New WordPress Plugin: Story Latest

I wanted a way to easily present a “latest articles on this story” list on Lichfield Live articles so I developed this simple plugin which uses a shortcode and tags to achieve that. For example, the Friary Outer development is an ongoing story that we’re covering. All of the related articles are tagged with “Friary [...]

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Planning Applications for WordPress: New Plugin

It was great to hear last week of the progress Chris and his team at OpenlyLocal have made on resurrecting Planning Alerts. Thanks to their efforts we now have a site where we can view planning alerts for each council across the country. Not all councils are there yet, but it’s a great start. As [...]

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New WordPress plugin: Restore Admin Header

WordPress v3.3 removed the header from the admin interface, merging it with the admin bar. This meant that the link to your site’s front page was taken away and you now have to go through drop down menus to get to the link. Instead, this plugin puts that link back onto your admin interface. Download [...]

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Hiding bbPress topics from logged out users

I just spent hours figuring this out so I thought I’d try and save others the bother by sharing it here. The basic aim was to hide the contents of topics in a bbPress 2.0 forum from any users not logged in. This makes for a nice private forum. I found suggestions about making forums [...]

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The Walled Garden

The Walled Garden

Thanks to my involvement in Lichfield Live I discovered earlier this year a project based out of Woodhouse Community Farm in Fisherwick, near Whittington. The Walled Garden is a community-supported agriculture project set mostly within the listed walls that once stood part of the Fisherwick Hall Estate. Jess and I joined in July and for [...]

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Think open data is just the realm of geeks? Not in Lichfield…

This is partly the reason why I love Lichfield so much. Our council CEO recently joined Twitter and was last night tweeting (much revered) webmaster, Stuart Harrion; [blackbirdpie url="http://twitter.com/#!/Ninadawesldc/status/133285420699095042"] Where else do you get a council chief exec tweeting her webby on a Sunday evening about the Open Government License?! Fantastic!

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Northcliffe’s Local People: It’s not working, let’s shift the risk

Good news! Northcliffe has realised that it’s Local People network model is flawed and has decided to try and shift the risk onto naive entrepreneurs instead. Maybe I’m just being optimistic given my well-known loathing of Local People but it’s as if Northcliffe have decided that  receiving £7k for each new Local People site is much [...]

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WordPress Author Bio Shortcode v1.2 plugin released

I finally got round to updating this quick-release Author Bio Shortcode plugin. The main changes are background stuff and making sure it’s compatible with the latest version of WordPress (v3.2.1 as I type). One important feature is that I’ve locked in compatibility only to v3.2.1 and older. If you’re using a version of WordPress prior [...]

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WordPress Plugin: Author Bio Shortcode

I’ve just written a quick and simple plugin. It provides a shortcode which, when inserted into a post or page, will print out the bio of the author as provided in their profile. You can download from WordPress.org now. Any issues/requests, use the comments below.

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A quick rant about Local People

Yes I’m biased because I run Lichfield Live which is obviously a competing service but I’m still gonna whinge about Local People. This week Lichfield Live launched a business directory, in part because the alternative is so out of date! Today I’m annoyed because they’ve decided to be all community-hugging and have the residents of [...]

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