David Artiss

Sep 6, 2023 | artiss.blog | David Artiss

WordPress theme company, Astra, have reviewed video player WordPress plugins and consider my very own YouTube Embed to be one of the best. And, to be fair, it was a tough crowd. Whereas YouTube Embed is specifically just for YouTube videos and then only using the capabilities of Google’s own API, the rest of the list were not such constrained, often providing their-own bespoke players for any kind of video.

Sep 1, 2023 | artiss.blog | David Artiss

Combining a couple of older functions, adding in some further automation and generally bringing them to a higher code quality, I’ve now created a new WordPress function for checking minimum requirements for a plugin. The idea is, you add this to your plugin and, when run, it ensures that certain checks are passed. If not, a message is displayed and the plugin is deactivated.

Aug 14, 2023 | artiss.blog | David Artiss

A few years ago I adopted a footnotes plugin, which I forked as Footnotes Made Easy. My plugin makes use of double brackets to indicate text that you wish to appear in a footnote. Settings allows you to change how it appears, including the symbols used. I’ve not done a huge amount with it and now, with WordPress 6.3 released, there’s much less a reason to even use it. You see, WordPress 6.3 added an easy-to-use footnotes block.

Aug 10, 2023 | artiss.blog | David Artiss

Does anybody actually like recieving spam emails? For a long time I removed a contact form from this site because of how bad it was. But that meant that people who genuinly wanted to get in touch may have struggled to, other than via social media. So, it’s back, but now it has 2 additional tick boxes, which must be ticked for the message to send. One confirms that they’re not asking for WordPress plugin support and the other confirms that they’re not contacting me for marketing purposes.

Jul 28, 2023 | artiss.blog | David Artiss

Ask most users what they hate most about what WordPress plugins do and they’ll say “banner ads”. Drill down further, though, and you’ll find that it’s any kind of advertising within WP Admin. Used to up-sell an audience to a premium version of the product, it’s understandable. But what if it’s to a different product entirely? What if it’s a free one? Then it REALLY does get annoying, particularly when it’s outside of the individual plugin’s pages and is splashed across the whole of WP Admin.