WordPress Archives | Dahlske Bank

// AlphaConsumerServices.com // WordPress stripped down to HTML

They’ll provide what is lacking. They provide everything.

Alpha Consumer Services is a fictional company from the movie Killing Heat, where protagonists Gordon Goldman and John Walker rake in their dollars. It’s a fun little tie-in from my old pretend-verse-building days, and home to some of the greatest video ads ever made for the Alpha Consumer Card (available in Gold and Platinum, obviously).

The 2010 Version of Alpha Consumer Services.

Originally originally in 2010, the website was something super simple with PHP fetching static HTML, but around 2015 I recreated the whole thing in WordPress, with my custom WP-theme built on Bootstrap 3. Rather than having to maintain an 11-year -old WordPress install and the very outdated functions in my theme, I scraped the site down to HTML with HTTrack Website Copier. No plugins, no database, no PHP-meddling, just pure static.

Website Archaeology: Keeping a Fake Company Alive Since 2010

Claude then got to work converting it to Eleventy, keeping everything intact, while functionality like AJAX content fetching and such got upgraded to more robust standards. ACS is a rather static site, and should I need to update or add a press release, the Eleventy setup makes that very easy. I can just write it in VSCode, no need for a GUI.

Eleventy also writes a straightforward sitemap. Not that ACS is a big website, though for testing and debugging purposes, I like having a page with all links within the site, so I can flip through each of them. When you got lots of nested pages within categories and tags, I especially, lose track of where the Effrey Epstein I was.

Kenny Wang handtyped much of the content long before LLMs, which is quite impressive when you read pages such as Site Terms, Privacy Policy, or FAQ. The lengths he went to just for this fictional company is over level 6000 autisme. It still reads better than Grok trying to write the same type of Privacy Policy…

AlphaConsumerServices.com

Advanced Automatic Updates

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https://wordpress.org/plugins/automatic-updater/

Advanced Automatic Updates adds extra options to WordPress’ built-in Automatic Updates feature. On top of security updates, it also supports installing major releases, plugins, themes, or even regular SVN checkouts!

While this will be useful for the vast majority of sites, please exercise caution, particularly if you have any custom themes or plugins running on your site.

Getting hacked cause I forgot to update WordPress, themes, and or plugins, is simply idiotic. Now it may happen from time to time that a WordPress site gets hacked and keeping it updated wouldn’t have made a difference, but for that one time where it could have prevented getting hacked, it’s rather stupid that the only reason it happened was because you forgot to log in and run an update. If you have many sites to manage like me, you may forget about some sites, you may not have time, or the hack happens just as the vulnerability is fixed and made public…

This is where Advanced Automatic Updates comes in. Why bother with updating websites manually when they can do it automatically? Now, something really important to note here is that this plugin only updates. Your site may break due to changes in plugins, themes or WordPress. The question is, would you rather have downtime due to an update you can reverse, or due to a hack? If you have made custom core changes to your theme, a theme that is available via the WordPress repository (this also goes for plugins), they will of course be overwritten as the updated version is downloaded and installed.

If you make changes to core files in themes or plugins, a simple way to avoid having them erased by an automatic update is to change the version number in the main PHP-file(plugin) or CSS-file(theme). Very often version numbers are pretty low, so if you set it to 1337 or something very, very high, it is unlikely that the plugin will be updated and your changes overwritten. You can also solve this problem via plugins that “lock” other plugins from getting updated, deleted, deactivated and so and so forth. But more on that plugin later.

As you see in the picture, you can via the settings page set whether you wish to update major/minor version of WordPress, plugins, and or themes. You can also setup so that you get an email for each update that has occurred. This really helps if the site breaks. Getting an email about an update, you might be inclined to check the site and see that everything still works. Or disable email notifications completely. Really depends on the site you are running.

Change name of menu item in Theme Options Framework

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// changes the name of the menu item of theme options framework
function wpmark_change_theme_options_menu_name( $menu ) {

	/* alter the options menu paramters */
	$menu[ 'menu_title' ] = 'Site Options'; // set the menu title
	$menu[ 'page_title' ] = 'Site Options'; // set the menus page title

	/* return our modified menu */
	return $menu;

}

add_filter( 'optionsframework_menu', 'wpmark_change_theme_options_menu_name' );

// changes the name of the menu item of theme options framework

function wpmark_change_theme_options_menu_name( $menu ) {

/* alter the options menu paramters */

$menu[ 'menu_title' ] = 'Site Options'; // set the menu title

$menu[ 'page_title' ] = 'Site Options'; // set the menus page title

/* return our modified menu */

return $menu;

