Wordpress Programming tips and tricks from a Wordpress Development company in London

How to override the comments form in a child theme

February 20, 2018 by louie171 Leave a Comment

This is a quick post on how to provide your own comments template in your child theme ( overriding comments.php in your parent theme). You can just as easily use the same code to override comments.php if you aren’t using a child theme.

Todo this you need to you need to use the filter ‘comments_template’ ( see the wordpress codex on this filter here)

function greenbox_override_comment_template( $comment_template ) {
    
     global $post;
     if ( !( is_singular() && ( have_comments() || 'open' == $post->comment_status ) ) ) {
        return;
     }
     
     
        
        // your full path and name of comments file to use
        return dirname(__FILE__) ."/my-comments.php";
     
}

add_filter( "comments_template", "greenbox_override_comment_template" );

function greenbox_override_comment_template( $comment_template ) {

global $post;

if ( !( is_singular() && ( have_comments() || 'open' == $post->comment_status ) ) ) {

return;

}

// your full path and name of comments file to use

return dirname(__FILE__) ."/my-comments.php";

}

add_filter( "comments_template", "greenbox_override_comment_template" );

A handy thing you might sometimes want todo is to have a custom comments template, for various custom post types. If you did want todo this you could just add in an if to encase the returned path and filename. e.g.

if($post->post_type == 'my_custom_post_type'){

         return dirname(__FILE__) ."/my_custom_post_type-comments.php";

}

if($post->post_type == 'my_custom_post_type'){

return dirname(__FILE__) ."/my_custom_post_type-comments.php";

}

Hope someone finds these snippets for how to override comments.php useful.

How to engage your staff using your Intranet

February 9, 2018 by louie171 Leave a Comment

In this article, we’ll look at some ideas for useful things to have on your intranet and how to use these to help engage your Employees, members or Volunteers.

What are the benefits of engaged staff ?

Happy workforce ( productive workforce, helps business be more profitable)
Low Staff turnover ( saves money in recruitment and training)

Useful Intranet features for employee engagement

Employee Recognition Section

Make your staff feel engaged by recognising them and their achievements ( both personal and professional ). A section on your homepage for this would really make people feel valued, and a good way for other employees to spark up a conversation with the recognised individual ( or team) Some ideas of the kind of thing to recognise:

An employee has a work anniversary
An employee is doing a Marathon for charity
A employee or team have delivered a great project that will help company save money
The works Football team are doing well

“Our Intranet features a news feed with stories of employee honors and work anniversaries, volunteering, company sponsorships and other news with links to more details. It can be a challenge sharing our culture across four states in a regulated industry. But people love reading about and seeing images of colleagues they know as well as those they’ve never met. By far we’ve gotten the most engagement posting photos of employees in Halloween costumes and celebrating Ugly Sweater Day. In a regulated industry, the simple, silly things unite us and we laugh together. ” – An Intranet Manager I interviewed that wishes to remain anonymous.

New Employees Section

Welcome your new employees, with a section on the homepage, linking to their staff profiles.

Suggestions

Have somewhere, that employees can easily post suggestions, to save money, to make staff more engaged, to make money and so on. Your staff are your businesses greatest asset ( often the ones on the shop floor close to certain areas of the business can deliver great insights – that might otherwise never come to light). You could incentivise with a monthly prize for the best suggestion.

Personalisation

Display relevant content to the Intranet visitor based on one or a number of criteria ( or even let users pick what they want to see).

Displaying content based on a Persona

E.g. one type of persona could be ‘New Starter’ , are there any important documents they need to read, are their specific forms they might need to fill ( eg bank details so they can get paid on time).

If your a large organisation (with multiple locations across the globe) you might want display things based on the location, or the team ( maybe HR need to see something different to IT and so on).

Allowing Users to pick content they are interested in

You can let users pick some of the content they are interested in and have it displayed prominently for them.

Are you looking to have an intranet developed or would like to upgrade / improve your existing Intranet ? Get in touch we’re experts in this area.

