Web Developer

I frequently install HeadSpace, the WordPress SEO plugin by John Godley, when I work on a WordPress site.

Recently I have been making use of the new custom post type features of WordPress 3.0 but found that the HeadSpace meta box for editing the title and description tags did not show on my custom post type edit screens.

After a bit of delving through the code I figured out the way to do this – note that this may only work if your custom post type uses the default post capabilities.

It checks that the HeadSpace class is available and if so adds the meta box to your custom post type edit screen. Just add the following code into your plugin or theme’s functions.php file replacing ‘myposttype’ with your custom post type.

/**
 * Add Headspace plugin support for myposttype
 */
function myposttype_headpspace_add_custom_box() {
 
	global $headspace2;
 
	if ( function_exists( 'add_meta_box' ) && is_object( $headspace2 ) ) {
		add_meta_box( 'headspacestuff', __('HeadSpace', 'headspace'), array( &$headspace2, 'metabox' ), 'myposttype', 'normal', 'high' );
	}
 
}
add_action( 'wp_print_scripts', 'myposttype_headpspace_add_custom_box' );

I recently tried out Joost de Valk’s Google Analytics for WordPress (version 4) and was happy to see it supported ecommerce tracking for WP e-Commerce.

I had the latest version of WP e-Commerce installed, version 3.7.6.7, and configured the analytics plugin to track transactions but for some reason my ecommerce purchases were not being tracked by Google Analytics.

I did a bit of digging around and discovered the Analytics plugin was looking for the global variable $cart_log_id from which it could get the transaction details, but this variable did not seem to exist (it did seem to be in pre 3.7.6.x versions of WP e-Commerce though).

I have submitted a patch for this for the forthcoming WP e-Commerce version 3.8 (which is currently in beta and looking great, by the way).

In the meantime, if you’re having this problem here’s how you can fix it…

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Was just browsing WordPress.org and got this server error message.

Matt, if there’s a WordPress problem is it always your fault?
Made me chuckle ;)

I recently noticed that WordPress does not seem to add style classes to the body tag for custom taxonomies in the same way that it does on category archives.

You can fix this by adding the following to your functions.php file.

function taxonomy_body_class( $classes ) {
	if ( is_tax() ) {
		$tax = get_query_var( 'taxonomy' );
		$term = $tax . '-' . get_query_var( 'term' );
		$classes = array_merge( $classes, array( 'taxonomy-archive', $tax, $term ) );
	}
	return $classes;
}
add_filter( 'body_class', 'taxonomy_body_class' );

I don’t know why WordPress doesn’t do this automatically – I guess it should be added to core. What do you think?

Getting to grips with custom post types in WordPress 3.0?

I am, and am finding they’re a great way to organise different content on your site and very easy to implement in just a few lines of code.

However, the challenge now is for plugin developers to make their plugins play nice with custom post types. The main thing I’ve noticed so far is that most plugins only tend to add meta boxes to posts and pages, so here’s the first step – getting your WordPress plugin meta boxes to work with custom post types.

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