}

add_filter( 'optionsframework_menu', 'wpmark_change_theme_options_menu_name' );

Display Google Captcha on key input

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function checkForInputs(){
   var filledUp = $(".wpcf7-email").val() != '';
   if (!filledUp) {
       $(".wpcf7-form-control-wrap.nyhetsbrev").css('display','none');
   } else if (filledUp) {
       $(".wpcf7-form-control-wrap.nyhetsbrev").css('display','block');
   }
}
 
$(".wpcf7-form-control-wrap.nyhetsbrev").css('display','none');
 
$(".wpcf7-email").keyup(function(){ checkForInputs(); });
$(".wpcf7-email").change(function(){ checkForInputs(); });

function checkForInputs(){

var filledUp = $(".wpcf7-email").val() != '';

if (!filledUp) {

$(".wpcf7-form-control-wrap.nyhetsbrev").css('display','none');

} else if (filledUp) {

$(".wpcf7-form-control-wrap.nyhetsbrev").css('display','block');

}

$(".wpcf7-form-control-wrap.nyhetsbrev").css('display','none');

$(".wpcf7-email").keyup(function(){ checkForInputs(); });

$(".wpcf7-email").change(function(){ checkForInputs(); });

Remove unnecessary body classes generated by WordPress

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function wpse15850_body_class( $wp_classes, $extra_classes ) {
// List of the only WP generated classes allowed
$whitelist = array( 'home','blog', 'archive', 'single', 'category', 'tag', 'error404', 'logged-in', 'admin-bar', 'search', 'search-results', 'single-post', 'custom-background', 'woocommerce', 'woocommerce-page', 'woocommerce-cart', 'woocommerce-account', 'woocommerce-checkout' );

// List of the only WP generated classes that are not allowed
//$blacklist = array( '' );

// Filter the body classes
// Whitelist result: (comment if you want to blacklist classes)
$wp_classes = array_intersect( $wp_classes, $whitelist );

// Blacklist result: (uncomment if you want to blacklist classes)
# $wp_classes = array_diff( $wp_classes, $blacklist );

// Add the extra classes back untouched
return array_merge( $wp_classes, (array) $extra_classes );
}
add_filter( 'body_class', 'wpse15850_body_class', 10, 2 );

function wpse15850_body_class( $wp_classes, $extra_classes ) {

// List of the only WP generated classes allowed

$whitelist = array( 'home','blog', 'archive', 'single', 'category', 'tag', 'error404', 'logged-in', 'admin-bar', 'search', 'search-results', 'single-post', 'custom-background', 'woocommerce', 'woocommerce-page', 'woocommerce-cart', 'woocommerce-account', 'woocommerce-checkout' );

// List of the only WP generated classes that are not allowed

//$blacklist = array( '' );

// Filter the body classes

// Whitelist result: (comment if you want to blacklist classes)

$wp_classes = array_intersect( $wp_classes, $whitelist );

// Blacklist result: (uncomment if you want to blacklist classes)

# $wp_classes = array_diff( $wp_classes, $blacklist );

// Add the extra classes back untouched

return array_merge( $wp_classes, (array) $extra_classes );

}

add_filter( 'body_class', 'wpse15850_body_class', 10, 2 );

Get parent page ID in WordPress

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function get_top_parent_page_id() {
	global $post;
	$ancestors = $post->ancestors;
	// Check if page is a child page (any level)
	if ($ancestors) {
	//  Grab the ID of top-level page from the tree
		return end($ancestors);
	} else {
		// Page is the top level, so use  it's own id
		return $post->ID;
	}
}

function get_top_parent_page_id() {

global $post;

$ancestors = $post->ancestors;

// Check if page is a child page (any level)

if ($ancestors) {

// Grab the ID of top-level page from the tree

return end($ancestors);

} else {

// Page is the top level, so use it's own id

return $post->ID;

}

The Famous Uncategorized Category of WordPress

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I couldn’t even write one single post before I had to ask myself a question… how to organize blog posts in categories and tags?

This seems to be highly discussed topic, but I won’t go into what categories and tags are (they’re taxonomies), nor will I dive into SEO-semantics. My question is what to name categories and when to use tags? Should this post be filed in the category WordPress? Or since this blog will be lots of WordPress, can I simply skip that category? Though many of my posts will be pure CSS, which should be it’s own category. Some CSS-posts will be related to WordPress, is it better for CSS to be a tag? Or should WordPress be the tag?

