Welcome to the life of a web-developer. “Can you make my bing-bong random?” says the client, but adding, “…this won’t cost me anything extra will it? I mean, after all, you can just Ctrl-Click your fingers and make it happen?”

Yes, some things are very simple in development and programming, but that doesn’t mean that hours, days, weeks and years do not go into making them so. Like random post order in WordPress. It’s truly simple once you know how, but knowing how could, unguided, take hours of research…

The Plugin Approach

One of the great things about using WordPress as a CMS—perhaps even the greatest—is that there is more than likely an already written plugin for whatever feature you seek. More than likely, but in the case of random post order, there are some limitations to consider…

Custom Post Order Plugin

The Custom Post Order Plugin is an excellent plugin for customising the order of your WordPress posts, with a variety of ordering options including:

• post date;
• post title;
• post author;
• last time modified;
• post slug;
• ascending or descending order.

Sadly however the Custom Post Order Plugin doesn’t allow for randomisation, so we will have to scratch it off our list.

Advanced Random Post Plugin

Only “officially” compatible with WordPress 2.3.3, and only at the time of writing developed to version 0.2, Daniele Salamina’s Advanced Random Post Plugin still works exactly as advertised, albeit with a few limitations:

• it only allows a maximum of 5 random posts;
• it isn’t compatible with sticky posts (to be fair these didn’t exist in v2.3), although it allows you to select a post position from where the randomisation takes effect, which may in some circumstances be an acceptable workaround;
• it wreaked havoc with a jQuery based slider, in this particular case the slider included in WooThemes’s Daily Edition theme (and many others).

WordPress moves, and updates, extremely quickly, and early 2008—the last time this plugin was updated—is in WordPress terms a very long time ago. Therefore, what is more than likely a partial incompatibility between the CMS and plugin—WordPress 2.9 is a very different beast indeed from v2.3—may lead you to scratch this plugin from your set-up completely.

Random Posts Plugin

Rob Marsh’s Random Posts Plugin is an excellent plugin from a family of excellent plugins (Popular Posts, Similar Posts, Recent Posts), with true everything-plus-the-kitchen-sink customisation possible. Able to be deployed as both a sidebar widget and a PHP function, this plugin possesses a near complete language for virtually limitless customisation, including the capacity to render HTML and PHP.

Without extensive customisation however, the Random Post Plugin is limited to generating a single iteration list of posts, outside of the WordPress Loop, and therefore is not a solution if it is the The Loop itself which you are attempting to randomise, i.e. make random all your WordPress posts, potentially across multiple ‘pages’.

The Template Approach

While there is no random post order option available (yet) in WordPress’s increasingly well-designed Dashboard, as of v2.5 randomisation has been included under the hood as a part of the template language, and can be invoked as a parameter of both the get_posts and query_posts template tags.

This is a far more elegant solution than a plug-in, as it utilises a functionality of WordPress that is already built-in, and doesn’t add an extra layer code with the potential for conflict, bloating and deprecation.

Random Posts Template Example

 $args = array(
	'numberposts' => -1,
	'post_parent' => $post->ID,
        'orderby' => 'rand'
         );
 query_posts($args);

More information on WordPress Templates

More detailed documentation on using both query_posts and get_posts can be found at WordPress.org.

Command-Shift what you say?

Yes, all right, if you’re coding for the Evil Empire, Ctrl-Shift-R or F5 will also do the needful.

Attempting a localhost installation of Magento v1.3.2.4, using Godsend and development life-saver MAMP, I came across an issue unseen in previous versions, and although the issue is documented, it may be of some benefit to explain its work around in more detail, especially when in combination with MAMP

During installation Magento sets cookies, and many browsers will refuse to accept them when the installation is at the MAMP default URL, http://localhost.

As the Magento installation notes explain:

DNS resolution (important)
During the installation Magento will set cookies and most browsers will refuse to accept cookies for localhost. This can lead to several problems but no error messages. E.g. when trying to set the locale the page will just refresh and revert to the standard En-US locale. To avoid this problem create another entry for localhost in your /etc/hosts file and use that hostname to access the site:
127.0.0.1 locahost www.localhost.com

Aside from being unable to set location information during install, I had the more critical issue of being unable to log into the Admin page afterwards, both in Firefox and Safari—basically a complete show stopper.

The workaround is as suggested in the install documentation, but slightly adapted for MAMP.

Creating a new host in MAMP

1. Open the MAMP application
2. Navigate to the Hosts panel
3. Create a new entry for localhost:

Server Name: www.localhost.com
Disk location: /Applications/MAMP/htdocs (default MAMP site root)

Which has the effect of changing your Magento installation location:

Default MAMP installation URL: http://localhost/magento
New MAMP installation URL: http://www.localhost.com/magento

Your browser will now accept cookies, and critical access to the Magento Admin page will be restored.

The Philip Wrightson Centre of Excellence needed something special—an affordable website to convey important information to industry professionals, and behind the scenes, a user-friendly content management system serving editable, dynamic content, including a news section.

Special Operations had the special skills for the mission. An accessible, simple website based upon a provided design was built incorporating a user-friendly, open-source content management system, it was done so quickly and within budget—the special touch delivered one again by the website specialists.

As one of the busiest medical Centres in Auckland, Lincoln Road Medical needed a special website, a website that could convey important information to patients, and a website they could update themselves.

