An Action A Day

WordPress Multi-site configurations often present some unique challenges for WordPress plugin authors.  One I just finished dealing with is how WordPress handles a WP plugin that is defining a TinyMCE editor plugin.  What follows is going to be very technical so read on if you want to learn more about writing TinyMCE editor plugins in a WordPress environment.

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For a few years I’ve been pulling in the feed from Lifehacker and it was good.  I was finding ways to make myself more productive, interesting applications that helped me organize elements of my life, do things better, etc.  Times have changed though and there’s much less in the feed that I’m finding relevant or useful.  Spending the time scanning through a fair amount of noise to find a few relevant tidbits of good signal has become a poor value for me.  So I’ve dropped Lifehacker from my regular feeds.

Why stop there though?  There are other feeds that I find interesting, but that I will likely not do anything with in the near or even moderately long term.  These are also adding their own form of noise and consuming time that I could be spending on efforts with greater relevance to my goals and active interests.  I’m going through my information sources, both in print and online, with eye towards how they contribute to my goals and my well-being.  Some examples:

• xkcd.com – It makes me laugh, keep.
• Lifehacker – I skip most of it these days.  Delete.
• Quicksilver google group – Love the Quicksilver application.  The google group is more useful to me though as a reference as opposed to an active information source.  Delete.
• Make Magazine – Here I’m on the fence.  I likely will not be making anything here soon, but the site is just so cool…  For now I’ll keep it for the inspirational value.
• Serious Eats – While this one aligns with my interest in food, it’s too general and I skip most of the content so it’s removed from my feed.
• Dropped most of my magazine subscriptions.  There was a time I was subscribed to 3 or 4 wood working magazines and the unread issues were stacking up.  Now I don’t have a growing pile on my desk reminding me I’m not keeping up.

It’s ridiculously simple to subscribe to content online and wind up hip deep (or worse) in posts, tweets, news feeds and email. Get off the lists that don’t serve you, the noise level goes down and what remains is a high(er) quality signal.

While prototyping a WordPress plugin I’m writing, I experimented with supplying default templates to display pages related to a custom post type. This is accomplished using the template_redirect action API.  If the following technique is not used, any special templates a plugin provides would need to be copied to the active theme, making plugin installation more complex than necessary.

A quick side note, I’ve got several projects running right now and one is designing this site so the following code snippets will not be nicely formatted until I’ve tackled that portion of my site design.

The first step in building the template_redirect action is to determine if the page being displayed is either a single page or archive of the custom post type. WordPress supplies the functions is_singular() and is_post_type_archive() for this purpose. If it’s a page that does not have a plugin supplied template, the function should return allowing WordPress core to select the correct template to use.

if (is_singular($my_post_type)) {
$template_name = 'single-';
} elseif (is_post_type_archive($my_post_type)) {
$template_name = 'archive-';
} else {
return;
}


Next, I build the full name for the template file that will be used and attempt to locate one supplied by the active theme. The WordPress function locate_template() will return the path to a matching template if one is present.

$template_name .= get_post_type($post) . '.php';
// Look for theme provided template
$template = locate_template(array($template_name), true);


Finally, if the theme does not supply a template, the plugin supplied default template is used. When the template_redirect action does use an alternate template, it is expected to exit and no further processing should be done by WordPress core.

if (empty($template)) {
include(WP_PLUGIN_DIR . '/my-plugin-dir/template/' . $template_name);
}
exit();


Putting this all together, here’s the entire code snippet:

function my_template_redirect()
{
global $post;
global $my_post_type;
if (is_singular($my_post_type)) {
$template_name = 'single-';
} elseif (is_post_type_archive($my_post_type)) {
$template_name = 'archive-';
} else {
return;
}
$template_name .= get_post_type($post) . '.php';
// Look for available templates
$template = locate_template(array($template_name), true);
if (empty($template)) {
include(WP_PLUGIN_DIR . '/my-plugin-dir/template/' . $template_name);
}
exit();
}
add_action('template_redirect', 'my_template_redirect');

The site has now been switched to a new theme that I’ve started to write based on the Blueprint CSS Framework.

At this point the formatting is all very basic with all styling being provided by defaults out of the Blueprint Framework by applying them to a few key places of the site markup.  The only site formatting I’ve added so far is to assign areas of the page to spaces in the blueprint grid.