Articles tagged with: Web development


Feb 6, 20125

WordPress Action Hooks and Filter Hooks – An Introduction

Categories: Web development, Wordpress
WordPress Action Hooks and Filter Hooks – An Introduction
If you’re learning about WordPress and are thinking of doing some plugin or theme development, then hooks are something which you should become familiar with.Even if you don’t plan on becoming a fully fledged programmer but simply like to tweak themes to suit your needs, then WordPress hooks are also something which you should be aware of.In this brief article we are going to introduce you to the two types of hooks which are used in WordPress and how you can identify them.We will also briefly look at you how you can leverage hooks to insert customised code in order to achieve some new functionality. So what are WordPress hooks? To put it simply, a “hook” is a certain location in the WordPress code which allows you to attach or run your own code. The word “hook” is an apt description because it literally conveys the act of hooking onto something - in this case hooking your code up to the core code of WordPress.Another way of describing WordPress hooks is that they are sort of like designated areas within the WordPress code which give you the opportunity to execute your own functions.If you decided to write a WordPress plugin or if ...
Jan 25, 20125

Some Useful Things About WordPress Which You Should Know

Categories: Web development, Wordpress
Some Useful Things About WordPress Which You Should Know
Straight out of the box, WordPress is an amazingly effective content management system and blogging platform.Within its core PHP interior resides functionality which makes it the most flexible and easy to use platform for creating websites ranging from the simplest blog to a full blown business eCommerce site.The majority of the WordPress functionality is clearly visible and accessible from the user interface in the administration panel.However there are also some other less obvious but powerful functional features which are available when you delve a little deeper into the WordPress internals.This article will introduce you to two common and useful functional features of WordPress which you should be aware of. WordPress Template Hierarchy WordPress uses a hierarchical template structure which determines how it renders any particular page or view for your currently active theme.The mechanics of this hierarchy are quite simple. WordPress will automatically check for the existence of certain template files in your theme folder in a pre-determined order whenever it is trying to render a particular page or view.For instance let’s take the example of a WordPress page. Before rendering any “page”, WordPress will check for the following templates in the order shown until it finds one and it will then display ...
Oct 4, 20116

A Cloud With a Silk Lining & The Kindle Fire

Categories: News, Web Design
A Cloud With a Silk Lining & The Kindle Fire
When Amazon launched the Kindle Fire recently you could be excused if your initial thoughts were whether we really need another mobile tablet device on the market.However, when the features and capabilities were revealed it quickly became apparent that this is not just another tablet device akin to the very popular iPad or the other alternatives such as the Samsung Galaxy Tablet.The Kindle Fire has something within its browsing capabilities which the other tablets don’t have by default. I’m referring specifically to the new web browser by Amazon, called Silk.The Silk web browser differs from most of the standard browsers in one major aspect - Silk exploits the cloud computing concept by leveraging most of the grunt and processing capabilities off the Amazon Web Services (AWS) Cloud.This means that instead of performing all of the processing on-board to display web content, the Kindle browser leaves most of that task to the Amazon servers which live in its cloud network. Hence, given today’s sophisticated and large amounts of web data, the cloud model offers huge benefits in performance and delivery.(Note: This cloud architecture is not unique to the Silk browser and has actually already been done before. Opera was the first browser to employ a ...
Jul 25, 20118

8 Ways to Access Blocked Sites

Categories: Tech Tips, Web development
8 Ways to Access Blocked Sites
Businesses are much more clever now: they see how popular the web and social networking is and often block those sites from employee access. Not only are work places doing this, but so are schools, colleges, even some libraries and churches. If you want to access your social networking profiles, email or blogs from one of these locations, it can be frustrating. At a company that does live chat customer support software that I work for we needed to access our tools from all over the world and it was very difficult. Also we all know that it’s really hard to stay away from these sites for 8-9 hours a day while at work or school; so here are 8 methods you can use to access these blocked sites. Proxy Servers Proxies are the most popular method of accessing blocked websites because they can bypass network restrictions. They help protect your privacy by letting you surf anonymously and securely. The connections are encrypted and help to prevent monitoring on your network, so it will never be traced back to you. Best of all they’re very simple to use: enter your URL and check/uncheck a few specifications and you’ll be surfing within seconds.Examples: ...
May 1, 20117

