~/jrtashjian

WordPress

  • Featured Image Fallback for Child Pages

    Continuing from the same project where I needed to highlight a parent page in a WordPress menu when on a child page, featured images is another place where I wanted some custom functionality. This custom functionality I’m about to share wasn’t necessarily a requirement but I wanted to make it as simple as possible for the…

  • Highlighting parent page in WordPress menus

    Menus in WordPress are a really simple and easy way to manage various navigation bars in a theme. wp_nav_menu() does a lot of the work automatically and includes a number of CSS classes for styling. Highlighting the current page is especially useful using .current-menu-item and .current-menu-ancestor classes. There was one issue I recently ran into though.…

  • Five Ways to Secure Your WordPress Plugins

    I wrote a piece on the VaultPress blog recently about some basic security practices plugin developers should know and include in their own plugins. This sums up my beliefs on being a plugin/theme developer: Writing plugins for WordPress gives us so much freedom and flexibility on the platform and with this ability comes a responsibility…

  • Talk: Getting Started with the Cron API

    I’ve wanted to speak at a conference for a long time and only recently decided to take the leap by submitting a talk for the local WordCamp in Saratoga. I chose the topic of the Cron API because I use something very similar everyday at Automattic and I’ve not seen any talks on the component…

  • Gravatar Is More Than Just An Avatar

    Personal profile websites are a common sight these days, especially when services like About.me make it so easy for everyone to have one. But did you know Gravatar can do more than just serve your avatar around the websites you frequent? Gravatar provides a personal profile that people can view to learn a little more…

  • Modular Sidebar in WordPress

    Like all good developers, I go back and look at past code to see what I could have improved and how I can apply the new knowledge to a current project.Both of the projects in question had sidebars with sections that are shared throughout the site. However, not all sections are being displayed at once.…

  • WordPress ‘Fetch Feed’ Plugin

    ‘Fetch Feed’ is a RSS retrieval and caching plugin for WordPress. You can use it to parse any RSS feed for displaying on your site. I created it while developing this new theme and thought other users would find it useful. I used it for the Delicious Bookmarks list on the sidebar and for the…