Earlier this week I received an email requesting some help with a WordPress install that had been hacked. The site was almost 3 years old and was still running WordPress 2.2. It was quite funny getting to see and play with retro WordPress again, but it had to go.

Recently I worked on a Wordpress site where I wanted to be able to customise the dashboard for different user roles. Wordpress by default has administrators, editors, authors, contributors and subscribers. It’s not too much to assume you might not want to show your editors or authors all the details of your blog posts etc and this short snippet will allow you to do just that.

These functions and hooks let you customise the output of the_excerpt() template tag. Just copy and paste into the functions.php file in your theme. This works for both posts and pages.

Have you ever needed to build a website which fit into the “Posts and Page” paradigm of Wordpress 95%, but also needed one or two bits of extra content? I often need to build sites that have a quote/testimonial or banner image tied to individual pages & displayed in the template separately to "the_content()". This is fine in Wordpress as long as it remains a one-to-one relationship as it can easily be achieved with custom fields (and check out the More Fields plugin for handling this), but achieving a one-to-many or many-to-many relationship in Wordpress requires some more dramatic extension.

Over the weekend I updated my blog to Wordpress 2.8. It’s been a relatively smooth process complete screw-up (see my comment at the bottom) although I lost my archive and recent post widgets as I had hacked them to be multiple instance. As they are now multiple instance anyway (hurrah) I was able to remove the extra code and get everything back working properly.