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Talks on Web Technology and Better Product Development

WordPress: How to add and link static or custom pages

November2

When I was new to wordpress theme development, I faced a common problem that many others might have faced. That is adding or linking or integrating a static or custom page in your wordpress site. It is very possible that you may prefer to keep one of your page or file linked as the following:

http://www.yoursitename.com/products.php

Sometimes this kind of requirement arrive that you have no other option but to do it.

But you know this kind of link will not directly appear in your wordpress blog or site because of the unique linking structure of wordpress. Most probably you will get a 404 error i.e. file not found error. So, if you want to link directly, you need to follow a simple trick. This trick is simple, small and intereting.

If you want to add and link your custom or static pages, follow these steps and you will get smooth result:

Step One: Changing the header of the php file

In this article, we will add a php file products.php in our wordpress blog. So, please create your products.php file.  Now open you products.php file and add the following two lines at the top of the file and save your file.

<?php
	define('WP_USE_THEMES', false);
	require('./wp-blog-header.php');
?>

Remember, these lines will be the topmost lines in your products.php file. OK? See below how I added.

<?php
	define('WP_USE_THEMES', false);
	require('./wp-blog-header.php');
?>
<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd">
<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">
<head>
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8" />
<title>Our Products</title>
</head>
<!-- Other lines of coding -->

Why are we adding these two lines? Because we are telling wordpress that this file will not use wordpress themes and we are going to link it in a different way. So, wordpress do not force to link in its usual way.

Step Two: Saving in the public_html or root folder

Now upload it in the wordpress installation directory so that it looks like:

http://www.yoursitename.com/products.php

Done? Great!

Step Three: Linking the products.php file in a usual way

Now in the code of any wordpress file where you want to link your products.php file, keep the html linking as usual or what we say relative linking. For example, in the contact us page, I am creating such a link in the body section:

<a href="http://www.tanzilo.com/wp-admin/products.php">Our Products</a>

And yes! We are done!
Test now if it works for you.

Thus, you can add any number of pages in your wordperss site. I do not know exactly when you may need to link this way. I had to do it time to time depending on the client’s project requirement.

Thus, you can also protect your pages from permalink (dot)htaccess in wordpress.

Thanks for reading.

posted under Blog, PHP, Wordpress | 3 Comments »

WordPress: get page content by page id. Static pages to Dynamic

November1

Hello!

Recently I am working in a wordpress project where I am converting a total static site to wordpress site. What I do is: (1) from the static pages, I am taking the static text and creating a new wordpress page for each static page. (2) fetching the page content/text by page id and (3) showing them wherever I want.

I have written a function and now I can fetch the content of any page or one more pages just by the page id.

<?php
	if(!function_exists('getPageContent'))
	{
		function getPageContent($pageId)
		{
			if(!is_numeric($pageId))
			{
				return;
			}
			global $wpdb;
			$sql_query = 'SELECT DISTINCT * FROM ' . $wpdb->posts .
			' WHERE ' . $wpdb->posts . '.ID=' . $pageId;
			$posts = $wpdb->get_results($sql_query);
			if(!empty($posts))
			{
				foreach($posts as $post)
				{
					return nl2br($post->post_content);
				}
			}
		}
	}
?>

I am using this function to fetch several page data and show them in one page. In the static site, there are several section with different designs. The client want edit each section using wordpress. So, if there are three different sections, I am creating three individual pages for this single page. Next, I am just fetching the content of the three pages by calling my method three times with different parameters and showing the output in one page.

For exampe,

<div id="income_tax">
	<?php echo getPageContent(6); ?>
</div>
<div id="tax_advise">
	<?php echo getPageContent(7); ?>
</div>
<div id="yearly_return">
	<?php echo getPageContent(8); ?>
</div>

Thus, I am just shifting all text and/or content of the static site to wordpress so that the client can edit the site himself. I think this is a simple way or technique if you want to convert your static page to dynamic wordpress site.

You can also customize this one as per your need. For example, you may only need to fetch the page title.

