Rebranding

We have rebranded “Devon Road Websites” to “Silver Maple Web”. Silver Maple Web will be offering all the web design and development services currently offered by Devon Road Websites, Devondev Inc. and Prime Admin Solutions.

We provide custom web design and development using modern web standards. We use WordPress as a Content Management System to allow our clients to update their site without programmer skills. Please view our Case Studies for some examples.

Simple Promo Code Plugin

I recently released the WordPress plugin, “Simple Promo Code”.  This plugin provides a short code that allows a user ro enter a promo code to access a page or document. The form validates the promo code and tracks its usage.  This can be very useful for tracking access to a document that you are promoting in an email campaign or magazine.

Use of the plugin is described on the Simple Promo Code  page.

Like my other “Simple” plugins it’s well commented and was built with use as an example in mind.  Feel free to pick it up and modify it to your requirements. I will be posting an annotated version of the code as a tutorial in the near future.  In particular this plugin provides a small example of an HTML form that performs validation, updates a database and redirects the user to another page when complete.

 

Using the PHP Session in WordPress

WordPress and Sessions

The WordPress platform is totally stateless and provides no support for the use of sessions outside of the cookie that keeps a user logged in.  This is a very good policy and helps keep your blog light and responsive.  Unfortunately there are times that a session might be convenient to hold some data between requests.  If you search online and in the WordPress forums you will find a lot of discussion of this and a few ideas that point in the correct direction.  

The best of these is Frank Verhoeven’s blog Post (now archived) on this topic which is short and sweet and contains the basic idea.  The comments on this are the real gold.  What I’m providing here is a summary of the facts I’ve found in those comments and much other online study and experimentation. Continue reading