define('EMPTY_TRASH_DAYS', 15 );  // 15 days

Just change 15 to the frequency in days that you want WordPress to empty the trash. It’s that simple!

What is MammothApps? From the about page:

“MammothApps is a WordPress development studio owned and operated by John Kolbert. Based out of Minneapolis, MN, MammothApps’ typical clients are looking for medium to large scale custom plugins or websites that require advanced functionality (such as e-commerce, or social networking). However, MammothApps offers a wide range of WordPress-related services.

Why, you may ask?

Put simply: growth. I’ve been blessed to be much busier then I expected with client projects. So much so, in fact, that I haven’t updated this website in four entire months. With MammothApps, I’m branching out. I’m officially declaring: I mean business. I’ve networked with several other talented developers who will be providing support and skills on larger scale projects overseen by MammothApps. We’ll be focusing primarily on larger scale (maybe even, mammoth?), custom plugins and applications, all built on WordPress. All of my WordPress-related developing will occur through the MammothApps studio.

JohnKolbert.com will become entirely my personal blog. All references to my former freelance consulting services have been removed or redirected to the MammothApps homepage.

I’ll hope you join me over at MammothApps. In addition to client work, we’ll be publishing a series of  advanced WordPress tutorials, called MammothTips each month, as well as releasing some pretty awesome WordPress based web applications (details forthcoming).

This update was mainly to fix an XML-RPC authentication issue that prevented remote publishing apps (like the iPhone WordPress app) from communicating with private blogs. I tested the iPhone app on a blog running 2.8.2 with no problems. I haven’t tested other remote applications, so your feedback would be appreciated.

I also added the ability to prevent blog subscribers from accessing any admin pages. Normally they have access to a profile page and a dumbed-down dashboard. If enabled, they’ll now be redirected to the main blog page if trying to reach any admin page.

And finally, some users running WordPress 2.8 were permission errors when clicking the link to approve users. Version 1.2 fixes this issue.

Visit the Absolute Privacy homepage to read more and download. Don’t forget to donate if you found this update useful.

Here’s a few highlights of the changes I’ve made.

Display My Services

The largest change is that the homepage now displays services I offer prominently and de-emphasizes the blog somewhat. This change is to allow me to focus more on client work and to have potential clients recognize the services I offer.

Portfolio

I’ve finally added a decent portfolio. Right now the portfolio is displaying ten recent projects I’ve worked on, minus the non-disclosures (obviously).

Dedicated Donation Page

I’ve also added a dedicated donation page to allow people who have enjoyed my plugins and/or services to donate anytime they like. The form processing is handled through PayPal.

Updated Plugin Pages

I’ve also updated the plugin pages for plugins I’ve released. They use the same graphic as the donation page with a different text overlay.

Feedback

Remember to leave any feedback in the comments or feel free to email me with any you have.

Note: An important aside about this script is that by default WordPress caches the feed for 1 hour. This means your Tweet on your website will be updated at that frequency. This is great because it saves your server a lot of overhead, especially on busy website. However, if you’re an avid Twitterer and want your very latest Tweet shown for every page refresh for every visitor, I recommend using this method.

function wp_echoTwitter($username){
     include_once(ABSPATH.WPINC.'/rss.php');
     $tweet = fetch_rss("http://search.twitter.com/search.atom?q=from:" . $username . "&rpp=1");
     echo $tweet->items[0]['atom_content'];
}

Past the above in your functions.php file. Now just paste the following in your theme file where you want your Twitter post to appear:

<?php wp_echoTwitter('johnkolbert'); ?>

Obviously replace my username with yours. Now you’re done! Style it however you like with HTML and CSS.

What’s Smart Ads, you ask? Smart Ads is an intelligent advertising plugin for WordPress. It lets you insert ads based on category, wordcount, member status, post age, and more.

