby parameter available since WordPress version 2.9.

Display Most Commented Posts in WordPress Without a Plugin

<ol>
	<?php $wp_query =
		new WP_Query('caller_get_posts=1&orderby=comment_count&posts_per_page=10');
		while ($wp_query->have_posts()) : $wp_query->the_post(); { ?>
			<li><a href="<?php the_permalink() ?>"><?php the_title(); ?></a> (<?php comments_number('0 comment', '1 comment', '% comments'); ?>)</li>
	<?php } endwhile; ?>
</ol>

Note: To change the number of posts to display, modify the posts_per_page parameter.

On my personal project Sparklette where I write restaurant reviews, I also run a Facebook Page where members can have conversations with one another. Every so often, interesting conversations would come up and I like to highlight these discussions on my website, Twitter, etc.

Now, finding the direct link for each status update may not be as immediately obvious as linking to photos, videos or albums, but the link is there all the same.

Here’s how to link to a Facebook status update:

1. Look for the date when the status was posted. In this screen capture, the dates are boxed out in red:

   

2. Click the date to go to the direct page dedicated to this status update. You can get the link from your browser’s address bar.
   Alternatively, right-click the date and select “Copy Link Location” or equivalent.

You now have the link to the Facebook Status update!

We have just completed a project for the South China Morning Post, one of Hong Kong’s main English-language newspapers. Every Christmas, they publish the SCMP Christmas Shoppers’ Guide to aid consumers in browsing shopping offers during the holiday season. But this year, they decided to develop an online equivalent of the hard copy shopping guide, and they hired us to do it.

After 2 months, the site has gone live at deals.scmp.com where you can see it in action.

You can easily browse the shopping offers in the gallery or by category (beauty, restaurants, books, etc) and location (Causeway Way, Macau, etc), and even view the hottest offers (Christmas dinner, wine offers, etc).

Specific functionality includes coupon downloads (with logging mechanism), an order form where merchants can book an ad spot, and a “My Favourites” list that lets you easily bookmark offers.

We built the entire website using WordPress as the CMS, with the theme custom-built from scratch along with some plugins and the usual suspects like the jQuery slider and the dropdown mega-menu that the client really likes from Sparklette.

To bring in that whole festive feel, we sprinkle in familiar Christmas icons such as using a snow globe with a house for the Home icon, the fir in the site footer, and a dash of Christmasy colors.

The whole process has been amazingly smooth-sailing, which is incredible considering that we were working exclusively from our office in Singapore the whole time, while the client is based in Hong Kong! O bless modern technologies and Skype.

At the conclusion of the project, the client sent us a few hard copies of the shopping guide which they have adapted the design from the website, along with a handwritten note of appreciation. You are welcome!