Remove Plugins From Plugin Screen

If you are creating a WordPress site for a client you could install a load of useful plugins for them, only for them to go in deactivate the plugin and break the site.

Some of the WordPress plugins can be essential to the working of your website, things like the Akismet plugin, Yoast SEO WordPress plugin or even a commenting system like Disqus. You would never want your users to deactivate any of these plugins as they are essential to the workings of your website.

Here is a WordPress snippet that will allow you to install the plugin and once it is activated it will be removed from the plugin screen so it can not be deactivated. The plugin will still be active and can be used as normal but it means that users can not deactivate these plugins.

You can add the following into the theme functions.php file or create a new plugin to handle hiding the WordPress plugins.

<?php
add_filter( 'all_plugins', 'hide_plugins');
function hide_plugins($plugins)
{
	// Hide hello dolly plugin
	if(is_plugin_active('hello.php')) {
		unset( $plugins['hello.php'] );
	}
	// Hide disqus plugin
	if(is_plugin_active('disqus-comment-system/disqus.php')) {
		unset( $plugins['disqus-comment-system/disqus.php'] );
	}
	return $plugins;
}

Resize Image Class With PHP

A common feature that you will across in websites is the ability to resize an image to fit an exact size so that it will displayed correctly on your design. If you have a very large image and you are going to place it on your website in a space that is only 100px x 100px then you will want to be able to resize this image to fit in the space.

One option is to just set the width and height attributes on the image tag in your HTML, this will force the image to be displayed at this size.

<img src="image.png" height="100" width="100" alt="Example of resizing an image" />

This will work perfectly fine and the image will fit in the 100px x 100px space but the problem is that when the browser loads the image it will not resize the image but will just display it in the limited size. This means that the image will still need to be downloaded at full size, if the image is very large it can take some time for you to download a large image just to be displayed in a small space.
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Multi Environment WordPress wp-config.php

When you are developing any website you will always have different environments for your website, the number of environments you need will depend on the size of the project and how many people are involved in the project.

The main environments you will find in any website project are:

Development Server - The developers local machine to development the website.
Testing Server - Once development is finished this will be where all testing takes place.
User Acceptance Testing Server - Where the client will review the changes to the website.
Production Server - The live website.

The two environments you will always need to have is a development environment and a production environment. You will normally only have these two environments if the client doesn't need to view the site before it goes live. This means that once the developer has finished working on the site they can simply put this onto the production server. These are normally for the very basic of projects where the developer can simply test on their local development server before going live.
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CSS Flip Boards

In this tutorial we are going to create a flip board effect by using CSS, there are 2 effects we can create one the hover event we are going to have one board flip on the horizontal and another board which will flip on the vertical.

This effect can be used to hide content from the user until they hover over the board this will then display the hidden board.

front board

flipped board

View the demo to see the effect.

Demo
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Add Twitter Cards To Your Website

When you share a post on a social network like Facebook it will scan the URL that you are sharing and return certain information to display the page in your feed. Facebook will get the page title, page description and a thumbnail image for the page. You can change the information that Facebook gets by using the open graph meta tags.

These are simply meta tags you can add to the head tag of your page, when Facebook scans your page to get the title, description and images it will search for these tags, if they are there then it will use the contents of these tags instead of the page title. These means you can fully customise the page titles just for Facebook.

Twitter also has meta tags which you can use to customise the message on Twitter. These are called Twitter cards, it allows website owners to add more descriptive text on their links when they are shared on Twitter.
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Absolute Center Images With CSS

Here is a technique about how you can absolute center position an element on the horizontal and vertical in CSS.

Center Images Horizontally

To center something on the horizontal in CSS it's quite easy all you need to do is set the width on the element and apply an auto margin-left and margin-right on to the image. The browser will work out the exact margin on both the right and left side of the image. This will position the image in the center of the parent element just by using the width and the margin properties.

<img src="example.html" alt="Center Images" />

img {
     width:250px;
     margin: 0 auto;
}

Validate Featured Image On Post

Since WordPress version 2.9 you have been able to add a post thumbnail to all your posts on your website. A post thumbnail is called a featured image for the posts, this image can be displayed in anyway you want, it is up to the theme developer. The benefit of this image is that it allows you to add an image to a post without it appearing in the content of the actual post.

This will allow you to use an image to display the post instead of just the content. The main use of this image is to be used on the index page or the search results page of your WordPress site.

Enable Theme Support For Featured Post

By default themes do not support this feature you need to add some code to the functiona.php file.

add_theme_support( 'post-thumbnails' );

Free Premium Files For May 2013

Each month the Envato marketplace brings you free premium standard files.

Envato is a web marketplace where you can get premium files for different areas of your website. My favourite marketplaces is the script marketplace CodeCanyon and the theme marketplace ThemeForest.

Here are the files which you can get for free for May 2013.

PHPWebServer with WebSockets Upgrade

18 purchases at the price of $5.

This item is a suite of PHP classes that define a HTTP web server with WebSockets upgrade possibility. It runs in PHP CLI , and you can do everything you want with it thanks to the low-end access of HTTP protocol.

Get It Free Now

Disable Scroll Wheel Zoom On Google Maps

Google Map

When you are using the Google map API on your website it will override the the scroll mouse event and act as the zoom on the maps. This feature makes it really easy to zoom on a certain position on the map, you just hover over the location and use your mouse wheel to zoom in or out.

But this causes a problem when you have a large or full screen map, as you scroll on the page the map will zoom out, making it difficult to scroll on the page using the mouse wheel.
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Always Get A Checkbox $_POST Value

The problem with checkboxes is that if they are not checked then they are not posted with your form. If you check a checkbox and post a form you will get the value of the checkbox in the $_POST variable which you can use to process a form, if it's unchecked no value will be added to the $_POST variable.

In PHP you would normally get around this problem by doing an isset() check on your checkbox element. If the element you are expecting isn't set in the $_POST variable then we know that the checkbox is not checked and the value can be false.

if(!isset($_POST['checkbox1']))
{
     $checkboxValue = false;
} else {
     $checkboxValue = $_POST['checkbox1'];
}

But if you have created a dynamic form then you won't always know the name attribute of your checkboxes, if you don't know the name of the checkbox then you can't use the isset function to check if this has been sent with the $_POST variable.

To get around this problem you can use a new hidden element which will store the true value of the checkbox. What you need to do is create a hidden element and use Javascript to change the value of the hidden field to the true value of the checkbox.
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