Back in June I posted about tidying up the WordPress admin dashboard. Recently I got a comment on that article asking if the admin menu could be altered for different users in a similar way. This turned out to be ever-so-slightly more complicated that I expected because there is no way to distinguish between the permission to edit and the permission to add a page or post. However, like most things in WordPress with a bit of graft it’s usually possible!

Code Example: You can download the complete code sample with comments right here: functions.php [ZIP File]

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.

This past week and a half I have “moved home” in more ways than one. Not only have I had to move EVERYTHING out of the house we bought 8 months ago so that electricians can re-wire the entire place, but I have also moved this blog to a new home with PeartreeUK. The result is I have been unbelievably busy, have no electricity at home (or sofa, or bed) and the 3rd part of my YUI: Javascript Carousel series has been delayed.

Web Hosting is a minefield…

Seeing the web hosting feature in the latest edition of .net Magazine has confirmed my feelings about the web hosting industry: it’s a minefield. A completely over saturated market of small-fry & big brands, most of which you will never have heard of unless you’ve heard a horror story or two. In my experience it doesn’t seem to matter where you turn, something unexpected goes wrong.

..last weekend I decided to finally sort out my hosting life. With all my resold accounts still hanging around on slowly-slowly-Surpass, and my blog on clunky-Clook, I’ve turned back to the one place I know I’ll get what I pay for – PearTreeUK. They may be relatively small, but there’s nothing like being able to get hold of an intelligent human being whenever you need one! Having kept my original account open as a test bed, I have now upgraded to a reseller with them.

This past week or so I’ve been a busy bee re-writing the CSS for this blog. That might sound like an odd thing to do, but it had become unmanageable and was slowing me down. So this is a quick heads up, if you spot any bugs please let me know – you probably won’t notice the few design tweaks I’ve made!