Simplr Registration Form Plugin

Installation Instructions:

Download and unzip the package. Upload the simplr_reg_page folder into your wp-content/plugins directory. Go to your plugins dashboard and click “Activate”.

Usage Instructions:

To use this plugin simply employ the shortcode [Register] on any WordPress post or page. The default role is “subscriber”. To apply another role to the registration simply use the the role parameter, for instance: [Register role="editor"]. If you have created custom roles you may use them as well.

You can also use shortcode so specify a custom confirmation message for each form:

[Register role="teacher" message="Thank you for registering for my site. If you would like to encourage your students to register, please direct them to http://www.domain.com/students"]

Finally, you can specify emails to be notified when a new user is registered. By default site admins will receive notice but to notify others simply use the notify parameter:

[Register role="teacher" message="Thank you for registering for my site. If you would like to encourage your students to register, please direct them to http://www.domain.com/students" notify="email1@email.com,email2@email.com"]

Plugin Options:

Please feel free to suggest future options for this plugin in the comments. The current options are:

• Admin Email: Specify the FROM email you would like to use for the registration confirmation message.
• Confirmation Message: Customize the message you would like to appear in the confimation email.
• Style: Overrides the default stylesheet included with the plugin.

The Issue: You’re working on a site designed long before Custom Post Types were an itch in Matt’s cerebellum. But now that the functionality is there and you want to incorporate it into your theme. Previously you used conditional code to theme your single.php file.

<?php if(in_category('foo')) { ?>
   Do something.
<?php } elseif(in_category('bar')) { ?>
   Do something else.
<?php } else { ?>
   Do yet another thing.
<?php } ?>

The thought of adding yet another layer of conditionals makes you sick to your stomach. Custom Post Types need to be treated completely different. They have different categories, taxonomies, and even different sidbars. Arg!

Solution: One simple function. Call it whatever you want, but here’s what it looks like. When I say simple … I mean simple.

function get_post_in_context() {
   global $post;
   $type = $post->post_type;
   include(TEMPLATEPATH .'/layouts/single-'.$type .'-content.php');
}

Now just create a directory in your theme called “layouts”. Then copy and paste all the markup in your single.php file between the get_header() tag and the get_sidebar() tag to a file named single-post-content.php and save the file to your layouts folder.

Now place a the get_post_in_context() tag into your single.php  where you want the markup from single-post-content.php to show up.

<?php get_header(); ?>
<?php get_post_in_context(); ?>
 <?php get_sidebar(); ?>
<?php get_footer(); ?>

The beauty of this is that you can now create a new single-POSTTYPE-content.php (example:single-events-content.php) file for any of your custom post types and it will automagically get called instead of the single-post-content.php without any more changes to the single.php file.

I can’t take total credit for the idea. Some theme frameworks already employ a version of this strategy. But I need to adapt an existing theme rather than start from a framework. This function above will allow you to scale your existing theme to accomodate new post types without having to redesign your whole site.

For one, you may be a template designer and want your templates to come pre-installed with this SEO friend feature.

Second, you may be having issues with Facebook link sharing not working. WordPress plugins use the wp_head() hook to access your template. But you have no control over the order. If you are using more than a dozen plugins your meta tags can get buried under tons of other code. This can prevent some bots from finding them. Indeed on several of my site Facebook’s bot was not finding them.

Third, it is just always good to do things without plugins if possible. Call it Occum’s Razor of web site building, the less code you use, the better.

Luck for us, it is extremely simple to add code for meta tags and descriptions without knowing much about wordpress or PHP.

Open the header.php file in your theme and paste in the following code:

<?php if(is_singular()) { ?>
<?php
global $post;
?>
<?php $recent = new WP_query('p='.$post->ID);
while($recent->have_posts()) : $recent->the_post(); ?>
<meta name="title" content="<?php the_title(); ?>">
<meta name="description" content="<?php the_content_rss('', TRUE, '', 50); ?>">
<?php endwhile; ?>
<?php } else { ?>
<meta name="title" content="<?php bloginfo('title'); ?>">
<meta name="description" content="<?php bloginfo('description'); ?>">
<?php } ?>

So what’s going on here? First, we’re checking to see if the post is a single post using the WordPress Conditional tag <?php if(is_singular()); ?> because we’ll to pull the title and the description of the individual post for our meta tags. But to do this, we need to get some information about the post, which is why we use the call global $post. This will give us information about the current post. Particularly it allows us access to $post->ID to query information about the post using WP_query.

The query we us looks like this:

$recent = new WP_query('p='.$post->ID); 

Once we have the query we put it into the standard wordpress loop:

while($recent->have_posts()) : $recent->the_post();

Then we use the standard WordPress tag <?php the_title(); ?> to pull in the META TITLE and <? the_content_rss() ?> to get the description. Notice, we are not using <?php the_excerpt(); ?>. This is because this WordPress tag prints the excerpt with a “read more” link in it. This will seriously screw up your theme. Using <?php the_content_rss(); ?> allows us to specify how many words of the content to pull in. But the second parameter has to be set to TRUE to avoid pulling in a “read more” link.