Category: WordPress

WordPress related stuff. Code snippets, plugin information, things like that.

Google Calendar Events, 0.4

I haven’t had much response (or any, really) to my beta release of 0.4, so I think the best thing to do is release it and be prepared to fix a few issues, if necessary, as and when they arise. I have done quite a lot of testing and everything seems to be ok, but it’s difficult to anticipate some potential problems, especially those to do with i18n and timezones.

0.4 adds quite a few small-ish features that people have asked for, or that fix certain problems. Here’s an explanation of the various bits and bobs:

Continue reading…

Google Calendar Events, 0.3

My WordPress plugin, Google Calendar Events has been out for a while now and I think most of the bugs have been ironed out in the latest release, 0.2.1. So it’s time to introduce a whole new load of bugs in 0.3!

One of the major feature requests from the comments on the plugin page was to have the ability to show the events from several feeds on one calendar grid, or in one list. So, this is the functionality that is added in 0.3.

Continue reading…

Google Calendar Events, 0.2

I’m really pleased with the response to my plugin so far. I never thought that it would get over a thousand downloads in a few days. Also, traffic to my website has increased by 20,000% in the last week! Although, that’s 20,000% of a very low number… so perhaps not as good as it sounds :P

Anyway, quite a few people in the comments on the plugin homepage requested more information in the tooltips, and others asked for the ability to hide certain bits of information (the start time of an event, for example). Well, these things are addressed in 0.2!

Continue reading…

Latest Tweet in WordPress, Error Handling

I have found that the method for displaying your latest Tweet that I previously posted about works nicely, if Twitter is working properly. Unfortunately, that seems to be a pretty big if. Recently, it is over capacity quite regularly or just doesn’t appear to work for some unknown reason.

The method I described fails completely if it doesn’t get a good response from Twitter. In fact, I found that it stops the rest of the page from executing, which is rubbish.

Luckily, preventing this is pretty simple. Here’s the original code:

Continue reading…

First Attempt at a WordPress Plugin, the Idea

As I mentioned earlier, I’m having a go at writing a WordPress plugin, which is something I’ve never done before. The reason I’m doing this is that I can’t find a plugin or other solution that will display Google Calendar data on a WordPress site I am developing quite the way I want.

The functionality I need is fairly similar to the ICS Calendar plugin, in that I need a full page calendar grid, containing events. However, I may also need a widget type thing to display a smaller grid or list of a few upcoming events and ICS Calendar can’t do this.

Continue reading…

Google Calendar and WordPress, the options

A website that I’m currently working on redesigning uses Google Calendar to keep it’s visitors up-to-date with events. I’m building the site on WordPress and have been looking at the various options for combining the two. I realise that there are event calendar plugins, which would allow the site admins to manage events from WordPress itself, but as they are already using Google Calendar it wouldn’t make sense to confuse them with a new calendar system.

So, here’s a run-through of the various solutions I have discovered:

Continue reading…