Buddypress how to remove tabs from groups sub tabs ( eg remove Delete group)

February 6, 2018 by louie171 Leave a Comment

This code is based on a post from the buddypress forums tested on Buddypress 2.9.2 ( forum states its compatible from BP 2.6+).

In this example we remove the Delete tab and also permission so that user can’t try and goto the url to access it.

Note there are numerous other examples / versions of this code scattered about the bp forums that dont work as function bp_core_remove_subnav_item now requires the extra param (see code below).

important: Navigation API has lots of good up to date examples

function gwb_remove_group_admin_tab() {
	if ( ! bp_is_group() || ! ( bp_is_current_action( 'admin' ) && bp_action_variable( 0 ) ) || is_super_admin() ) {
		return;
	}
	// Add the admin subnav slug you want to hide in the
	// following array
	$hide_tabs = array(
		
		'delete-group' => 1,  // you can get this from view source of the page the id of tab is this
	);
	$parent_nav_slug = bp_get_current_group_slug() . '_manage';
	// Remove the nav items
	foreach ( array_keys( $hide_tabs ) as $tab ) {
	  // Since 2.6, You just need to add the 'groups' parameter at the end of the bp_core_remove_subnav_item
		bp_core_remove_subnav_item( $parent_nav_slug, $tab, 'groups' );
	}
	// You may want to be sure the user can't access
	if ( ! empty( $hide_tabs[ bp_action_variable( 0 ) ] ) ) {
		bp_core_add_message( 'Sorry buddy, but this part is restricted to super admins!', 'error' );
		bp_core_redirect( bp_get_group_permalink( groups_get_current_group() ) );
	}
}
add_action( 'bp_actions', 'gwb_remove_group_admin_tab', 9 );

function gwb_remove_group_admin_tab() {

if ( ! bp_is_group() || ! ( bp_is_current_action( 'admin' ) && bp_action_variable( 0 ) ) || is_super_admin() ) {

return;

}

// Add the admin subnav slug you want to hide in the

// following array

$hide_tabs = array(

'delete-group' => 1, // you can get this from view source of the page the id of tab is this

);

$parent_nav_slug = bp_get_current_group_slug() . '_manage';

// Remove the nav items

foreach ( array_keys( $hide_tabs ) as $tab ) {

// Since 2.6, You just need to add the 'groups' parameter at the end of the bp_core_remove_subnav_item

bp_core_remove_subnav_item( $parent_nav_slug, $tab, 'groups' );

}

// You may want to be sure the user can't access

if ( ! empty( $hide_tabs[ bp_action_variable( 0 ) ] ) ) {

bp_core_add_message( 'Sorry buddy, but this part is restricted to super admins!', 'error' );

bp_core_redirect( bp_get_group_permalink( groups_get_current_group() ) );

}

add_action( 'bp_actions', 'gwb_remove_group_admin_tab', 9 );

See this post also on hiding the delete tab on the groups from the buddypress forums

WordPress SQL snippets

January 22, 2018 by louie171 Leave a Comment

A place to keep snippets of useful WordPress SQL.

Do a select based on some meta field of a post ( i.e. search for a post that has a particular metafield )

SELECT  p.ID,p.post_title,
        MAX(CASE WHEN pm1.meta_key = 'id_vim_node' then pm1.meta_value ELSE NULL END) as field_i_want
 FROM    wp_posts p LEFT JOIN wp_postmeta pm1 ON ( pm1.post_id = p.ID)

where pm1.meta_key = 'id_vim_node'

GROUP BY
   p.ID, p.post_title

SELECT p.ID,p.post_title,

MAX(CASE WHEN pm1.meta_key = 'id_vim_node' then pm1.meta_value ELSE NULL END) as field_i_want

FROM wp_posts p LEFT JOIN wp_postmeta pm1 ON ( pm1.post_id = p.ID)

where pm1.meta_key = 'id_vim_node'

GROUP BY

p.ID, p.post_title

In the example above I’m searching for posts with a value for id_vim_node. This is based on this code from stackexchange

