Category: Code

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While there’s been a lot written about the new editing experience that came out with WordPress v5.0 last month, I want to give a reminder of some of the neat features for end users. One of the best things about the new editor is that a theme or plugin can add or remove features from the editor with simple hooks, allowing you to craft an experience that fits your needs.

As an example, I have taken a few client sites that have embraced the new editor, and used their style guides to add their branding colors, fonts, and variants into the page editor. Now, when they want to add a block of content with a colored background or change the color of a button on a page, they have their palette of brand-approved colors already set to use. No need to remember hex codes or anything confusing!

Sounds great! How do I set up a custom color palette?

Default WordPress Editor Color Palette
Notice that the editor will warn you if your background and text colors aren’t high contrast. This makes it a bit easier to keep your content accessible!

By default the editor will have a palette of 11 colors, plus a color picker to get a different color. You can swap to a palette of your own by adding some code to your theme. Place the following in your functions.php file or where appropriate based on your structure. Next, we’ll modify it to fit our needs.

This code came directly from the Gutenberg Theme Support Handbook, a good resource for all WordPress developers.

function mytheme_setup_theme_supported_features() {
    add_theme_support( 'editor-color-palette', array(
        array(
            'name' => __( 'strong magenta', 'themeLangDomain' ),
            'slug' => 'strong-magenta',
            'color' => '#a156b4',
        ),
        array(
            'name' => __( 'light grayish magenta', 'themeLangDomain' ),
            'slug' => 'light-grayish-magenta',
            'color' => '#d0a5db',
        ),
        array(
            'name' => __( 'very light gray', 'themeLangDomain' ),
            'slug' => 'very-light-gray',
            'color' => '#eee',
        ),
        array(
            'name' => __( 'very dark gray', 'themeLangDomain' ),
            'slug' => 'very-dark-gray',
            'color' => '#444',
        ),
    ) );
}

add_action( 'after_setup_theme', 'mytheme_setup_theme_supported_features' );
Code language: PHP (php)

There’s a lot of code there, but not a lot to break down. First, remember that after_setup_theme is a hook, on which you add the function mytheme_setup_theme_supported_features that you’re creating. In that function we’re using add_theme_support, a built in WordPress function, where we’re using editor-color-palette to set our palette up.

We’re adding an array of colors, and each element of that array is itself an array. Within those nested arrays we have the name of the color, which we’re making translatable with the __() function, and setting the textdomain of our theme. Change themeLangDomain to whatever matches your theme. This name is a descriptor for when you hover over it in the palette.

The slug is a string of how you’ll refer to the color elsewhere in your code. The color is the hexadecimal value of the color that you want in your palette. With the above code, you’ve got a new editor palette with four colors that you’ve set, along with the color picker.

Our custom WordPress editor color palette
Our four custom colors now appear, along with the color picker

Adding to Our Palette

There are a few more features of the editor color palette that I’d like to show off, including targeting blocks in CSS, Customizer set colors, and removing the color picker.

Using our Color Palette Selections in CSS

If you’re editing text with the color palette you shouldn’t have to make any other changes. But what if you want to use the color selection in something a bit more customized, or in your own block type?

The slug that we added to our colors in the example above lets us target for both background and text colors. We don’t even need to use the color set in the editor, but something custom to our needs. For example, you may want a specific background or text color when you use the strong magenta color. In that case, here’s the CSS that can target the classes added when we use that color:

.has-strong-magenta-background-color {
    background-color: #313131;
}

.has-strong-magenta-color {
    color: #f78da7;
}Code language: CSS (css)

Setting a Color Palette with the Customizer

The twentynineteen theme that comes with WordPress has a custom palette that includes colors that can be set in the Customizer. This means that you can set your own primary and secondary color from the WordPress dashboard, without changing code!

array(
	'name'  => __( 'Primary', 'twentynineteen' ),
	'slug'  => 'primary',
	'color' => twentynineteen_hsl_hex( 'default' === get_theme_mod( 'primary_color' ) ? 199 : get_theme_mod( 'primary_color_hue', 199 ), 100, 33 ),
),
array(
	'name'  => __( 'Secondary', 'twentynineteen' ),
	'slug'  => 'secondary',
	'color' => twentynineteen_hsl_hex( 'default' === get_theme_mod( 'primary_color' ) ? 199 : get_theme_mod( 'primary_color_hue', 199 ), 100, 23 ),
),Code language: PHP (php)

The new color is now set as the output of a function that will get a theme mod, if you’ve modified the color. If not, it’ll return the default, ensuring that there’s always a color set.