Well I’m happy to say that in just over a year, Smart Ads has been downloaded over 10,000 from WordPress.org! It’s quite a milestone for Smart Ads and myself personally, as it is my most popular plugin. I told my wife today and her response was “Why didn’t you just charge $1 for it!” You can tell she has more business sense then I do!

If you’d like to give Smart Ads a try, check out it’s homepage. It’s fully compatible with WordPress 2.8 and absolutely free.

What is Absolute Privacy, you ask? It is a WordPress plugin which turns your blog into the ultimate private blog.

• Force registrants to enter first and last name
• Allow registrants to choose their own passwords
• Moderate users: new registrants cannot login until approved
• Get emailed every time an approval is waiting (with a link for quick approval)
• Lock out all non-logged in views from your website (configurable)
• Perfect for family blogs, personal sites, and private communities!

To download or read more, please visit the Absolute Privacy homepage.

What is Smart Ads?

Smart Ads automatically, yet intelligently inserts advertisements like Google’s Adsense above and below your post content. These advertisements are only visible when viewing a single post (single.php). Since it doesn’t make sense to fill small posts with ads, users can set a “Wordcount” minimum for their advertisements. Smart Ads will only insert advertisements into posts that meet or exceed the desired Wordcount. Do you start your posts with an image? You can chose to disable the top ad if your post has an image tag in the first number of characters (you set the limit)!

Also, to ensure that new content remains fresh, users can chose to only place ads on posts that are over a certain amount of days old. Advertisements can be manually disabled on a post-by-post basis while writing a post, for entire categories, or for registered blog members.

You can also insert custom ads anywhere in your post text using the built in shortcode. Custom ads are not affected by the Wordcount or date minimum requirements and can toggled to be shown on the index page or only shown when in single post view.

This tutorial teaches you how to add WordPress 2.8’s built-in syntax highlighting and line numbering capabilities to your plugins administrative pages. It requires 2.8 beta and up.

Background

WordPress 2.8 is set to be released in the near future and promises to add quite a few new features. Among them, and one that fellow nerds like me will appreciate, is the addition of syntax highlighting and line numbering to WordPress’ built-in theme and plugin editors. Although I rarely use the built-in editors, it’s a nice addition for those times I need to make a quick change and don’t want to log into my FTP.

What made me figure all this out? While developing a plugin recently I found that the user experience would be improved by including syntax highlighting and line numbering. After trying to integrate a few scripts on my own I thought why not try to use WordPress’ built in feature now?

Well, after a few hours of being elbow deep into WordPress’ admin files, here’s how you can add syntax highlighting and line numbering to your plugin natively. WordPress 2.8 uses an open source project called CodePress to handle the syntax highlighting and we’re able to tap into that script for our own purposes.

Download the Tutorial File

The PHP file is available for you to download, test, and modify: WP Syntax Demo (90)

Step 1: Creating Your Plugin’s Admin Page

First let’s create the administrative page for your plugin. For this example I’ll create a top-level menu page, though you can create your admin page anywhere you like.

function sd_add_pages(){
     add_menu_page('Syntax Demo', 'Syntax Demo', 8, __FILE__, 'sd_content'); //add top level menu page
}

add_action('admin_menu', 'sd_add_pages'); //add options pages

First we create the the menu page by using the add_menu_page function and referencing it through the admin_menu action. See the link below for more info on the add_menu_page function.

Useful Link (opens in new window): Adding Menu Pages – WP Codex

Step 2: Creating Your Textbox

In the add_menu_page function above we referenced a sd_content function. This function will house our textbox that will have the syntax highlighting. First I’ll give you the code then explain a few important details about it.

function sd_content(){
?>
   <div class="wrap">
     <h2>CodeBox: Test Your Code Here</h2>

     <form method="post" action="" id="template" name="template">
        <table class="form-table">
        <tr>
          <td valign="top" style="width: 560px">
            <textarea name="newcontent" id="newcontent" tabindex="1" class="codepress php" rows="15" cols="75"><?php echo $_POST['newcontent'];?></textarea>
             <input style="margin-top: 10px;" class="button-primary" type="submit" value="submit" />
          </td>
        </tr>
        </table>
     </form>
<?php
}

This function merely adds a form with the ID of template, and a textarea HTML element with the ID of newcontent. You must use these IDs when naming your textarea and form. To use different IDs see the Advanced Usage section, below. Also, we gave our textarea a special class of class=”codepress php”. This tell the CodePress script to change this textbox and that the language we want for syntax highlighting is PHP.

