Recent Plugin Updates

Over the past few weeks I’ve released or updated quite a few of my plugins. I’ve also revamped my Plugins page so it’s easier see all of my plugins across GitHub and WordPress.org. Check it out!

Display Posts Shortcode

Display Posts Shortcode is my most popular plugin. This week I finally documented all of its great features! I spent 5 hours today working on the new README file and improving the wiki. If you’ve used the plugin before, I recommend taking a look at the new list of parameters and filters to see what all you can do. Useful and underused features include:

  • Full date query support
  • Multiple taxonomy queries
  • Create shortcut arguments – e.g., do those complex tax queries without typing all the parameters each time
  • Change CSS classes using content_class and wrapper_class
  • Customize the excerpt using excerpt_length, excerpt_more, and excerpt_more_link
  • exclude_current excludes the current post from the results (useful for related posts listing)
  • no_posts_message displays a message if no posts matched the current query

I also released a Co-Authors Plus Extension for displaying multiple authors. I plan to build more extensions rather than providing users with code to drop in their theme.

If you’re a developer who uses this plugin, I’d appreciate your thoughts on #75 – Rebuild the output filter. The current output filter is a mess with a ton of parameters, and it’s difficult to filter it multiple times without overwriting earlier changes. I’d like a cleaner solution, but it needs to remain backwards compatible.

wp cli plugin install missing

This plugin is my first package for wp cli. It compares the list of active and installed plugins and installs any that are missing. As mentioned in my post Git Push for WPEngine, I use this when pulling down a fresh copy of a production site’s database into my local development environment. If the client has installed any plugins since I last worked on it, this installs them locally as well.

Thanks to Daniel Bachhuber for his patience in helping me build this and write tests for it (which took longer to figure out)

BE Media from Production

I’ve updated it quite a bit from its initial release. It’s all filter-based now, and has a new (simpler) option to serve all media from production. I use this when working on large websites locally, so all the images display correctly but I don’t have to download 10gb+ of media.

BE Sidebar Selector

This simple plugin lets you create additional sidebars from the admin and then when editing a page, select which sidebar is used. It’s similar to Genesis Simple Sidebars but it works with non-Genesis themes as well. It’s more of a beta release – it works well enough for the project I needed it on but there’s a bunch of improvements I’d like to make.

Bill Erickson

Bill Erickson is the co-founder and lead developer at CultivateWP, a WordPress agency focusing on high performance sites for web publishers.

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Comments

  1. Amber Hinds says

    We use this plugin frequently on client sites and just love it. It has so many applications! Thank you for all the work you do on it, Bill!

  2. Ratan Mia says

    I using your Display Posts Shortcode, Genesis Grid Loop and Genesis Title Toggle plugin most of my site and my client sites. Those are awesome. Genesis Grid Loop, I like very much.