The WordPress customizer with a primary color selection

Removing the Color Picker

You can also do things like disable the color picker, to ensure that users can only use the colors that you have preset for them. Doing so requires just one line of code in your functions file:

add_theme_support( 'disable-custom-colors' );Code language: PHP (php)

With that single line we’ve made it so the beautiful design that we’ve worked so hard to craft and the branding style guide that we have had to constantly review will always be set the way that we want.

Wrapping Up

As you can see, there’s a lot that you can do to change how users edit content in the Gutenberg editor, without having to add a tremendous amount of code.

This is only the beginning, and even more developer and user friendly features like this already exist or are coming to the editor and the rest of WordPress. I’m excited for the new opportunities this gives to all stakeholders of a site, from designers and developers, to admins and editors, all the way to customers and visitors. Let’s keep making WordPress better for everyone!

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I’ve started using Beaver Builder with a few clients after having played with it a bit and hearing lots of great reviews. I’ve looked into multiple WordPress Page Builders, and have had experience with quite a few of them through my work offering WordPress maintenance service.

I’ve found that Beaver Builder is able to handle a lot of the customizations that my clients may want to make, but there are still a few things that I have to setup externally to get a feature that they want. As an example, a client wanted to use the callout module to make an entire box clickable, not just a button after text and images.

Doing the above was fairly straightforward for this use-case: I set the entire callout link to be relatively positioned in CSS, so that I could absolutely position the anchor tag within the link to be the full height and width of that box. Finally, I added a hover and focus state to the button so that when hovering with the mouse or focusing with the keyboard there would be a visual indication that it was clickable, besides the cursor icon that was already set.

.callout-link {
	position: relative;
}

.callout-link a {
    position: absolute;
    width: 100%;
    height: 100%;
    top: 0;
    left: 0;
}

.fl-callout-button a:hover,
.fl-callout-button a:focus {
	box-shadow: 1px 1px 3px 0 #315E7D;
}Code language: CSS (css)

So what’s the issue?

That looked like a simple solution to the problem that we had, but like many bits of code, I inadvertently created a new issue.

Beaver Builder is a front-end content editor, which means that it uses the same HTML and CSS structure to display the content while editing. While this is normally a good thing, it means that you need to pay attention to custom code that you’ve added to modify Beaver Builder.

Since I changed the layout of links in the callout module, I changed the layout of links for the editor of that module. Additionally, I’d styled unordered list bullets with pseudo-elements, which also caused a display issue. This is what the editor looked like when I tried to modify those links:

Broken Beaver Builder editor CSS
This is what happens when you let me touch code!

After I determined that I was the cause of the issue, I set about to fix it. Thankfully, Beaver Builder adds several body classes while the page editor is open, including the class fl-builder-edit which I used to fix this particular issue. I hid the li::before pseudo-elements, and restored the link anchor to relative positioning.

/* Beaver Builder Editor Fixes */
.fl-builder-edit .entry-content ul li::before,
.fl-builder-edit .fl-builder-content ul li::before {
	display: none;
}

.fl-builder-edit .callout-link a {
    position: relative;
}Code language: CSS (css)

With that code in place, the editor layout looked as it should before I mangled it.

Fixed Beaver Builder editor settings
That’s a lot better and actually usable!

Check for unintended consequences of your code.

This broken CSS wasn’t a major problem, and was thankfully easy to fix. But it did bring up a good reminder: when you make one change to your code, you may change something else that you didn’t mean to. It’s always good to review every time that you make a change. Having some version control in place that you use regularly doesn’t hurt either!

