Snippets

I've been a reluctant/late adapter of the Flexbox and CSS Grid layout systems. I'm not proud of that, but it is what it is. After reading and watching a boatload of tutorials and videos on these systems, I got the idea that I should dive into Flexbox first — and I did. But then I watched a Kevin Powell video on how easy it is to get started with CSS Grid, and I was converted.

Mai Lifestyle Pro, a popular Genesis child theme, supports banner areas after the header. Banner areas with banner images — much like featured images — can add interest to a post and provide subliminal context. However, the default behavior of the banner area presents a potential problem. Namely, if you want to display the banner area on only some posts, there's no quick and easy way to hide the banner area from the posts on which you don't want it to appear. But there's a solution, involving just a few lines of code.

This is a repurposing of an earlier blog article, First Look at Foo Gallery. I wanted to make it easy for people to find this solutions for making FooGallery and Responsive Lightbox by dFactory work together.

Instructions for displaying a tag cloud as a list in WordPress and WooCommerece.

Sometimes I want to see all the constants I have defined. Here is some diagnostic PHP I use for displaying all user-defined constants.

Sometimes I want to see all the user-defined functions that are in memory when a page loads. Maybe the page doesn't need certain functions and I can realize performance improvements by removing them. And sometimes — I'm being candid here — I copy functions from one application into a library file for another and don't need any of them for the current application. This function, offering some diagnostic PHP, helps.

Sometimes when developing, it's helpful to echo some diagnostic information to the screen. Here's some simple diagnostic PHP I use for displaying all included files.

CSS is so big that unless we work with it diligently on a day-to-day basis — and live long enough, we're likely to be dealing with just the tip of the iceberg. In this article, I show a simple technique for creating tooltips with nothing more than CSS (no JavaScript). Hat-tip to Travis Neilson, whose DevTips YouTube channel is very informative and a real hoot.

Here’s a snippet of SQL code and a procedure for updating a MySQL database table using a subquery and data from Microsoft Excel (or similar). Perhaps you could adapt this solution to your own situation.

In this article, I'll share a custom PHP shortcode function I use for my non-WordPress Web sites to improve their maintainability. This function mimics the WordPress shortcode feature.