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Dynamic redirect to referrer in login

Chad Butler · Aug 2, 2013 ·

This article is provided free. Find out how you can get full access to premium content, including how-to articles and support forums, as well as priority email support and member exclusive plugin extensions..

I have a challenge creating a title for this tutorial, so to describe what it covers, I recently had a question regarding how to dynamically put a redirect back to the original content into the link to the login page. In this instance, the user had customized how they were using the plugin and rather than having the login in place of blocked content as is the default, they had a link to the login page. Continue Reading →

Remove an unparsed wpmem_txt shortcode

Chad Butler · Apr 11, 2013 ·

The wpmem_txt shortcode is something that WP-Members puts in on the fly and its purpose is to prevent WordPress from putting line breaks (<p> and <br /> via the wpautop and wptexturize functions) into the form, thus throwing off the layout. This is one of those magic things that runs in the background that no one really knows about unless something breaks it.

Here is the problem: WordPress runs the shortcode parser on the content only once. By itself, that’s not a problem. However, if a plugin or theme developer includes a shortcode in their code and they do not use the function do_shortcode() on the $content variable before returning it, any shortcodes that are executed after theirs will be unparsed. For WP-Members, a bad practice like that will result in leaving wpmem_txt unparsed in your form.

So… how do you fix this? Continue Reading →

Disable the WordPress toolbar

Chad Butler · Sep 4, 2012 ·

The “admin bar” is actually more correctly referred to as the Toolbar. But most people refer to it as the admin bar, so I’ve referring to it as such in this post so as not to confuse anyone.

Removal can be managed with 3 lines of code to your functions.php file (or 1 if you really want to be efficient).

Continue Reading →

Customizing WP-Members with pluggable functions

Chad Butler · Aug 29, 2012 ·

IMPORTANT: This article remains here for legacy purposes. There are many users who utilize pluggable functions in the plugin and have not updated these processes to utilize hooks and filters. There are also articles buried in this blog that have customizations that use a pluggable function (if you find one, let me know). HOWEVER, pluggable functions, while still supported, are not the preferred way of customizing plugin features. Like WordPress core, these were the original way to customize, but as filter and action hooks were added to the application, pluggable functions were not longer necessary. The API for WP-Members is much more mature than it was when pluggable functions were introduced. There really should be no reason to use pluggable functions at this point. If you are working on customizing on your own and you see no other way than to use a pluggable function, mention it to me as there may be a better way, or maybe there needs to be a new filter or action in the plugin.

Making direct changes to the functions within the plug-in is discouraged because it puts the user in a difficult situation. These types of changes are generally referred to as “hacks” and hacks must be reapplied anytime you upgrade the plug-in. Avoiding upgrades because of the need to update your hacks is a bad practice because upgrades often include important security updates.

So to make things a little more extensible, I have introduced pluggable functions to the WP-Members plug-in. Pluggable functions are functions that can be recreated outside of the plug-in itself without the need to make changes to the core script files directly. This way the plugin can be customized so that when you upgrade, your customizations will not be overwritten. Continue Reading →

WordPress site management best practices

Chad Butler · Aug 16, 2012 · Leave a Comment

WordPress is a great tool and it has become an icon in the Internet world. But with success of distribution comes the vulnerability of becoming a target for hackers. Many of you have experienced what it is like to deal with hacking and malware. Hopefully most of you haven’t experienced this yet. This post will cover some best practices so that hopefully, you won’t ever have to deal with that. Continue Reading →