What I’ve always wanted was a way to reload the current page after I have logged in. So if I’m on the “Search” page, I just want to go to the login page, then go back to the page I was on when I clicked the “Login” link. Finally – a solution!

Thanks to David Chambers – it is as easy as changing the url that the “login” link points to.

<a href="<?php echo get_option('siteurl'); ?>/wp-login.php?redirect_to=<?php echo urlencode($_SERVER['REQUEST_URI']); ?>">log in</a>

He calls it WordPress Login Redirect. I would imagine that this would be a handy plugin for a lot of people. On an intranet, you may want to provide a link to the dashboard if they are an admin, or a link to logout if they are not. I have been using a very simple conditional statement that determines what to put in place of the login link after you are logged in.

<?php
	global $current_user;
	get_currentuserinfo();

	if (!(is_user_logged_in())) { ?>
		<a href="<?php echo get_option('siteurl'); ?>/wp-login.php?redirect_to=<?php echo urlencode($_SERVER['REQUEST_URI']); ?>">Log in</a>
	<?php } elseif
		(
		(($current_user->user_login) == "brock") 	||
		(($current_user->user_login) == "admin")
		)
		{
			echo "<a href=\"";
			echo get_option('siteurl');
			echo "/wp-admin/\">Dashboard</a>";
			} else { ?>
			<a href="<?php echo wp_logout_url( get_permalink() ); ?>" title="Logout">Logout</a>
			<?php
		}
?>

Click me

I used to be hidden!

JavaScript does the magic behind the scenes. The way you accomplish this is by putting your two text fields into divs. I’ll set the first one to be visible, then when you click on it, I will hide the first and show the second in its place. I use the style.display feature of JavaScript to change whether or not it is visible or shown. Let’s take a look at the JavaScript:

<script type="text/javascript">

function toggle_text(shown, hidden) {
       var e = document.getElementById(shown);
       var f = document.getElementById(hidden);
    if(e.style.display == 'inline') {
			e.style.display = 'none';
			f.style.display = 'inline';
	}
	else {
			e.style.display = 'inline';
			f.style.display = 'none';
	}
}
</script>

I’m simply passing in the two divs to the JavaScript function, then JavaScript checks whether or not the first div (the shown div) is visible or not. If it is visible, it hides it and shows the hidden one. The opposite happens if it isn’t visible. Note that using inline will display your text on the same line. If we wanted it to be on its own line, we could just use block instead.

Now you just need to insert the divs into the body of the page. Here is the code used from the sample above:

<div id="shown_first" style="display:inline">
	<a style="cursor:pointer" onclick="toggle_text('shown_first', 'hidden_first')">
	Click me
	</a>
</div>
<div id="hidden_first" style="display:none">
	<a style="cursor:pointer" onclick="toggle_text('shown_first', 'hidden_first')">
	I used to be hidden!
	</a>
</div>

WordPress catches all of the comment spam, but it doesn’t seem to delete it often enough. If you have a high traffic site, this can become megabytes in your database. Bleh. I don’t have a high traffic site, but I sync my databases off-site everyday and spam wastes my bandwidth. So I delete all the comments marked as spam automatically each day using a scheduled cron job so that I never even have to see it. Could I possibly delete a real comment? Yes. Does the convenience of never even knowing about comment spam outweigh the risk? You bet.

Create a bash script in your scripts folder by typing this at the command prompt:

sudo pico /home/brockangelo/scripts/del_spam.sh

sudo: elevate privileges
pico: use your editor of choice
/home…/scripts/: wherever you keep all your bash scripts
del_spam.sh: name it something obvious

By the way, bash scripts are as easily made as windows batch files. You just put in the code and put a .sh at the end. Inside “del_spam.sh” add the following:

mysql -u username -ppassword -e "delete from wp_comments where comment_approved='spam';" brockangelo

Where “brockangelo” is the name of the database. Repeat this line for each WordPress site you host. Then you need to set this up as a cron job and schedule it for once a night. Or, you can download my plugin that deletes spam daily. Delete Spam Daily plugin.

By the way, the username and password format in that command you see above looks wrong, but it is typed correctly. You put “-u (space) username” then you squish the “-p” and “password” together like this “-u username -ppassword”.

If you’ve ever used Microsoft Excel, you probably have an idea of just how easy changing hundreds of cells can be. Gone are the days of manually typing line by line any corrections that you need to make. The same is true when you are working with a database like we are in WordPress.

This example performs a search and replace of all custom fields that meet a specified criteria. In this case, I’m looking for all staff member pages that have a custom field for a department phone number that was incorrect. We want to replace that with a new number. Using PHPMyAdmin and running a SQL query, I can select all of them to see the results before I do anything to my databse:

SELECT * FROM `wp_postmeta` WHERE `meta_key` LIKE 'DeptPhone' AND `meta_value` LIKE '212-555-1212'

It is worth mentioning, that you can also use wildcards if you want to include more results. The ‘%’ is your wildcard:

SELECT * FROM `wp_postmeta` WHERE `meta_key` LIKE '%eptPhone' AND `meta_value` LIKE '212-555-%'

This yields the same results. It is also worth pointing out that the quotation mark around our text values and the tick mark around our table column names are different.

• `meta_key` uses tick marks (this is usally the top left key on your keyboard, next to the 1)
• '%DeptPhone' uses a single quotation mark (this is next to the enter key)

So, to perform the changes, we need to use the UPDATE command instead of select, and actually replace text. Here goes:

UPDATE `wp_postmeta` SET `meta_value` = replace(meta_value, '212-555-1212', '212-444-1212') WHERE `meta_key` LIKE 'DeptPhone'


while have_posts : the_post:

Add this php code:

if ((!(in_category(53))) && (!(in_category(55))) && (!(in_category(56)))) : {

Where 53, 55 & 56 are categories that you don’t want in your feed. Notice that this is an if statement and this ends with an opening curly brace. So all you have to do is close this if statement.

You must close the if statement at the bottom of the file by issuing a closing curly brace and an endif statement just before the endwhile. So the bottom of my “feed-rss.php” looks like this:

<?php while (have_posts()) : the_post(); ?>
<?php if ((!(in_category(53))) && (!(in_category(55))) && (!(in_category(56)))) : { ?>
<item>
<title><?php the_title_rss() ?></title>
<?php if (get_option('rss_use_excerpt')) { ?>
<description><![CDATA[<?php the_excerpt_rss() ?>]]></description>
<?php } else { // use content ?>
<description><?php the_content_rss(”, 0, ”, get_option(’rss_excerpt_length’)) ?></description>
<?php } ?>
<link><?php permalink_single_rss() ?></link>
<?php do_action(’rss_item’); ?>
</item>
<?php } endif; ?>
<?php endwhile; ?>
</channel>
</rss>

The Codex article can be found here: Customizing Feeds.