Monthly Archives: June 2012

Page Template Option Missing

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On one of the sites I administer, we are using a premium theme that comes with custom page templates.

When setting up a new page on this site, I noticed the Page Template option was missing from the Edit Page page.

I knew older pages were using the same template, so I knew the file wasn’t missing. I checked anyway. Yep, it was there. Maybe there was something weird in the header that was keeping WordPress from registering it as a template.

I downloaded and opened the template file and this is what I found (I replaced the template name to protect the sloppy):

<?php /* Template Name: [redacted] */ ?>

I would not have thought the absence of newlines would have mattered, but I knew that was not like the example that WordPress gives here. So I added some newlines.

<?php 
/* 
Template Name: [redacted] 
*/ 
?>

(Make sure you replace [redacted] with your template name.)

Then I uploaded the change, refreshed my Edit Page and the template option was restored.

I’m off to fix the other pages.

Hopefully in the next update of this theme they fix the problem or I will need to update the page files again.

Random String Shortcode To Fix A PDF Caching Problem

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On my church’s website, we post links to our missionaries’ newsletters as PDF files. We have a problem with browsers caching the older newsletters so even though a new file is on the server, the older file appears in the browsers. Not even clearing the cache seems to work. Adding to the problem is when Cloudflare.com caches the file, so I have to log in and delete the cache there.

One solution is to rename the PDF file and then change the link on the site every time. But we like to be lazy efficient around here, so I came up with a shortcode function that inserts a random string.

Adding a question mark and a random string to the end of the link so the browser would  fetch the latest version of the file rather than get the cached version in their browser’s history.

So for each newsletter link, I went into HTML mode and added

?[randomstring]

to the end of the link’s href attribute. So

<a href="http://domain.com/newsletter.pdf">Newsletter</a>

became

<a href="http://domain.com/newsletter.pdf?[randomstring]">Newsletter</a>

and when the post/page is rendered in a browser, [randomstring] would be replaced by a random string of 5 characters. 5 is the default, but the length can be changed by setting the “length” attribute in the shortcode like this:

[randomstring length=10]

Here is the code you need to add to your function.php file in your WordPress theme to make this work.

/*
 random string function
*/
if (!function_exists("random_string")) {
function random_string($atts, $content = null){
 extract(shortcode_atts(array(
 'length' => '5' 
 ),
 $atts));
 $l = $length;
 /*
 Credit: This section of code by "kriskra at gmail dot com"
 http://www.php.net/manual/en/ref.strings.php#84888
 */
 $c = "ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZabcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxwz0123456789";
 for(;$l > 0;$l--) $s .= $c{rand(0,strlen($c))};
 return str_shuffle($s);
}
}

add_shortcode('randomstring', 'random_string');

I decided to keep this simple by not letting the function add the question mark, because a need may arise where you need to use an ampersand instead or perhaps nothing at all.

 

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