WordPress 3.1 adds a new filter that allows you to change the ‘Enter Title Here’ text that appears in the title input text field. Here’s how it looks now: With a little bit of magic, we can get our own text there. Previously this required using javascript to change this text, but 3.1 creates a…

I just updated Absolute Privacy to version 2.0, so it should be hitting your dashboard soon. It’s been nearly 9 months since my last official update of the plugin. This was a large update that added things like members only capabilities (protect a page and all subpages but allow everything else), shortcodes for profile editing…

Well I’ve been sitting on this one for a long time, mostly due to things being crazy around here (like having a baby, school, yadda yadda). I’m releasing an update to my popular WordPress plugin: Absolute Privacy 2.0 beta 1 is ready for public testing. You can read the change notes below, or just download the…

While working on an update for the Absolute Privacy WordPress plugin, I decided to re-vamp how the plugin handles authentication. The current version of the plugin (1.3), uses a custom wp_authenticate function which bypasses the standard authentication found in pluggable.php. This has essentially been the standard method of using the functions contained in the pluggable file….

I am happy to have finally released version 1.3 of Absolute Privacy. If you’ve ever wanted to make your WordPress powered website private (aka, family blogs, online journal, etc), Absolute Privacy makes it happen, complete with moderated registrations, RSS control, and lots more. Version 1.3 bring the following additions: added ability to control RSS feeds….

I am currently working on a personal project using the multisite capabilities of the alpha version of WordPress 3.0. When a new site is added to the WordPress network, a slew of new tables are added to the database, prefixed with the defined table prefix and the blog ID (eg: wp_2_). Note: This article is about…

The recent release of WordPress 2.9 brought a great new feature: the trash. Now users have a way to recover deleted posts and comments. By default, WordPress empties the trash every 30 days. If you’d like to change how often the trashed information is removed, simply open up wp-config.php and define the following constant: define(‘EMPTY_TRASH_DAYS’,…

I am very excited to announce the official launch of MammothApps, a development studio specializing in advanced web applications and large-scale plugins built on the WordPress content management system (CMS). The former “John Kolbert WordPress Consulting” has lost its self-indulgent name and split to a completely separate entity. All of my development focus will now…

I just released v1.2 of my Absolute Privacy WordPress plugin. Absolute Privacy is a plugin which makes your blog only accessible to logged in users. It also lets users register themselves, choose a password, but have to be approved before being able to log in. This update was mainly to fix an XML-RPC authentication issue…

While working on the redesign of my website I realized I was using a very inefficient method of displaying my latest Twitter post (“Tweet”). Currently I’m using a script I found online that uses two functions that are just over 20 lines of code total. Here I’ll show you how to use WordPress’ built in…