I’m Alison Barrett, and I like WordPress. A lot. I’m a PHP developer at GoKart Labs. You might want to read a little more about me, check out some of my WordPress tutorials, or drop me a line. Or just do some clicks on the hyperspot links on the Web Page below.
I spoke at WordCamp Minneapolis 2014 this past weekend. My talk was about development best practices, especially when it comes to non-destructive coding (i.e. version control). Here’s the video, along with my slides:
When I’m at WordCamps, I always get asked by at least one person where I got my WordPress-branded desktop wallpapers from. I got most of them from wp-wallpaper.com, which had a few dozen nice wallpapers available for download. I always refer the aforementioned people to that URL.
Today I discovered the site was down. The domain didn’t even resolve to anything. Lo and behold, wp-wallpaper.com was up for grabs. So I grabbed it.
Anyone know who used to run t.co/nA29tAPOKj, or who made the wallpapers? I want to relaunch the site but don't know who to credit.
— Alison Barrett (@alisothegeek) August 5, 2013
Also, if you have an original WordPress wallpaper you want posted on the new t.co/nA29tAPOKj, ping me!
— Alison Barrett (@alisothegeek) August 5, 2013
I plan on keeping the site’s spirit alive. It will be a curated collection and the downloads will all be free.
I have no idea when it will be up, or how many wallpapers it will have. (Under-promise, over-deliver, right?) If you have a wallpaper you want to submit, please do so! You can ping me on Twitter or contact me here.
Here are the slides and the video for the presentation I gave at WordCamp San Francisco 2013. Yay!
Resources for getting started with unit testing:
BuddyCamp begins! #wcmpls twitter.com/alisothegeek/s…
— Alison Barrett (@alisothegeek) April 28, 2013
Check out this Meetup →
In the past week, I’ve added a couple of oEmbed handlers to my WordPress theme to enable easy embedding of external media, specifically SpeakerDeck (example) and Meetup.com (example). It’s really easy, and I figured I’d share the knowledge for those who want it.
oEmbed is a standardized format to allow for easy embedding of external content in a website. A service that supports oEmbed functionality will have an “endpoint URL” that all requests point to. Usually, you just pass the URL of the item you want to embed to that endpoint, and it returns the HTML required to embed it. This is what allows you to embed YouTube videos in WordPress by putting the URL on its own line in the editor.
We need to hook into an action in WordPress to make sure we’re adding the oEmbed handler at the right time, and then use a built-in WordPress function to register a new URL pattern to look for. In this case, the init hook will do the trick.
In your theme’s functions.php file, add the following code (replacing ag with your own function prefix if desired):
add_action( 'init', 'ag_add_oembed_handlers' );
function ag_add_oembed_handlers() {
wp_oembed_add_provider( '#https?://(www\.)?speakerdeck.com/.*#i', 'https://speakerdeck.com/oembed.json', true );
}
Now if you put a SpeakerDeck URL on its own line in the WordPress editor, you’ll have an embedded SpeakerDeck presentation!
The wp_oembed_add_provider function accepts three parameters:
The first parameter can be either a wildcard string (using an asterisk * for the wildcard) or it can be a full-blown regex pattern. I prefer regex, because I’m nerdy and that’s what I’m supposed to prefer. Let’s look at the regex pattern I used:
#https?://(www\.)?speakerdeck.com/.*#i
We’ll work from the outside in. # is marking the beginning and end of the pattern. The i at the very end is telling it to use a case insensitive search.
A ? means that the item immediately preceding it is optional. It’s used twice here: for the “s” in “https” and the “www.” before the domain. Since the “s” and “www.” are optional, all of the following URLs would match this pattern:
https://speakerdeck.com/aliso/advanced-actions-and-filters speakerdeck.com/aliso/advanced-actions-and-filters https://www.speakerdeck.com/aliso/advanced-actions-and-filters www.speakerdeck.com/aliso/advanced-actions-and-filters
At the end of the pattern is .*. The period will match any character except for a line break character (\r or \n). The asterisk is similar to the question mark in that it applies to the item immediately preceding it. It means “0 or more of the previous item.” This accounts for the rest of the URL after speakerdeck.com/.
If a service supports oEmbed, you can usually find the oEmbed endpoint in the developer or API documentation for that service. When in doubt, use Google: “_______ oembed endpoint” usually gets you the information you need.
When this is set to true, the function treats the first parameter as a regex pattern. The other option is to use a simple wildcard string, which would look something like this:
https://speakerdeck.com/*
It’s not as powerful or flexible as regex, but it still gets the job done.
The code for adding oEmbed support for Meetup.com looks very similar to the code for SpeakerDeck. I can use the same function and just add another line to it.
add_action( 'init', 'ag_add_oembed_handlers' );
function ag_add_oembed_handlers() {
wp_oembed_add_provider( '#https?://(www\.)?speakerdeck.com/.*#i', 'https://speakerdeck.com/oembed.json', true );
wp_oembed_add_provider( '#https?://(www\.)?meetup.com/.*#i', 'api.meetup.com/oembed', true );
}
That’s it! Once I added that to my theme, I could embed SpeakerDeck presentations and Meetup events. Now go add oEmbed handlers to your own site! Have fun!
I’ll be giving my “Advanced Actions & Filters” talk at the next MSP WordPress meetup.
Check out this Meetup →