I recently had a project where I needed to include some testimonials into a WordPress theme. The client would also need to add in additional testimonials at a later date.

I immediately thought about using the Text Widget available by default in WordPress and using the title for the credit and the body text for the testimonial.

However, ... Read more...]]>

A testimonial on massageweymouth.co.uk

I recently had a project where I needed to include some testimonials into a WordPress theme. The client would also need to add in additional testimonials at a later date.

I immediately thought about using the Text Widget available by default in WordPress and using the title for the credit and the body text for the testimonial.

However, it turns out that “simply” swapping the title to show underneath the widget body copy isn’t that simple!

The way around it is to create a second widget (based on the Text Widget) with the required modifications, like so…

<!--?php <br ?--> // Title AFTER Content in Text Widget
class WP_Widget_Text2 extends WP_Widget {
function __construct() {
$widget_ops = array('classname' =&gt; 'widget_text', 'description' =&gt; __('Arbitrary text or HTML'));
$control_ops = array('width' =&gt; 400, 'height' =&gt; 350);
parent::__construct('text2', __('Text2'), $widget_ops, $control_ops);
}
function widget( $args, $instance ) {
extract($args);
$title = apply_filters( 'widget_title', empty($instance['title']) ? '' : $instance['title'], $instance, $this-&gt;id_base);
$text = apply_filters( 'widget_text', $instance['text'], $instance );
echo $before_widget;
?&gt;
<div class="textwidget"></div>
<!--?php <br ?--> if ( !empty( $title ) ) { echo $before_title . $title . $after_title; }
echo $after_widget;
}
function update( $new_instance, $old_instance ) {
$instance = $old_instance;
$instance['title'] = strip_tags($new_instance['title']);
if ( current_user_can('unfiltered_html') )
$instance['text'] = $new_instance['text'];
else
$instance['text'] = stripslashes( wp_filter_post_kses( addslashes($new_instance['text']) ) ); // wp_filter_post_kses() expects slashed
$instance['filter'] = isset($new_instance['filter']);
return $instance;
}
function form( $instance ) {
$instance = wp_parse_args( (array) $instance, array( 'title' =&gt; '', 'text' =&gt; '' ) );
$title = strip_tags($instance['title']);
$text = esc_textarea($instance['text']);
?&gt;

&nbsp;

<input id="&lt;?php echo $this-&gt;get_field_id('title'); ?&gt;" class="widefat" type="text" name="&lt;?php echo $this-&gt;get_field_name('title'); ?&gt;" value="&lt;?php echo esc_attr($title); ?&gt;" />

<textarea id="&lt;?php echo $this-&gt;get_field_id('text'); ?&gt;" class="widefat" name="&lt;?php echo $this-&gt;get_field_name('text'); ?&gt;" rows="16" cols="20">&lt;?php echo $text; ?&gt;</textarea>

<input id="&lt;?php echo $this-&gt;get_field_id('filter'); ?&gt;" type="checkbox" name="&lt;?php echo $this-&gt;get_field_name('filter'); ?&gt;" checked="checked" /> /&gt; <label for="&lt;?php echo $this-&gt;get_field_id('filter'); ?&gt;"><!--?php _e('Automatically add paragraphs'); ?--></label>

<!--?php <br ?--> }
}
register_widget('WP_Widget_Text2');
?&gt;

Paste that in to your functions.php file and when you next visit ‘Widgets’ in the backend you’ll have a Text2 Widget you can use for testimonials (or any other instance where you need the title to come after the main text)

The result of the Text Widget

When you died I had never lost someone so close to me before. It hurt a lot. I felt real sorrow for the first time in my life.

You were such an important part ... Read more...]]> It’s your birthday this month, and for whatever reason I’ve been thinking about you a lot recently. I had an odd thought today, I’m no longer a Grandson…

When you died I had never lost someone so close to me before. It hurt a lot. I felt real sorrow for the first time in my life.

You were such an important part of my childhood. All my fondest memories have you in them. Endless summers in Leeds, going to museums, building a pond, playing cricket (I’ve still got the home-made bat you made), walking along the Leeds & Liverpool canal, shopping with Grandma and of course, the daily trip up to the bookies!

I’m fairly certain I never said I love you. Or if I did I was too young to understand what it meant. I’m sorry about that, because I really do.

You were taken from us quite suddenly, but not too quickly for me to call your hospital bedside telephone. I’m really sorry I didn’t, I wish I’d called and wished you well. I’ve never been confident talking on the phone. It’ll be something I regret forever. I told Grandma how I felt about that, hopefully she’s passed on the message to you.

I honestly don’t know why I’m writing this. I suppose I just need to get it all out in the only way I really know how to. I remember helping you (several times) to ‘get online’ – so I hope you’re logged in up there, surfing away, and reading this.

We never got to chat about my hobby of Urban Exploring, I wish we had because I know you’d have enjoyed hearing about some of the fascinating places I’ve been and looking at the photos.