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If you’re like me, it might not always be easy to get new posts out to your blog. I’m trying to keep a new tech-tip going every regular weekday for a while to see how I keep up with that.

Since my content might not always be the newest, I may want to highlight when something was recently published.

Calculate posts published in the last two weeks

In the following example, I’m going to check to see if a post was published within the past two weeks. If so, I’m going to attach a notice to the title of the post. I’m assuming that the following code is going to go into a loop of posts, or somewhere that we’re already using the correct post ID.

$post_title = get_the_title();
if ( get_the_date( 'U' ) >= date( 'U', strtotime( '-2 weeks' ) ) ) {
    $post_title .= ' — New Post!';
}
echo $post_title;Code language: PHP (php)

First, on line one, we’re creating a variable in PHP called $post_title. This will hold the title of the post, which we get with the built-in WordPress function get_the_title(). Again, I’m assuming that we’re already in a loop for a specific post, but if not you can pass the ID of the post as an argument in that function.

Next, line two is going to get the date that the post was published in Unix Timestamp format. I’ve put it into that format to make it easy to compare. I am grabbing the date instead of the exact time since it doesn’t really matter to me if it was exactly within two weeks down to the second, just generally two weeks by day count.

The post publish date is compared to the current time minus two weeks, also in Unix Timestamp format. The PHP function strtotime() allows you to use human readable formats for time conversions, which we’re using to say “give me the time in Unix seconds for two weeks ago”.

If that comparison is true and the post was published less than two weeks ago, we’re going to append the text ” — New Post!” to the post title. By using a period followed by the equals sign, we’re saying that we want to concatenate, or add the new value to the existing variable.

Finally, on line five we’re echoing out the value of $post_title, meaning we’re printing it to the screen. So if I were to use the above code to display titles for this site and this post was published less than two weeks ago, the title would display as Display a Notice for New WordPress Posts — New Post!

How else could this be used?

One way that I use this code is for a custom post type that displays properties for sale for a client. They wanted to highlight some recent listings, and using this code along with some CSS let me put a fancy ribbon on the corner of property listings, as well as list the number of days that the home has been on the market.

Property Listing with new listing notice and number of days on the market

If you have the need to calculate WordPress post publish date compared to the current date, I hope the above snippet has been a good place to start!

Posted On

This post has been updated on 9 March 2022 to reflect updates to the code

Sometimes you’ll have a Gravity Form that you want to keep visible after it is submitted. Maybe you want people to be able to fill out the same form multiple times, or maybe your design looks better with the form still showing.

Gravity forms has a filter hook built in called gform_pre_submission_filter, which can be used to make changes to the form, among other things, after the form has validated (ensured that required fields are filled, nothing is blocked, etc), but before the form submits and notifications are sent. You can learn a bit more about that filter on the Gravity Forms documentation.

We’re going to use this filter and create our own PHP function that will check the form before it is submit, and create a div that holds any confirmation messages that we have set.

The code is embedded here, or can be viewed as a gist on GitHub.

Inserting the Form before the Confirmation Message

First, on line 3 we add our function, dw_show_confirmation_and_form, to the filter. Notice that we use the parameter $form in our function, which gives us access to details about this specific form.

On line 7 I’m getting the shortcode that inserts the form into the page. In this case I want it to get the proper ID of the form, and I want to display the title of the form but not its description.

Below that, from line 15 to line 19, we’re checking to see if there are any confirmations for this form. If so, we’re going to loop through each confirmation and append it to the form shortcode (so the form will display again), then put the confirmation text inside of a div that we’ve given the class .confirmation-message. That class can then be used to style the display of the confirmations.

Finally, on line 21, we return the form. Since we’ve prepended the shortcode with the ID of the form, when the form submits it will display the form again, followed by our confirmation message.

Gravity Form displaying with confirmation text below it.
Our post-submission form, with the confirmation text displaying below

The code above will make this change to all forms. If you need to target just one form, use the ID of the form and change the filter to include the form number after an underscore at the end. For instance, if we’re making this change to form three, we’ll change our filter call to 'gform_pre_submission_filter_3'.

