Wow, the time has just flown by!!! Sorry for the lack of recent code and wordpress goodness.

Firstly, I am glad to see that my WP Post Columns Plugin is still going strong!!! Although it has not been updated since 2009 it seems that it is still working (for most people at least) and the comments keep flooding in!

Many of my WordPress plugins, themes and code tutorials are now unfortunately un-supported. But they are still free, and many people add solutions and answers as well as questions in the comments. I am still working with WordPress every day, but can no longer spare the time to provide free support for free plugins and tutorials.

I have had quite a few comments from people saying that they find it hard to read white text on a black background. Some of these comments have been so strongly worded that I was unable to publish them on the site! If you really can't stand it then you could always try getting firebug addon for firefox and changing the colours however you want (yellow text on a pink background looks quite good). I probably won't be changing my theme in the near future. Also, it's probably a good idea not to get into server administration like linux / apache stuff if you don't like light text on a dark background...

Some new wordpress tutorials and goodies coming soon I promise!

Get your hands on the new Street Fighter 2 widget. You can grab the widget code and embed it on your website, or even your myspace or facebook profile. This flash remake of the game is a very accurate copy of the arcade original featuring all the characters and bonus levels. If you just want to play the game on a website please follow this link:

Play Street Fighter online

I have been working for some months now to develop an e-commerce module for Admin76,  the CMS which is currently exclusive to 76 Creative. The e-commerce module, called Cart76, utilises many of the nice features of Admin76 such as drag n drop functionality, advanced image gallery management, etc. It is now in it's final stages of development, so if you are interested in running your self-managed site on the Admin76 platform, or if you require a self-managed online store please contact 76 Creative for more info.

While working on a WordPress site recently I came up against a problem that had never occurred to me before. The client wanted each post excerpt on the homepage to include an image which when clicked would link to the main post (permalink) itself. The built in functions of wordpress when inserting an image allow you to link to either the 'File URL' (i.e. the full size version of the image) or to the 'Post URL' which is actually an attachment page in wordpress which displays the image, but does not include the text of the actual post itself. However, without either editing the html of each post (not an option for this client) or inserting the image without a link, and then adding the permalink to the image (too long winded) there was no simple way to create the image links in the way they wanted them.

My solution to this was to create a very basic hack which would allow them to use the 'Post URL' link when inserting images, but instead of linking to the attachment page, the link would automatically be updated to link to the post's permalink itself.

Here is the basic php function that you would need to insert into your theme's functions.php file:

function lose_attachment($content){
return preg_replace('/<a(.*?)href="(.*?)\/attachment\/(.*?)"/i', '<a$1href="$2"', $content);
}

add_filter('the_excerpt', 'lose_attachment',2);

This will remove the 'attachment/name-of-image-file' part from the URL making it link to the post's permalink itself.  I hope someone out there finds this useful!