Step 3: Enqueue the CodePress Script

In this step we’ll tell WordPress to add the CodePress script to the list of enqueued scrips that WordPress adds. We’ll do this by creating a function that calls wp_enqueue_script.

function sd_header(){
     if($_GET['page'] == "syntaxdemo.php"){
          wp_enqueue_script( 'codepress' );
     }
}

add_action('init', 'sd_header'); //add header info

To make sure that the CodePress script is only added to the page we need, we’ll add a simple check to make sure we’re on our plugin’s settings page. You’ll need to adapt the $_GET['page'] == “syntaxdemo.php” to reflect the actual filename of your plugin. If you plugin is in a folder it would be $_GET['page'] == “folder/syntaxdemo.php”. Also, you’re $_GET['page'] variable may be different depending on how you added your plugin settings page (in our case, as a top-level menu).

Useful Link (opens in new window): Using wp_enqueue_script – WP Codex

Step 4: Finishing the Textbox Input

If we stopped now the textbox we created would have proper syntax highlighting and line numbers. However, you wouldn’t be able to access any of the information that the user enters into the textbox. This is because CodePress actually places an iFrame HTML element over the textbox. Thus all editing is being done in the iFrame and not actually in the textbox we created. We just need to get the value of the textbox from the iFrame and add it to our textbox when the form is submitted.

There are two ways to do this. We can use WordPress’ built in function:

if($_GET['page'] == "syntaxdemo.php"){
      add_action( 'admin_print_footer_scripts', 'codepress_footer_js' );
}

However, this requires the following

• form ID and name of template
• textarea ID and name of newcontent

If you follow the above guidlines, then this script will work fine. Note: I followed these guidlines in this example.

Advanced Usage

If you’d rather use your own IDs and names for your form and textarea we can manually add the correct javascript code to the footer. This code is the same as got included in the admin_print_footer_scripts function used above, but we’ll manually change the IDs to reflect our own.

function sd_footer(){
     if($_GET['page'] == "syntaxdemo.php"){
?>  <script type="text/javascript">
          /* <![CDATA[ */
          var codepress_path = '<?php echo includes_url('js/codepress/'); ?>';
          jQuery('#formid').submit(function(){
          if (jQuery('#textareaid_cp').length)
          jQuery('#textareaid_cp').val(textareaid.getCode()).removeAttr('disabled');
          });
          /* ]]> */
      </script>
<?php
     }
}

add_action('admin_footer', 'sd_footer');

There are a few noteworthy things in the above code. Here again we checked to make sure we were on our plugin’s page by using the $_GET['page'] check as we did before. Also, we must change #formid on line 6, above, to the ID we’ve given our form. If the ID is myform, then it would begin jQuery(‘#myform’).

Finally, we must change #textareaid to reflect the actual ID of the textarea we create, making sure to keep the _cp addition were necessary. If we create a textarea with the ID of mytextarea, lines 7-8 in the above code would get changed to the following:

if (jQuery('#mytextarea_cp').length)
jQuery('#mytextarea_cp').val(mytextarea.getCode()).removeAttr('disabled');

That’s It

By following the above instructions we can now include syntax highlighting and line numbering natively in our WordPress plugins. Where could you use this? Some examples might be as custom field boxes on the write post/page screen, or on settings pages for plugins where the user needs to paste or enter some HTML or PHP code. I’m working on integrating it into a few of my plugins. What about you? Do you think it’s worth it?