Special Operations delivered to these mission requirements on all fronts—a simple brochure style website with custom design incorporating the medical centre’s logo and colour scheme built, and a user-friendly, accessible, open-source content management system installed under the hood, for the client to populate and modify the site with unsupported, and without ongoing charges.

Several years ago a simple website like this would have had a starting price equivalent to a late model car, and required propriety software with ongoing fees and hosting charges. But then it wouldn’t have been a special operation…

The eyewear market in New Zealand is highly competitive, and as a national retailer looking to lift its brand and offer to new level, EyePro needed something special—a members only website where sales, brand and technical information could be internally shared.

A special mission for Special Operations—build a simple, lightweight, accessible HTML website with secure access controlled via PHP.

Mission targets met, a special website deployed, the special treatment was delivered once again.

Built while at Communications Arts, Wellington.

Unless you’ve endless quills, parchment and a parlour full of lace sleeved dandies to scratch forth, you can never have enough handwriting style script fonts.

Never enough unless you add Olicana by G-Type founder and font bold-weight Nick Cooke to your collection. Banish the quill and flatbed scanner, here finally is a font which convincingly suggests the texture and flow of ink.

According to fontophiles Typographica there was an “atypical outpouring of enthusiasm” when Olicana was released, and it scratched and curled its way immediately into their Typefaces of 2007.

[...] I think the primary reason it was so powerfully and instantly popular was the font’s voice, a personality both complicated and unique. On the one hand it has a casual and authentic sense of vivacity and fun. On the other hand this expressiveness is intermittent; it continuously but gently teases the eye. These features are especially appealing in the context of an otherwise confident and disciplined hand.

For the truly hardcore and typographically true, Olicana even offers ink blots and scratches for added realism and inky verisimilitude. Which just begs to paraphrase Jack Black from the School of Rock, “You’re not hardcore unless you kern hardcore.”

Where to get this flowing, swashing masterpiece of frills and quills?

• FontShop
• MyFonts
• Veer

Communication Arts are a special company. With over thirty years of industry experience and numerous awards won, they stride the integrated design, print and logistics market in New Zealand like a colossus, and when they sought to upgrade their online presence a special solution was required—Special Operations to the rescue.

With a new brand and design created by the in-house studio, a previously static, “brochure” style site was transformed into a cutting edge online showcase and portfolio, while at the back-end, a client login and file submission area was added, along with an editable company wide intranet.

Mission completed, and another special operation delivered.

Built while at Communications Arts, Wellington.

Make no mistake about it—Mozilla’s Thunderbird is a great email client, and all my friends on PC’s are big fans (clients for the most part tend to be on locked down Windows boxes where Outlook is the IT choice of no-choice). But what’s up with Thunderbird v2.x sending forwarded messages as .eml attachments by default? What the fudge Mozilla?

I got this message today from a client whose email as well as website I host:

Hey mate, is there any way you can see if you can stop the mail server from blocking .eml attachments, as every message I forward is getting bounced back to me?

And here is the error message he was receiving:

This message has been rejected because it has 
a potentially executable attachment "Message Subject here.eml" 
This form of attachment has been used by recent viruses or 
other malware. If you meant to send this file then please 
package it up as a zip file and resend it.

After briefly considering using Exim Editor to do what the client was requesting for, I don’t know, maybe two seconds, common sense quickly prevailed and, a speedy 0.21s search query of Teh Google later, was revealed to be less than prevailing over at Mozilla. As of version 2.0, Thunderbird is configured to forward messages as attachments—by default!

The solution to this “known issue” is rather simple. Don’t complain to your host or ISP, but rather change Thunderbird’s preferences to forward messages inline:

How to forward messages inline in Thunderbird 2.0

Windows:
Tools > Options > Composition > General tab, switch “As Attachment” to “Inline”.
Mac:
Preferences > Composition > General tab, switch “Forward messages” to “Inline”.

Yes, you can just add your Google Analytics tracking code manually to your WordPress theme’s footer.php file, and yes, if you’re a developer, using a plugin to do something you can do by hand yourself is just not, well, “hardcore”, but this is a plugin by Joost de Valk, author of so many essential WordPress extensions that he is near butter to the ubiquitous blogging platform slash Content Management System’s bread, and do you really his plugin would “just” add a tracking code for you?

As the blogging wunderkind himself explains, using the Google Analytics Plugin on your WordPress site has numerous advantages:

This plugin adds the possibility to tag and segment all outgoing links, so you can see whether a click came from a comment or an article. You can choose where it tracks those links too! It also adds the possibility to track just the domain, instead of the complete link, so you get a better view of how much traffic you’re sending where.

Who wants to eat bread without butter, or if you’re Dutch, without jam and cheese? Track your outbound links today from the comfort of your WordPress dashboard with the Yoast Google Analytics Plugin.

Download the plugin: Google Analytics Plugin

Boris Purushottama Grebenshikov is special—an icon of Russian music known in his native land simply by the intials B.G.—and for a concert tour across Europe he required a special website—one that would not only promote the concerts and his music, but include a Content Management System serving content in multiple languages.

Special Operations to the rescue. Using the elegant, Pure Web Designs created Victorian style design of the existing promotional material, a website was created true both to the spirit of the event and the needs of the client—news, promotional material and concert information all created and served in English, German and Italian.

Grebenshikovconcert.com—another successful mission; another special operation.