Output WP_Query sql code (very useful for debugging WP_Query )

if in the loop

<?php echo $GLOBALS['wp_query']->request; ?>

1	<?php echo $GLOBALS['wp_query']->request; ?>

outside of loop

$customPosts = new WP_Query($yourArgs);
echo "Last SQL-Query: {$customPosts->request}";

1 2	$customPosts = new WP_Query($yourArgs); echo "Last SQL-Query: {$customPosts->request}";

based on this post on stackexchange

Using WordPress as a Company Intranet

October 4, 2017 by louie171 Leave a Comment

WordPress can be a great choice as a company / staff Intranet, but it’s important to first define what features you need. Then to either code the features or choose plugins to use / customise.

Being a programmer, I think WordPress is an excellent intranet choice, the WordPress API allows you to customise things to how you want.

In this article I’ll later discuss some useful plugins for some of the main features.

Common features of a staff intranet

There are many possible features an Intranet website can have, these are probably the ones that nearly all Intranets will need.

Company news
Knowledge base / Document management System
Staff Directory and Profiles

Other features a company Intranet may need:

Forms ( online / downloadable printable forms )
Staff Events Calendar
Blog/s
HR section (policies and the like )
Social network features (such as groups, group threads, user to user messaging )
WordPress integration with Microsoft Active Directory (if you choose WordPress and your on a windows network)

Look and feel and navigation

This is down to preference, but some things to consider are:

Company branding
A good homepage will have latest news prominently displayed.
Good navigation and Search feature to allow staff to navigate to the things that important to them.

How to achieve the main Intranet features with WordPress

Document Management

WordPress has basic document management built into it as standard through the media library, which for many organisations will do what you need.

For basic Document Management on an Intranet you need to ability to:

Upload a file and store it
Generate a link to the file that can be used anywhere on the Intranet (allowing easy access)

Once you have this functionality you can create pages and put the documents on the pages, eg you might have a HR (Human Resources) section that has a policy documents page (just add the links to the page). Go to the file in the media library and get the link like in the image below:

If you want to go further, an example might be wanting to have review dates for documents. So you can guarantee that policies and training documents etc are upto date, then a good starting point is the WP Document Revisions Plugin (you’ll need to customise it alittle for review date functionality):

https://wordpress.org/plugins/wp-document-revisions/

Company News

The blog feature of WordPress can be used for posting articles on any topic. If you want to create a company news section, a simple way is to create a category type of ‘company news’ and then add this to any post you want to have in the company news section.

E.g if I wanted a Javascript posts section on my website I could create ‘javascript’ category and then all the javascript posts are on this page: https://www.green-box.co.uk/category/javascript/ ( so long as i tag each post with that category ).

You probably want this also on your homepage, todo this alter the template for the homepage and drop in something like below or use a widget if you have widget areas and don’t want to touch any code https://en-gb.wordpress.org/plugins/category-posts/ .

<?php global $more;

$cat = array(24); // id of category you want to display
       $args=array(
            'category__in' => $cat, 
            'orderby' => 'post_date',
           'order' => 'DESC',
           'posts_per_page' => 5,
           'paged'=>get_query_var('paged')
           );    
    
$my_query = new WP_Query($args);

?>

<?php while ($my_query->have_posts()) : $my_query->the_post(); ?>
        <hr/>
        <div <?php post_class(); ?>>
            <h3 class="entry-title"><p align="left"><a href="<?php the_permalink(); ?>" rel="bookmark" title="<?php printf(__('Permanent Link to %s', 'gpp_i18n'), the_title_attribute('echo=0')); ?>"><?php the_title(); ?></a></h3></p><br>
            <div class="entry">
    <?php global $more;
    $more = 0;
    the_content(); ?>
        <?php wp_link_pages(array('before' => '<div class="page-link">' . __('Pages:', 'gpp_i18n'), 'after' => '</div>')); ?>
            </div><div class="clear"></div>
        </div><div class="clear"></div>
        <p class="postmetadata"><?php the_time(__('M d, Y', 'gpp_i18n')); ?> by <a href="/?author=<?php the_author_ID(); ?>"><?php the_author_nickname(); ?></a> | <?php _e('Categories: ', 'gpp_i18n');
        if (the_category(', ')) the_category(); ?> <?php if (get_the_tags()) the_tags(__('| Tags: ', 'gpp_i18n')); ?> </p>
        
