Tims musings and pontifications

Blog and Articles

An eclectic mix of how-tos, insights and musing from Tim. From security to community and everything in between there is something for everyone.

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Structuring your next WordPress project

Structuring your next WordPress project

WordPress

Setting up WordPress is famously easy! It takes only 5 minutes but it’s worth taking some time to look at the best way to structure your next WordPress project. Tim looks at his current preferred WordPress structure and discusses some of the rationale behind it. Continue Reading

Let me decide where I put my secrets

WordPress

Many plugins call on 3rd party services when they do those services often provide some form of credentials and 9 times out of 10 those credentials get stored in wp-options table. Except I don’t want my security credentials in my database. Where you store you secrets can be deeply personal thing.

A common way to call credentials in plugin is something along the lines of

$api_key = get_option( 'mysecretkey' );
define( 'SECRETKEY', $api_key );

if you are going to do that, then try this instead

if ( ! defined( 'SECRETKEY' ) ) {
$api_key = get_option( 'mysecretkey' );
define( 'SECRETKEY', $api_key );
}

By checking if it’s already defined before pulling it from DB it allows me to add the API key in the wp-config.php and avoid putting it in my DB.

If you develop plugins that make use of third party services and storing API keys, then give your users the flexibility to store the keys where they want.

Hello, I’m back!

Hello, I’m back!

General

Welcome to TimNash.co.uk come sit down and find out what’s new and different about this incarnation of TimNash.co.uk Continue Reading

PayPal Identity services lift off!

WordPress

It’s always the way. The one event you don’t go to and all the cool toys are announced. This year is the first time I didn’t make it to Innovate PayPal developer conference and they announced a huge pile of new stuff including an interesting ecommerce platform hybrid thingiemagik. However, what really interested me were […]

Working out Multi Currency prices with burgers

General

This is an expanded version of a post I published in the SEO Dojo since then, I have literally had one email asking about it, so I decided to expand the forum post and publish it here. I wish to pose a simple question: How would you determine the price of a product or service […]

Password Protection round x

General

my friend Angie pointed me to this latest twitter status update and I thought it was worth sharing. It appears that for a number of years, a person has been creating torrent sites that require a login and password as well as creating forums set up for torrent site usage and then selling these purportedly […]

Split and Chained Looking at Paypal Adaptive Payments

WordPress

Paypal recently released a whole heaps of new ways to use their services, I have been lucky enough to have been part of early beta testing and now no longer under those pesky NDAs can spill the beans on some of the new features. The two big releases from Paypal have been Adaptive Payments and […]

You Could Be My ATM With One Line Of Code

General

How Many of us have thought wouldn’t it be great to have our own cash machines sitting in our living room, well today potentially we all can. The spam all your friend  scripts still are doing the round much to my horror and so I wanted to show you just how easy it is […]