<?php
	if(!function_exists('getPageTitle'))
	{
		function getPageTitle($pageId)
		{
			if(!is_numeric($pageId))
			{
				return;
			}
			global $wpdb;
			$sql_query = 'SELECT DISTINCT * FROM ' . $wpdb->posts .
			' WHERE ' . $wpdb->posts . '.ID=' . $pageId;
			$posts = $wpdb->get_results($sql_query);
			if(!empty($posts))
			{
				foreach($posts as $post)
				{
					return nl2br($post->post_title);
				}
			}
		}
	}
?>

You can not only get the page content, but also the post content if you set the value of the “$pageId” equals any post id. You know you can see the page or post id from the admin panel.

By the way,
I have put my functions in the functions.php file so that I can access it from anywhere. I suggest you following the same way i.e. writing all your custom functions in the functions.php file.

Thank you for reading.

posted under Blog, PHP, Wordpress | 26 Comments »

Password protect sub-directory in wordpress by htaccess

October18

Hello!

Recently a Canadian client of mine told me to look at an interesting wordpress problem. I regularly develop wordpress theme for him. He is a great artisitic designer of wordpress theme and I code theme to HTML & CSS. Whatever, my client told me that he wants to password protect a sub-directory “download”. He has done it from cPanel. He also created a user and permitted that user in that sub-directory. But it was not working.

Befoer I start, I want to clear that in this case wordpress was installed in root directory. One more thing is in this post i cannot write “.” and “htaccess” together. May be this is a security issue. If I write “.” and “htaccess” together, the post is not saved and I get a 404 error. So, I have written (dot)htaccess instead. Again, (dot)htpasswds instead of “.” and “htpasswds” together.

So I logged in to the cPanel to check what is happening actually. I found that whenever you password protect a sub-directory from cPanel, a new (dot)htaccess file will be created in that sub-directory. And the content of the (dot)htaccess file is less or more like as follows:

AuthType Basic AuthName “Authorized Area!”
AuthUserFile “/home/ftpusername/(dot)htpasswds/public_html/download/passwd”
require valid-user

And your password that you set from the cPanel will be encrypted and saved in a file (dot)htpasswds in the AuthUserFile location.

If this was not a wordpress site or it was a wordpress site (but custom Permalink not used; rather the Default used), you should not face problem in most cases. But when you use customized Permalink in wordpress to create beautiful links and try to protect a password, the password protection from cPanel does not work!

But do you know why? Here is the reason: in the root directory you installed wordpress and here there is a (dot)htaccess file. The settings in this file and the (dot)htaccess in your sub-directory (for example root_directory/download/(dot)htaccess) do not smoothly match with each other with since you are using Permalink plug-in to customize your URLs.

So, when you try to go to: http://www.yoursitename.com/download wordpress think that it is a post or page!

WordPress think this because you have enables permalink and this is quite correct and logical. But you know your download sub-directory is not a post but a folder/directory in the root folder. So, you need to do something so that wordpress does not confuse the following link as a post or page.

http://www.yoursitename.com/download

Here is the solution:
1. Open the (dot)htaccess file in http://www.yoursitename.com/(dot)htaccess
2. Find out the line # BEGIN WordPress
3. Just before this, add the following three lines:
# To bypass download directory
 ErrorDocument 401 /%{REQUEST_URI}/myerror.html
ErrorDocument 403 /%{REQUEST_URI}/myerror.html
 4. Save the (dot)htaccess file and upload in your root or installation directory.

Now go to http://www.yoursitename.com/download and check if it works. If everything is OK, you should get a prompt asking for a username and password that you set from the cPanel.

Here is my example:
Sub-directory download password protected: http://www.tanzilo.com/download
Permalink smoothly working: http://www.tanzilo.com/2008/10/18/password-protect-sub-directory-in-wordpress-by-htaccess/

Or you may install a shopping cart in location as in:

http://www.yoursitename.com/shop

This should work smoothly too as you see my example here:
http://tanzilo.com/shop

Although there is an application/software in the shop sub-directory, wordpress no more thinks it a post or page!

Thus, you can set (dot)htaccess, password protected sub-directory (i.e. /download/) and any other sub-directory (i.e. /shop/) in such a way that they will be living in happiness in the same home!

The last interesting thing is this solution is sometimes helpful in Drupal and in some other applications where (dot)htaccess and URL rewriting code do not fit together.

Thanks for reading.

posted under Blog, Wordpress | 22 Comments »