<?php endwhile; ?>

<?php global $more;

$cat = array(24); // id of category you want to display

$args=array(

'category__in' => $cat,

'orderby' => 'post_date',

'order' => 'DESC',

'posts_per_page' => 5,

'paged'=>get_query_var('paged')

);

$my_query = new WP_Query($args);

<?php while ($my_query->have_posts()) : $my_query->the_post(); ?>

<hr/>

<h3 class="entry-title"><p align="left"><a href="<?php the_permalink(); ?>" rel="bookmark" title="<?php printf(__('Permanent Link to %s', 'gpp_i18n'), the_title_attribute('echo=0')); ?>"><?php the_title(); ?></a></h3></p><br>

<?php global $more;

$more = 0;

the_content(); ?>

<?php wp_link_pages(array('before' => '<div class="page-link">' . __('Pages:', 'gpp_i18n'), 'after' => '</div>')); ?>

</div><div class="clear"></div>

<p class="postmetadata"><?php the_time(__('M d, Y', 'gpp_i18n')); ?> by <a href="/?author=<?php the_author_ID(); ?>"><?php the_author_nickname(); ?></a> | <?php _e('Categories: ', 'gpp_i18n');

if (the_category(', ')) the_category(); ?> <?php if (get_the_tags()) the_tags(__('| Tags: ', 'gpp_i18n')); ?> </p>

<?php endwhile; ?>

Staff Directory and Profiles

There are many plugins for creating staff directories, this depends on your needs. A straightforward one is Ultimate member:

https://wordpress.org/plugins/ultimate-member/

Another good one (with lots of features), is Buddypress. This one might be overkill if you want basic staff directory. It has member features for creating a social network – such as groups, member to member messaging and so on.

https://en-gb.wordpress.org/plugins/buddypress/

Conclusion

I hope this gives you some insight in creating an Intranet with WordPress. Although I’ve only touched on some of the basic features here.

If you’re planning an Intranet or would just like to know more, enter your email below to receive my free pdf which goes into much more depth on creating some other features that you might find useful things like:

being able to easily create forms
integrating WordPress with Microsoft Active Directory

If you’d like my free PDF on Intranet Development with WordPress please enter your email below:

please email me on [email protected]

How to add a form to a shortcode in WordPress (using PHP and Ajax)

May 27, 2017 by louie171 Leave a Comment

Recently I needed to develop a Shortcode that would display a form, this blog post details what I did. I used Ajax ( which seems the best way to add forms to shortcodes, but I’d welcome any input from other developers on your approach).

So without further ado lets get on with adding a form to a shortcode in WordPress.

We need javascript to handle submission of the form via ajax (this presumes you have jquery available), and handle the response from the server. green_form is the form id.

jQuery( document ).ready(function() {
    // Handler for .ready() called.
    
    
    //
    jQuery(function(){
        jQuery("#green_form").submit(function(event){
            event.preventDefault();
            
            var formOk = true;
            
            // do js validation 
   
            jQuery.ajax({
                url:ajax_object.ajax_url,
                type:'POST',
                data: jQuery(this).serialize() + "&action=green_do_something",
                success:function(response){
                    
                        
                    if(response=="true")
                    {
                       // do something
                    }
                    else{
                        
                        alert('doh something went wrong'); 
                    }
                       

                }

            });
        });
    });


});

jQuery( document ).ready(function() {

// Handler for .ready() called.

jQuery(function(){

jQuery("#green_form").submit(function(event){

event.preventDefault();

var formOk = true;

// do js validation

jQuery.ajax({

url:ajax_object.ajax_url,

type:'POST',

data: jQuery(this).serialize() + "&action=green_do_something",

success:function(response){

if(response=="true")