6 Best JQuery Lightbox Scripts to Show Your Images Using Lightbox Effect

Categories: Web development
6 Best JQuery Lightbox Scripts to Show Your Images Using Lightbox Effect
Do you remember life without the lightbox? It wasn’t that long ago, yet lightboxes are popping up everywhere, literally. In 2006, the first lightbox script was released by Lokesh Dhakar and has become a staple for websites and blogs alike. Though they’re mainly used for larger items, even companies like Facebook have adopted lightboxes to display photos in an easy-to-see, easy-to-scroll manner. The original javascript had plenty of good qualities, but it became widely adopted when web developers started making their own lightbox applications.The original Lightbox has not been lost in newer formats. In contrast, lightboxes have been improved and now incorporate features and functions that enhance the overall quality and user-experience. It is hard to rank the best scripts in any specific order because they all have been crafted extremely well. Choosing the best script for your site will really come down to coding preferences. Fancybox Fancybox has taken a pretty direct approach and is an upgrade from pure javascript to jQuery. The overall appearance of this lightbox is like the name says, fancy. The interface is clean and displays images and associated caption text nicely. In addition to looking nice, this script displays HTML elements, SWF movies, iframes and AJAX ...
Feb 28, 201138

Free Premium Plugin and Theme Downloaders – Beware!

Categories: Blogging Tips, Featured, Shop Admin Tips
Free Premium Plugin and Theme Downloaders – Beware!
Reading this article may end up saving your site from getting hacked.This Tips and Tricks HQ blog gets so many queries on the term “Free eStore Download”, "Free WordPress eMember" and many similar terms from bloggers not wanting to pay for the WP eStore or the WP eMember plugin. I am pretty sure the same is true for most premium plugins and themes. I understand some of you not wanting to pay for a plugin or a theme but trying to get a free download (possibly from a warez or torrent or file sharing site) is not the solution.I always believed in the fact that there are no free lunches in this world. If you see someone giving someone else's premium plugin or theme for free you have to ask yourself the following question:“Why are they giving it away for free?”When people offer you something for free, like premium plugins or themes because they know thousands are looking for it, you need to think twice before downloading and USING it.Anyone can easily add code to the original plugin or theme and offer it to you for free. Now this premium plugin that you got for free can give them a ...
Jan 24, 201129

6 SEO Strategies That Can Generate Highly Targeted Traffic

Categories: SEO, Site Optimization Tips
6 SEO Strategies That Can Generate Highly Targeted Traffic
Developing SEO strategies that can drive an immense amount of traffic to your site within a month is not an easy task, especially if you want your site’s visitors to convert into profits. Generating highly targeted traffic or visitors that have the intent of availing the services or products that you are offering is the best way to really earn from your website.The good news is that there are many ways that you can do to hasten the process of having your site noticed by people who are in need of the information, services or products that you provide. Here are some of the ways that you can do to generate specifically targeted online visitors in under a month.1. Target easy to rank long-tail keywords through blog postsIf your site has no blog section yet, then you better start including one. Blogs can benefit your business in so many ways, and consistently driving traffic to your site is one of them. Using long-tail keywords in your blog posts’ titles (eg. How to learn SEO), can extremely help your site’s performance in terms of traffic generation, seeing as this strategy can very much take your blog posts on top of SERPs ...
Nov 8, 20109

