WordPress Archives - Page 2 of 6

Hello WordCamp Manchester, I’m Rhys

So as a way to do a fairly easy blog post (as well as a re-hash of a post I wrote before WordCamp Europe), I thought I’d write a post about me and WordCamp Manchester as a way to try to connect with interesting people.

Hello everybody! My name is Rhys Wynne. I am the lead developer for FireCask by day and by night I make my own WordPress Plugins and themes, which are hosted on my company’s site, Winwar Media.

I will be representing FireCask along with my boss Alex, as well as spending a lot of time with John, who is staying at mine.

I’m truly honoured that I am speaking at the first WordCamp Manchester, as my talk – “How To Get Your First Child Theme Off The Ground” will be at 1:30pm (the first session after lunch) in the technical track. The talk is written but if there is any questions you want answering or covered, please drop me an email.

I do hope you can attend my talk and you enjoy it. I will be at the after conference social and contributor day the next day. I’ve successfully managed to get VVV running on a Windows machine, so if you are a Windows user who is struggling, feel free to speak to me.

Incidentally, I’d be curious to speak to people who are interested in the following:-

Any Premium Plugin Developers willing to share notes about marketing and upselling.
Any Plugin Developers at all for sharing notes on how they provide support. I think I’ve got it down to a tee, but am always looking at improving.
Any bbPress developers as I’ve a few ideas for plugins for a possible collaboration.
MOST IMPORTANTLY AS I AM WRITING THIS IN RED anybody who is collecting the Panini World Cup Stickers. My Swapsies list is here. I need a grand total of 55 at the time of writing (5 more means that I can order the rest). I am willing to offer swaps & free WordPress advice if you have the Argentina or Italy Shiny.

So if you fall into the following categories, send me a tweet or drop me an email, I’d be keen to meet up!

Speaking at WordCamp Manchester 2014

Hi everybody,

I’m back from a non-self-imposed blogging hiatus (yeah, been busy) to announce that I am speaking this years WordCamp Manchester, at MMU Business School, on 28th of June.

My talk is entitled “How To Get Your First Child Theme Off The Ground”, and it is aimed at new developers wanting to learn what child theming is, how to put together a child theme together, and – most importantly – why you should be using a child theme for your next project.

I am incredibly excited to speak at this conference, as it was one of my goals for the year. I’m looking forward as well to interact with the WordPress community more, which for the last year has been a constant source of learning for me. This is the first time I’ll be speaking at a WordCamp, after I spoke at MWUG earlier this year (view the slides & notes here)

Talk is still in the early stages of planning, so if you want me to cover anything, please drop a comment or an email.

If you fancy attending, at the time of writing, tickets are available on the WordCamp Manchester site. Be warned though, they will sell out. That isn’t some marketing speak to drive ticket sales – they have already sold out once before, and – with only 3 left – I’d put the house on them selling out again.

They are also looking for sponsors. Sponsoring is cost effective and could be a good source of exposure for your company. Find out how to sponsor here.

Finally, if you’re coming, I encourage you to attend the Contributor Day the next day. It has been the best thing I’ve done professionally this year, and you can really contribute to the growth of a fantastic piece of software. Tickets for that are free.

A WordPress Site Reports “This Request Is Not Valid Error” in Microsoft Word? Try This….

Recently I’ve been working on a site that required me to put the entire developmental site behind a maintenance mode site. Our maintenance mode plugin of choice is WP Maintenance Mode, as it allows me to control both the front end, styling it beautifully, whilst still continuing the development of the site.

However, when reporting on the development, we were hitting an issue with the site, in that links to the site were causing errors when being clicked on in Microsoft Word. This was the error we received:-

503-error

After investigation, the error is due to the Maintenance Mode plugin returning a “503: Service Unavailable” error. Whilst the site appears up to users, the header returns tell software that the site isn’t up, causing errors.

Thankfully, there’s an easy fix. Within your theme’s function file (or better yet in your own plugin), put in the following code:-

https://gist.github.com/rhyswynne/11139039

This returns a “200: OK” header, which means links can be clicked on in Word.

Hope that helps anybody! If you have any questions, or any way to improve the code, please let me know in the comments.

He’s Hardcore (Contributor)

So yes, I know I’ve been terrible at posting here. Been incredibly busy (good busy!) over the last month or so. I’ve a few ideas for a post, but I thought I’d give a quick post on something that I’m excited to announce.

Last night, WordPress 3.9 dropped. A fairly large update to WordPress with a bunch of new features. You can read about these features in a post I wrote for the FireCask blog. But the cool thing for me? I’m in the credits.

This is the first time I contributed to WordPress, so I’m delighted to have made it in the credits, even if it lead to a massive refresh of my WordPress Profile Page (I should link to it in the header). So yes, massively chuffed. Hope it continues!

So yes, my code is helping run 20% of the internet. Scary, but chuffed.

A massive thank you to WP Contributor Day for getting me started on Contributing to WordPress (you can read about my day contributing here). If you want to contribute to WordPress, connect with the community, and have a lot of pizza and beer doing so, I suggest attending one.

WP Flipclock Released!

So today I’m delighted to announce the release of WP Flipclock!

This plugin is quite simple, as it adds a flipping clock to your site. So for example. Upto now you have been reading this post for this long:-

There are options where you can set it to be a count up/down clock, and from a specific date. You can also specify if you count down from days, minutes or hours.

It’s very simple, and needed it for a theme I was making, so thought I’d release the plugin out to the open as well!

Read the launch notes for how to implement it into your site, and if you like the plugin, give us a good review on WordPress.org. If you don’t and can think of another feature, check out the project on Github.

This plugin uses the Flipclock.js library from ObjectiveHTML.