Artiss YouTube Embed

I embeded these YouTube Videos using Artiss YouTube Embed By David Artiss. It was a great Plugin for WordPress YouTube videos but it was taken over by another developer and it’s not as well liked any more. Besides which, with the new version of WordPress you can now embed YouTube videos automatically just by pasting the shortlink into a Page or Post.


deactivate_plugins not working in my register_activation_hook function

I just figured out for myself, after not being able to get the deactivate_plugins function to work and not finding any helpful documentation on it, how to prevent my plugin from being activated under certain conditions.
My new workaround is to use die() in my register_activation_hook, under the desired condition. Now, I know you are not supposed to put any output in your register_activation_hook function, but it just works perfectly for me. It successfully stopped the activation of my plugin, and it even put the text from my die statement nicely into the box at the top that tells the user that the plugin could not be activated. I had also tried using wp_die() but it really did die with nothing on the screen but my message in a box. I liked it better just using die().
In my install function I put:

global $wp_version;
if (version_compare($wp_version, "2.6", "<"))
	die("This Plugin requires WordPress version 2.6 or higher");

This way people can only install my plugin if they are not running a really old version of WordPress.

XML Sitemap Generator for WordPress

I used to use the Google XML Sitemaps plugin by Arne Brachhold for SEO. Then a friend got me to try out WordPress SEO By Joost de Valk and it seemed like a good SEO tool until I noticed today that it had duplicated my site name in the HTML header’s TITLE tag. After not finding any easy way to turn off that “feature” I just disabled the plugin and switched back to the Google XML Sitemaps plugin I used before. I works well and has all the features in need, plus it’s easy to configure, easy to use, has really good support documentation.

the Google XML Sitemaps plugin

A New Blog

I just setup this blog today so that I would have my own place to test stuff in WordPress. I think I’ll make an attempt to write something each day for at least the first month. This will be a blog all kinds of stuff I’m interested in from my family, to WordPress, to Ubuntu, and more. Well, that’s all for now. (How was that for a first entry ;-)