JQuery: An introduction

Categories: JQuery
JQuery: An introduction
As a web developer we all are familiar with JavaScript. Sometimes we need complex functions to implement our business logic. It is very easy to write complex functions with a few lines of code using JavaScript libraries.The JQuery library, referred to from here on simply as JQuery, is an extremely popular and easy to use JavaScript library originally written by John Resig. The initial release came on 14 January 2006 and since this time it has continued to be modified and refined by its creator and a growing community of contributors. It is open-source and completely free of charge.JQuery is a small library based on few very simple intuitive principles. Working with RAW JavaScript or DOM Programming does bring-in its challenges while handling the browser-specific quirks. JQuery provides quite a few utilities to help working in browser agnostic environments. JQuery library strikes right balance between size, feature set and ease of use.JQuery would help bring-in considerable productivity gains and it’s easy to learn and work. This tool has the potential to bring-about quiet a change in client side development with complex UI with front end logic in JavaScript library.JQuery is primarily an element selection and DOM manipulation library. It supports ...
Aug 20, 201084

WordPress Video Lightbox Plugin – Display Videos and Images in a Fancy Lightbox Overlay

Categories: Wordpress Plugin
WordPress Video Lightbox Plugin – Display Videos and Images in a Fancy Lightbox Overlay
The WordPress Video Lightbox plugin allows you to embed videos on a page using lightbox overlay display similar to the one shown below. This plugin can be used to display images, flash, YouTube, Vimeo, iFrame etc in a lightbox overlay. The embedded videos can be viewed on iPhone and iPad too. The plugin uses the PrettyPhoto JQuery Library.Click on the image below to see how the video pops over in a lightbox overlay.[video_lightbox_youtube video_id="G7z74BvLWUg" width="640" height="355" anchor="http://www.tipsandtricks-hq.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/08/wp-video-lightbox-demo.png"]Little Background Previously I was using another plugin to display my Vimeo videos in a lightbox overlay but recently Vimeo changed their video embed code to use HTML5 in an effort to make the videos playable in iPhone and iPad. Unfortunately, the other plugin wasn't working with this change and I was getting the following error on all my embedded Vimeo videos:Sorry, this video does not existTo get around the problem I created this plugin and tweaked the prettyPhoto JQuery library so it works with the new Vimeo video embed code. When you use this plugin to embed videos it will play your YouTube or Vimeo videos on iPhone and iPad too! Download WP Video LightboxDownload the WP Video Lightbox Plugin from here. InstallationUnzip and Upload the ...
Jul 16, 20106

bbCaptcha – A Working reCAPTCHA plugin for bbPress Forum

Categories: bbPress
bbCaptcha – A Working reCAPTCHA plugin for bbPress Forum
Recently I started to get a lot of spam bot signup on my Tips and Tricks HQ forum. This forum is powered by bbPress so I started to look for a bbPress plugin that would enable reCAPTCHA on the forum registration page to stop these bot signups. Sadly the one plugin that I did find wouldn't work on my site. So I wrote my own bbPress reCaptcha plugin.Plugin Description The bbCaptcha plugin adds reCAPTCHA to the registration page of your bbPress forum.[caption id="attachment_2536" align="alignnone" width="442" caption="reCAPTCHA to bbPress registration"][/caption] Installation & UsageUnzip and Upload the folder ‘bb-captcha’ to the ‘my-plugins’ directory. Activate the plugin through the ‘Plugins’ menu in bbPress. Go to Settings menu of bbCaptcha plugin and add the reCAPTCHA keys. You can get reCAPTCHA keys here if you don't have it already for your site.[caption id="attachment_2537" align="alignnone" width="442" caption="Activating bbCaptcha Plugin"][/caption][caption id="attachment_2538" align="alignnone" width="148" caption="bbCaptcha Settings"][/caption] This Plugin in Action You can see this plugin in action on the registration page of the Tips and Tricks HQ Forum. Download Latest Version Download the Plugin.All the plugins developed by Tips and Tricks HQ are listed on the projects page. If you need help just leave a comment below.
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