I Made the WP World a Better Place!

Many, many people have sung the praises of WordPress as a community, not just a piece of code. So I won’t bore you with that, but instead encourage you to Google it. But, today, I became part of the reason it’s a great community and not just a participant or by stander.

I Made the WP World a Better Place! I Contributed!

There’s many ways to help out the WordPress community. And you should. Really. WordPress is a free piece of genius available to help you get amazing work done. Why wouldn’t you just say “thank you”!? You should. It’s polite. I teach my kids to be polite. It’s one of those “Everything I Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten” kinds of things.

So what did you do, Matt!?

Oh ya, the thing. Well, basically, you know that little green “padlock” in your address bar that tells you that a site is safe to enter your personal or financial information on? (Again, Google it if you don’t, it’s important)? Well, WordPress plugins are supposed to call up their scripts in a way that automatically updates their links when a page is supposed to be secure (with the padlock). But sometimes the plugin was made a long time ago, before WordPress built in a way for plugins to do that. Then, the plugin author didn’t update their plugin with the new standards, blah, blah, blah… It happens. It sucks, but it happens.

So I needed a site to be fully secure with the green padlock, but this one little plugin was not cooperating. PHP and Javascript are not my strength at all, but I can Google with the best of ’em. So after I posted a request to the plugin author and didn’t hear back I decided to do something I’ve never done before:

I HACKED HIS PLUGIN!!

Hopefully, the next update this author pushes will include my fix. I mean, I handed it right to him on a silver platter. So if it doesn’t … well, that’d be rude and a disservice to everyone who could benefit from this update.

The bottom line is, the author didn’t provide this fix (yet), so I figured it out and posted it on his Support forum for all his 13,000+ other users to benefit from as well. That’s contribution right there. And that’s something we can all do “with our own two hands.”

Take it away Ben Harper!

Header photo credit: “yayitscarol” at Flickr.

2 Comments

Matt says:

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Good Job Matt!

I recently contributed to improving a WP plugin as well. It’s a little known plugin called LayerSlider (maybe you’ve heard of it). I figured out a way for the scripts to load only on the pages that actually have a slider and sent the fix to the developers. They said they’re going to use my hack but only time will tell. Maybe I should write up a post about it…

1. Matt says:
  
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  Thanks Matt. Ya, Layer Slider is pretty popular. Great job on that, that is absolutely a useful thing for any plugin to implement. It’s really dumb to see so much code in a header of a page that has no scripts actively loaded (this to me is one of the biggest draw backs to WP, or any CMS).
  
  Honestly, I highly doubt the author of WP Fluid Images will see my post, but s/he hasn’t updated their plugin in over a year, so I’m not too optimistic that my fix will get integrated, but I had to try, I don’t want to have to do that again for every time I use the plugin.
  
  Thanks for reading!

I Made the WP World a Better Place!