Imagine coming home from a long day of work. You open the front door, set down your keys, take off your shoes, and then see a present on the kitchen table. If you have a partner living with you it's probably a nice gesture of some sort. But what if you're the only person with keys to your home? Then it gets creepy right?
That's what I experienced today. Not with my home but with my site.
Guess what I did today? I sent an email to noreply@speakinginbytes.com. Why did I send an email to a noreply@{domain} address? And why to my own domain? Because as I was flying through my email using all of my fancy gmail shortcuts I opened an email, pressed r to reply typed up a response pressed tab and return and let it fly. Only then did realize that I sent it to my own domain. What would've been really handy in this situation would be a way to automatically change the from address in emails that already contain the requestor's email address.
A quick Google search will turn up this great post by the WP Ninjas (the guys who make Ninja Forms) about dynamically changing the email address. This is actually a really great solution because you can specify exactly which fields you want to use for the name & email address as well as which forms you want to apply this to. The only down side is that it isn't plug & play – and I like plug and play. That way if I ever create another form or modify my form by adding or deleting fields it will still work.
One of the best things about WooCommerce is the slick one page checkout. It's really fast since you don't need to reload any pages and it's smart enough to know when you don't need shipping information when you're only purchasing virtual/downloadable products. We like to make sure the site manager has all of the data available to them so if you have a free download available on your site WooCommerce still asks the user for all of their billing address fields which works great for most users.
I'm a big fan of premium plugins – they typically have more features, better support, and are better maintained than free plugins. Having said that you can actually do quite a bit with all of the free plugins available on the WordPress.org plugin repository. This site for example uses only free plugins and plugins I've written myself (okay technically I'm using one premium plugin because I'm experimenting with it).
I'm very happy to announce that I've just released a Wysija extension for Ninja Forms! If you haven't heard of Wysija before make sure to check them out – they're an awesome newsletter service that you can manage through your own WordPress site. Now, with this extension you can allow users to automatically subscribe to your Wysija lists when they fill out a form on your website.
Over the last few months at work we've been digging into the WordPress Theme Customizer and thinking about using it as the basis for a SaaS web app. Building upon the basic controls for the theme customizer is one of the challenges we've been facing and the Google Font Picker Control is the first of (at least two) the controls that we developed to make the Theme Customizer even more awesome.
Writing plugins for yourself or others is a natural step for a developer that uses WordPress. Unfortunately if you want to share your plugins with the WordPress community that means submitting them to the WordPress plugin repository and there is one really sucky part about that – learning Subversion.
Subversion, or SVN, was great years ago when Git didn't exist. But since the emergence of GitHub, Git has become hugely popular and produces far fewer headaches than SVN. As a result new developers don't even bother learning SVN. Why learn to drive a stick shift when you can drive an automatic that has better gas mileage and more control?
With a lot of googling and several hacking sessions I took an existing shell script and modified it so that is does all of the cumbersome SVN for you. It will pull down the latest version of your Git repo, reproduce it in SVN, and push the changes to the WordPress plugin repository. It will even move your plugin assets (including the header image and screenshots) to the appropriate spot in the SVN repo.
A few months ago I had a client who wanted a job application form for their website. “That should be fairly simple”, I thought. There are tons of services out there that allow you to post job listings and host application forms; the problem is that those services cost money, you know, that thing that clients never want to spend.
That means I either had to build a custom job application form for them (which would cost way too much) or I would have to find a simpler and cheaper solution. I eventually stumbled onto JotForm. They have a service that allows you to use a WYSIWYG interface to build your forms and they do all the form validation for you. They also allow you to have 100 fields on your form with the free account which beats out their competitor Wufoo (just 10 fields).