Personally I feel this depends on the type of blog. If you are reviewing movies, genres might be categories, and actors/directors tags. So I wonder, is this blog too broad? Is that why I can’t choose category or tag? Let’s say I make a WordPress category, obviously I should have a plugins subcategory. But on the off-chance I write about a Joomla plugin, where do I categorize that? This is a website running on WordPress. The theme is coded for WordPress. Everything I make and write is basically for WordPress. So a category for WordPress seems superficial.

Then again, if you venture into my site, you may want to only read posts about WordPress… This leads me to the fact that I have to plan my categories in advance. My seven categories. Yes, that’s right. 7. There are only seven stories in the world. And seven deadly sins. If I were to believe in religion, blogging would be a sin, but that would make it eight sins, and then my analogy wouldn’t work… also if blogging was a sin, I wouldn’t be writing this…

So, keeping with human tradition, when ten is too much and five is too little, seven is always believable, I present my seven categories.

WordPress
Plugins
CSS
News
Rambling
…
…

Already I’m having trouble with this, not only is this only five categories, but a WordPress plugin that changes CSS… that can’t be in three categories. That’s just bad categorizing. If this was a physically located backup log, it would be wasteful to keep a copy of the same document in three different file cabinets. Should CSS be a tag? Or perhaps both a tag and a category? Filed under CSS. Tagged with CSS. Isn’t that just surplussing? So, the category CSS contains CSS that I’ve ~~stolen~~ written myself. And plugins that change CSS are tagged with CSS, while CSS that is for WordPress is tagged with WordPress?

Obviously this post belongs in Rambling, but since I’m discussing pivotal WordPress functions, it’s tagged with WordPress. Will I ever need the category WordPress? Can’t I just tag anything that is WordPress with WordPress?

While writing this post, I went out on an errand. Walking around and being in motion helps me think, which made me rethink the categories. I had to consider the future. So my new categories are below, six of them kinda make sense, while the seventh is vacant… Anywho, I see myself doing some sort of design, logos for instance, which is not related to CSS or WordPress. This frees me to easily post stuff I’ve ~~stolen~~ found on Internet, and neatly keep it in separate categories.

Design
- Logos…
Styling
- CSS
- HTML
Coding
- PHP
- JavaScript
- jQuery
- SQL
Plugins
- WordPress plugins…
Rambling
- Anything not useful at all…
News
- kNews…
Vacant Futuretech 1 Slot…

So there we have it. Several hours gone just so that I could rethink how to name and organize categories and tags. This is probably not the first time I have done that. And I haven’t even published the new site yet… Lord. I’m spending more time naming this post than I did with the fucking categories…

Coming back to WordPress

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It’s been 6 months since I was active with theme development for WordPress. Obviously I have forgotten some stuff, but most of it will come back to me. Since I have to question myself and look through code, config and plugins, I will post all my ramblings to this blog.

Ugh. Calling it a blog just makes it worse. A log. A detailed log where I write about how to code for WordPress, what plugins to use, and how to have fun with CSS. I might remember all this if I dig deep, but look at this like a backup of my experiences and memories related to WordPress. A backup log… *bwaff*

Although this may have some actual benefit; I finally start with that blog I’ve been talking about for years, it will also make sure that my theme works well with blogs. I fucking hate blogs. Blog posts, you big tourist! And who knows, maybe someone else can make use of my knowledge… or rather lack of. I take no responsibility for any posts, claims or ramblings I may incoherently put together on this site. As with anything on the Internet, use common sense and follow your gut. Or, you know, whatever.

I kinda feel like I’m making up excuses as to why I’m writing a blog, since I pretend to hate it so much. But it’s more for me than it is for anyone else. I often have lengthy discussions about what plugins I should use, how to organize code and files, or whether or not to write a blog. I have these discussions with myself. I don’t ask anyone else. I gather information from 30+ websites, combine the pro’s and con’s, and then ask myself. I’m my own soundboard. This save times. No need for anyone else to read up on the most logical way to name functions. But it also creates mass-confusion. Since I rarely agree with myself, I also often forget what my conclusion was.

So perhaps this is a coder’s diary? Perhaps I can find yet another excuse away from the word blog… Anywho, if you are reading this, you might just be another looney. This is merely the start of the ramblings. The roots. The first seed. Which will grow into something… stranger… weirder… most peculiar.

I’ll leave you with a quote… quoting myself of course.

I’m gonna start blogging. Don’t like it? Go fuck yourself. That’s what I said to myself when I told myself I was gonna start blogging, but since cloning isn’t commercialized, my other personality just looked dumbfounded upon me.

— Daniel Dahl, 2016