Will Anderson

David Peralty sent out a tweet recently, asking if there was a plugin that enforced a minimum password length. I looked around and didn’t find anything, so I decided to write one. As with most of my plugins, it’s pretty simple. Just install it and go. If you want to change the minimum password length (default is 7 characters) simply edit the plugin file and change the value of $min_length.

Plugin page (basically the same instructions as this post).

Direct Download

Have you voted on the Weblog Tools Collection Plugin competition? There are is a host of new plugins available for download. They range from the very simple to the very complex. My personal favorite is the Pixopoint Menu Plugin, but there are some other great ones there as well. Check it out!

Today I’m releasing a new plugin: Short Comment Filter

It automatically spams or deletes comments that are too short.

You can view more information about the plugin and download it here.

When creating WordPress themes, one problem I’ve faced is using template tags and other functions which aren’t implemented in older versions of WordPress. Of course the best solution is for people to upgrade their version of WordPress, but you can’t exactly force people to do this. If you want to use new functions, but want to support people with older versions of WordPress, there’s something you can do. As an example, let’s look at wp_page_menu().

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Almost every WordPress theme has a 404 template. Some are better than others, and a few are quite impressive, but on problem that pervades all of them is the fact that editing them requires opening finding and opening the correct template file. This is OK for people who know about HTML and PHP and are familiar with WordPress, but what about technically challenged people (like your Grandma)? They’re not likely to be able to edit a WordPress template, so they will be stuck with whatever you give them. If you create a good template, this may be sufficient, but there will still be people who want to change something.

Thankfully you can provide a much simpler solution for people who don’t want to edit your templates. With this solution, users can edit the 404 page contents just like it were any other page. Here’s how it works.

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XKCD recently ran a cartoon pointing out some humerus/frightening Google trends as well as where they are most popular. While I tend to doubt the veracity of some of them, it sparked my interest, so I did some trend sleuthing myself. My focus was holidays.

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Today was the first day of 2009. I feel that 2008 was a really good year and I’m thankful to God for what he’s done in my life during that time. As I look back at what transpired in 2008, I can see His hand working in my life, so I wanted to share some of the ways God has blessed me in 2008.

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Bread Crumbs are something that’s been around for quite some time. I first remember seeing them in ANGEL when my dad was working for the company in 2005. Similar things can be found in File Browsers, and browser history is really a kind of bread crumb.

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Just wanted to really quickly say that WordPress 2.7 RC 2 came out today. The second release candidate means we’re probably only a couple days away from getting a final release. Its interesting that the final release will be almost exactly one month after its originally intended release. I suppose this is really to be expected though, considering all the changes that went into 2.7.

EDIT: Oh yes, and here’s the dev blog announcement and the direct download link.

I’ve been developing a WordPress plug-in for the Holidays (more on this at a later date) and I found something interesting. When plug-ins are loaded, the conditional tags (is_home, is_page, etc.) are effectively useless because the requested URL hasn’t been parsed yet. This was a problem for me because I wanted to be able to only have the script do its magic on the home page (by checking is_front_page). I did some searching but didn’t really find anything helpful. I even looked at the definition of is_front_page in the source code, which simply confirmed that it wouldn’t return accurate results when the plug-in was loaded. I finally thought of a good way to fix this… an action hook.

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