{

// do something

}

else{

alert('doh something went wrong');

}

});

Next we need the php to handle everything else, you could put this in functions.php (or include from functions.php) or put it into a plugin. The shortcode to include the form in our page or post is [shortcode_with_form]

The code handles:

the output of the shortcode
the server side processing of the form (I’ve just created a stub in this example ( function do_something_serverside )
and the including of javascript file required ( if you’d like to know abit depth on ajax forms in WordPress see my post on that )

$greenShortyExample = new GreenShortyExample(); 

class GreenShortyExample {


    public function __construct() {

        $this->attach_actions();

        $this->attach_shortcodes();
    }

    function attach_actions() {



        add_action('wp_ajax_nopriv_green_do_something', array($this, 'do_something_serverside'));
        add_action('wp_ajax_green_do_something', array($this, 'do_something_serverside')); /* notice green_do_something appended to action name of wp_ajax_ */


        add_action('wp_enqueue_scripts', array($this, 'theme_enqueue_styles'), 99999);
    }

    function theme_enqueue_styles() {

        /*
         * include the js
         */

        wp_enqueue_script('green-script', plugin_dir_url(__FILE__) . '../js/ajax_call_to_handle_form_submit.js', array('jquery'));

        // in JavaScript, object properties are accessed as ajax_object.ajax_url, ajax_object.we_value
        wp_localize_script('green-script', 'ajax_object', array('ajax_url' => admin_url('admin-ajax.php'), 'we_value' => 1234));
    }

    function do_something_serverside() {
        
        echo "true";  // output to ajax call        
        die();
       
    }


    function attach_shortcodes() {


        add_shortcode('shortcode_with_form', array($this, 'shortcode_with_form_code'));
    }

    function shortcode_with_form_code($atts, $content = null) {

        if ($this->formOk()) {
            return " <div>thanks your form has been submitted</div>";
        } else {
            return $this->show_form();
        }
    }

    function show_form() {

        $form = '
            
       
        <form id="green_form" action="">
        

          
          field1:<br>
          
          <input type="text" name="field1" value="">
          <br>
          
          field2:<br>
          
          <input type="text" name="field2" value="">
          <br>
          
          <br>
          <input type="submit" value="Submit" >
          
        </form> 
        
      


';

        return $form;
    }

    
    function formOk(){
        
        
        return true; // use session or something to check
        
    }
}

$greenShortyExample = new GreenShortyExample();

class GreenShortyExample {

public function __construct() {

$this->attach_actions();

$this->attach_shortcodes();

}

function attach_actions() {

add_action('wp_ajax_nopriv_green_do_something', array($this, 'do_something_serverside'));

add_action('wp_ajax_green_do_something', array($this, 'do_something_serverside')); /* notice green_do_something appended to action name of wp_ajax_ */

add_action('wp_enqueue_scripts', array($this, 'theme_enqueue_styles'), 99999);

}

function theme_enqueue_styles() {

* include the js

wp_enqueue_script('green-script', plugin_dir_url(__FILE__) . '../js/ajax_call_to_handle_form_submit.js', array('jquery'));

// in JavaScript, object properties are accessed as ajax_object.ajax_url, ajax_object.we_value

wp_localize_script('green-script', 'ajax_object', array('ajax_url' => admin_url('admin-ajax.php'), 'we_value' => 1234));

}

function do_something_serverside() {

echo "true"; // output to ajax call

die();

}

function attach_shortcodes() {

add_shortcode('shortcode_with_form', array($this, 'shortcode_with_form_code'));

}

function shortcode_with_form_code($atts, $content = null) {

if ($this->formOk()) {

return " <div>thanks your form has been submitted</div>";

} else {

return $this->show_form();

}

function show_form() {

$form = '

field1:<br>

<br>

field2:<br>

<br>

</form>

return $form;

}

function formOk(){

return true; // use session or something to check

}

Hope you find this interesting if you’re looking to add a form to a shortcode.