David Artiss

Don’t you just hate it when WordPress plugins are just a rule to themselves when it comes to adding new menus to your installation? Those slick, and well thought out, menu positions are now, seemingly, randomly dotted with plugin menus jostling for attention.

Well, hate no more. Tidy My Menus is an automated solution to all this. Install, activate and watch your menus tidy themselves up.

When adding code to a WordPress post, you may find that it gets modified (particularly when using the visual editor). For some years now, a popular plugin of mine, Code Embed, has allowed you a way to achieve this without any such modification. However, the plugin has had many features to it, making it a lot larger from what it first was. And that first release did it just a few lines of code.

So, dusting those lines down, bringing them up to VIP coding standards, here they are for anybody to easily add to their site, for example, via their functions.php theme file…

Google has announced, today, a new style of AdSense ad – the "Auto ad". Using machine learning, the code will insert adverts into your site where it things they will be most relevant.

Auto ads balance revenue and user experience by delivering the right ad at the right time to your visitors.

They can even be added side-by-side with your existing, fixed, AdSense advert. And it's really easy to add these to your WordPress site.

I have had a lot of plugins. 19 as of yesterday. And managing to keep them maintained, let alone adding new features, can be difficult. With Gutenberg around the corner and the changes that will be needed as part of that, it's a burden that's now impossible. 

Many have been around for many, many years and there are far better alternatives now available. Many have few users (less than 10 in some cases). So, with a heavy heart, I've decided to reduce that burden.

Today marks a momentous occasion – for most of this year I’ve been trying to bring my 18 WordPress plugins up-to-date and, as of this morning, it’s now complete.

You see, I’d allowed my WordPress plugins to fall behind in their updates, for various reasons, and changes were required to them all – not enhancements but basic maintenance tasks.

Why did it take me so long? Quite simply, time. With a new job, I need to prioritise that above everything else. Now, more settled I’ve been able to find the time to get this work done. And, my work also allowed me time to complete one of those tasks – learning Github enough to be able to start hosting my plugins there – as Github knowledge is of use to my role as well.