Clearing Inputs

So that covers keeping the form displayed, but now we need to clear all of the inputs in the form.

This is where the function dw_gf_footer_scripts() comes in. Without relying on jQuery it looks for Gravity Forms inputs and textareas to clear them out on reload. Crucially, hidden fields are left alone, so that the values assigned to them are still available for submission.

Final Notes

Edit: A few people have pointed out that this can cause issues with using ajax="true" for your form. This can be due to when the JavaScript is loaded, and some necessary jQuery not loading before this. The following post gives an easy way to make Gravity Forms files load in the footer, but it could potentially cause problems with other extensions or plugins.

https://hereswhatidid.com/2013/01/move-gravity-forms-jquery-calls-to-footer/

You may also want to do other things, like control whether any fields stay filled or not, update without refreshing the page, or scrolling down to the confirmation when complete, but those are lessons for another day!

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I have clients that want to ensure that their pages print well so that people can save things offline for later, like recipes or instructions. I don’t print webpages myself, but I can see plenty of useful reasons to do so.

One of the issues when printing a webpage is that you lose context and interactivity. This is usually fine, as the site is probably intended to be read online anyway. But sometimes you want to make it easier for people to use that printed site, like still being able to find a linked page from a printed article.

The Solution: Print Styles for Links

Let’s say that you want to link to FixUpFox, my WordPress maintenance service. You can put https://fixupfox.com as the text on your page so that it prints properly and people can visit the site from their computer later.

The above works for print, whether you link it or not, but usually you’ll want to say something like “For site support I use FixUpFox, because they provide great service at an affordable price for unlimited tasks”. In that case, you’ll want to have some way to display that URL next to the linked text when printing.

Thankfully, there is a media query in CSS that is for print styles. Your browser will pull up that style when viewing the print version of a site. We’re going to use that to create our links.

Making the Print Styles

First, we’re going to make a media query in our stylesheet. This can go at the end of your existing stylesheet, or you can place it elsewhere as long as it loads on the page that you want print styles for.

@media print {
}Code language: CSS (css)

Next, we’ll add an underline style for links, so they’re easier to see among text in a printed document that might be in black and white. We’ll add that style to visited links as well to override any potential visited link styling already on the page for underlines.

@media print {
	a,
	a:visited {
		text-decoration: underline;
	}
}Code language: CSS (css)

Finally, we’ll use a CSS pseudo-class of :after on links that have an href attribute selector (so it’s not just an empty <a> tag), which is the target URL. We’ll add that target URL attribute of the link (the page that we’re linking to) to the content, after any links on our site. We’ll add a space before the link, and wrap it in parentheses to set it apart from the text. That code looks like this:

@media print {
	a,
	a:visited {
		text-decoration: underline;
	}
	a[href]:after {
		content: ' (' attr(href) ')';
	}
}Code language: CSS (css)

This works with any anchor tag that has a target link, even if it’s a text link instead of the URL. So when I type Ongoing WordPress Support and Maintenance, the printed version of that link will be the text of the link underlined, a space, and the URL in parentheses.

The following screenshot shows what the link looks like when we view the page in print mode:

screenshot example of a CSS print style for links
This is a saved PDF of part of this article. Note the URL in parentheses after the link text.

Finishing Up

You’ll likely find that you have lots of things displaying links that you probably don’t need, like the menu to your site, or sidebar content.

One solution would be to use the print styles to hide those portions of the site entirely. After all, if I’m printing a recipe out for later, I don’t need the navigation, header, footer, or anything else to print besides the content of that recipe. Another solution would be to target links in your content specifically, such as using the .entry-content class to get links that are only in your page and post content if you’re using a theme like the Genesis Framework.

Whatever method you choose is up to you, but I hope that this helps you consider the ways that you can use print stylesheets, CSS pseudo-classes, as well as CSS attribute selectors to add more context to your site, whether printed or on the web.

Thanks for following along and putting up with the shameless plugs for my maintenance business!