By default, WordPress attempts to find pairs of single or double quote marks, and converts them to curly quotes, (or "smart quotes" as they're called --- with the one on the left curling one way and the one on the right curling in the other way).

This is all well and good for appearance sake when you're posting articles made up of paragraphs of text, headings, etc -- but is extremely annoying when you're posting computer programming code examples.

Most computer programming languages extensively use quote marks, (single and double), for formatting and parsing code.

In WordPress, the conversion is done by the wptexturize function.  Luckily, you can turn it off in most areas of your blog by locating the specific places and adding a remove_filter() instruction in your template's functions.php file.

The code below turns off wptexturize for titles, content, (and RSS content).

<?php
// ======================
// turn off smart quotes
// ======================
//
remove_filter('the_content', 'wptexturize');
remove_filter('the_rss_content', 'wptexturize');
remove_filter('the_title', 'wptexturize');
//
?>

Simply cut and paste the above code into your functions.php files, click  Update File, and those curly quotes should be gone.

###

While setting up and testing WordPress, I realized the site's users would all get email from someone named "wordpress" using the email address "wordpress@example.com" -- this wouldn't do!

I searched the forums and some of the "How to" sites, but all I could find was an outdated plugin that claimed to be able to change the name.  Knowing someone else's plugin could do it in an earlier version, I figured I could write something to do it myself, (this was a WP 3.0 installation).

One easy to deal with aspect of customizing WordPress is filter hooks [READ MORE...]

Yup, we installed the upgrade -- it went painlessly.. almost.

One little problem with Shadowbox plugin not properly linking thumbnails to articles, (on another site where we upgraded but didn't install the new templates, menus, etc)  Also, we updated the ShadowBox plugin on that site too, so can't say where the blame lies.

Anyway, let me know if you spot any critters, (so I can promptly blame them on WordPress and deny any possability that I screwed up).

A customer asked me to install an MP3 player into their WordPress blog. I searched the WP Plugins directory for "mp3 player" and found several that either had too many features or required you to jump through hoops to get an audio file into place.  Many required use of manually constructed [tags] to insert the player into a page. [READ MORE...]

Resumes, printable coupons, eBooks, and many other type of documents are prepared for distribution and printing as an Adobe PDF, (Portable Document Format), file.

If you have PDF files that you want to make available for download on your blog, follow these easy steps:

• login to the Admin area of your WordPress blog
• click Write Post
• give the post a Title and begin to enter the text of the post
• at the point in your post where you want the PDF link to appear, click the Add Media icon

[READ MORE...]