Welcome to the official homepage for my free WordPress plugin, Contact Form X (CFX). This is a more personal look at the plugin, aimed at readers who are familiar with my work. Here you’ll find some screenshots, cool features, and of course some rambling backstory (because there is one). If you are looking for official plugin documentation, visit Contact Form X at WordPress.org. There you will find docs, download, installation steps, support forum, translation tools, and more. Continue reading »
I’ve been super busy this year, cranking out some useful new plugins. Nothing as awesome as Banhammer Pro, but some pretty useful new plugins nonetheless. So I’m launching a total of five new WordPress plugins. The first four basically are utility plugins designed to make WordPress life easier. The 5th and final plugin (for awhile at least), is Contact Form X, which I am now using as the contact form here at Perishable Press. Contact Form X I know what […] Continue reading »
For those still in the dark, WordPress 5.0 will bring HUGE changes to the post editor. Dubbed Gutenberg, the new WP post editor replaces the entire “classic” post editing screen. So as of WordPress 5.0 and beyond, the “Edit Post” screen will be completely replaced by a giant WYSIWYG content builder called “Gutenberg”. So much more is being replaced than just the content editor. The list of things that are replaced by Gutenberg include the RTE/Visual Editor, Plain Text Editor, […] Continue reading »
Currently Gutenberg does not display the Custom Fields meta box. Before Gutenberg, in WordPress 4.9 and earlier, the “Edit” screens in the WP Admin Area optionally displayed the Custom Fields meta box. The Custom Fields meta box is employed by millions of sites, themes and plugins. Including my own collection of WordPress plugins, which use custom fields for Posts, Pages, and many Custom Post Types. Basically Custom Fields are a critical part of WordPress functionality, so I wrote a plugin […] Continue reading »
I’ve been exploring WordPress new Gutenberg functionality, and unfortunately keep encountering various weird errors. So to keep things organized and hopefully help others on the same path, I’m going to update this post with any Gutenberg errors for which I am able to find a solution. This includes any PHP errors, warnings, notices, as well as any JavaScript and/or debug/console errors. Continue reading »
Been playing with WordPress new Gutenberg functionality. While exploring the new features, I created some Shared blocks via the “Convert to Shared Block” button. After another hour of playing with the Gutenberg API, there were a number of “orphaned” Shared blocks (just due to swapping out code snippets while testing). After some searching, I found it is possible to delete Shared blocks programmatically with JavaScript, but could not find any specific documentation or examples. So, I came up with an […] Continue reading »
Banhammer makes monitoring traffic and banning visitors crazy easy and fun. Say your forum is being harassed by some dirtbag. Or your admin directory is crawling with bad bots. Or some script kiddie is trying to brute-force your login page. Don’t just sit there and watch it happen.. drop the Banhammer on those fools and block them forever. Continue reading »
Since version 2.3, WordPress has been vulnerable to a Host Header Injection attack in certain server environments. Over the years, there has been some discussion about fixing the vulnerability, but as of WP 4.9 (beta) nothing has been implemented. So to help those in the WP community who may be concerned (including myself), I developed a new security plugin that fixes the issue: Host Header Injection Fix (HHIF). Continue reading »
This post contains overflow FAQs for the free version of User Submitted Posts (hosted at WordPress.org). I am moving a bunch of the FAQs to this post in order to clean up the plugin’s ever-growing readme.txt file. For FAQs about the Pro version of USP, check out USP Pro – FAQs & Presales over at Plugin Planet. Note that these FAQs are in no particular order. So without further ado.. Continue reading »
WordPress responsive images are awesome. But some people want to use their own methods to implement. This post explains how to disable WordPress responsive image functionality so that you can use your own methods. It makes things easier when you don’t have to wrestle with what WordPress is doing. Continue reading »
I recently redesigned my .htaccess site, htaccessbook.com. Before the redesign, I was using bbPress for the forum functionality. It worked okay for a few years, but along the way there were all sorts of really nasty bugs and important things breaking. It seemed like, no matter what, each updated version of the bbPress plugin caused serious problems, like replies not working, permalinks changing, and all sorts of other issues. Eventually, I got tired of spending hours after each bbPress update […] Continue reading »
The WordPress core uses .htaccess for two things: Permalinks and Multisite. This means that .htaccess is only required if you have enabled either of these features. Otherwise, .htaccess is entirely optional for default WordPress installations. Beyond the WP core, many plugins also use the .htaccess file for custom directives involving rewrites, redirects, custom headers, file compression, and much more. In many cases, such plugins add their .htaccess rules to your .htaccess file automatically, behind the scenes. Continue reading »
Announcing the Pro version of my WordPress security plugin, Blackhole for Bad Bots. Like the free version, Blackhole Pro protects your site against bad bots, spammers, scrapers, scanners, and other automated threats. This increases site security and saves precious server resources for your legit visitors. It’s time to say “bye bye” to bad bots. Continue reading »
In this tutorial, I’m going to walk you through how you can add a new menu in WordPress Admin Area, where your users will be able to import any demo content — including widgets, their positions and navigation as well — by a single click. The code follows the best WordPress practices, uses WP Filesystem for file management, includes escaping and all text strings are prepared for translation. It also passes the WordPress theme check plugin! Continue reading »
I’ve been using other plugins to display my code at Perishable Press, Plugin Planet, DigWP, and WP-Mix for years now. The other plugins have done the job, but there are things that I’ve always wanted to change. For example, syntax highlighting. I use syntax highlighting for code snippets at WP-Mix, but not on any of my other sites. So I wanted to combine clean, time-tested code escaping with stylish syntax highlighting. After sharing well over 1,000 code snippets online, I […] Continue reading »
By default, depending on file permissions, WordPress automatically will modify the contents of your site’s .htaccess file. It does this on several occasions, adding and/or updating the rewrite rules required for WP’s permalink functionality. This post explains how this works, why it can be dangerous, and how to stop it from happening. Continue reading »