I’m married now. But I’m sure you know that. Hailey has made me very happy, I know you liked her and you made her feel very welcome when we came to stay. She’s done a tattoo to remind me of you, it’s not completely finished yet. I don’t know if you ever approved of my tattoos? I hope so. I’ve also got a design in mind for Grandmas tattoo. I think she’d like it.

I’d never seen Grandma look so lost as she was without you. She looked completely different without your arm to hold on to. I really hate that you’re not here any more and that if I ever have children they wont be able to meet you and love you like I did, but more than anything, I’m happy that you and Grandma are together again. That’s the most important thing.

Thanks for everything,

Adam

As part of mine and my friends ... Read more...]]> I often have my best ideas when I’m either driving to or from work. And usually I forget them as soon as I get out the car. Thankfully, this was one of the rare times I actually remembered! So here’s an account of the trip that was born from that idea in July 2011.

As part of mine and my friends love of Urban Exploring I devised a plan to take four days at the end of July to visit every ROC bunker in Dorset, camping between our stops.

So as the planning started, we soon realised that there’s only about 10 bunkers left in Dorset. We needed another county. Devon.

With our list of ROC’s and other miscellaneous sites we set off…

Day One

Our first stop: WW2 hide-out shelter

12:00pm – It was a bit of a later start than we had arranged, but we were soon on the road and at our first stop. Tesco! Plenty of junk food, pot snacks and camping supplies. Luckily, our first explores weren’t too far away, in Dorchester.

We knew from previous visits that the ROC in Dorchester was sealed, and sealed well. Unfortunately this was still the case so we headed across the other side of the town to a wooded area in amongst farmers fields. Here we’d find a bunker used by Auxilary troops to hide in and attack from during World War 2 if ever England was occupied by Germans.

Not a lot remains of the bunker, which is basically an Anderson Shelter sunken in the ground and covered with earth.

13:30 – By the time we got back to the car it was getting late in the day so we decided to pull our fingers out and head to Purbeck for Lulworth ROC and Worth Matravers ROC.

Squeezing in to Lulworth ROC

14:10 – Lulworth was rammed. It was camp bestival weekend and we were stuck with hundreds of middle-class mums in Range Rovers quing into the campsite. We finally got to Lulworth ROC and after battling with the weeds (again!) we got our photos.

15:20 – After a failed attempt at a cross-country lane over farmland in the Land Rover we went the long way round to Worth Matravers only to find the ROC was locked up tight. However, not tight enough for one of us to squeeze through and assess the bunker. Not worth it.

18:30 – So, after a few more rotton ROC bunkers we found ourselves still in Dorset, near Cranborne. So we set up camp in a random field beside a wood.

Day 2

A random field in Dorset would be our home for the night

09:00 – It’s safe to say we’ll never be camping in a random field ever again. The night was filled with Owl “hoots” and curious deers nuzzling our tents. However, there would be a greater reason, which wasn’t apparent yet…

10:30 – Our first port of call was the ROC at Sixpenny Handley, which, was conveniently situated on a campsite. After swiftly realising the bunker was seriously over-grown and right next to a family having their breakfast we decided to leave, well, after we’d used the campsite facilities!!

11:00 – Our next stop, Fontmell Magna ROC. Another massive hill to climb! Another impossibly over-grown compound! Note to self, must remember the garden sheers next time!!

12:30 – So, our first non-ROC of the trip came in the form of Bourton Mill in north Dorset. Driving around the site it was clear the place was an absolute shit-tip, graffiti everywhere, anything that could be smashed, was.

We didn’t hold much hope the site, but there was a real nice area in the middle of the main building. A waterfall crashing where a waterwheel would have sat. The colours and noise was pretty special and we spent ages trying to photograph it.

So… with that done, we headed in to Devon.

14:00 – Technically, we stopped in Somerset first, at my favourite explore of the trip, Tonedale Mill. Currently in mid-development in to apartments (such a shame!) it was a bit of a nightmare getting in.

Nosey neighbours galore and regular security patrols, coupled with “umpteen” CCTV cameras almost had us give up any attempt to get inside. But then, just like always, an opening presented itself to us.

Such lovely machinery still sits on the top floor of the mill. Before we could check out the other buildings we bumped in to security. I’m not sure who shit themselves the most!

16:00 – Time was now against us to get to any more locations today and after the first night we didn’t fancy sleeping in the wild again! So, out came the map and we headed to the closest campsite.

20:00 – After a bit of begging we were signed in to the campsite, tents pitched and bellies full of stir fry. There was a pub down the road so we had a wander and a few pints. Nice.

Day Three

09:00 – After a fantastic sleep and more than acceptable breakfast, all hell broke loose. Fucking ticks!

Our first night camping proved to be more than just a scary, noisy, animal filled night. Ticks had found their way in to our clothes, the truck, tents, sleeping bags, and worst of all… on our bodies. They were everywhere!

After horrifying our fellow (elderly) campers with screams of, “Shit, Fuck, Bugger, Twat” and an incident with a burning hot knife in my ass we packed up and headed to our first site of the day, Bampton ROC…

…however, after reading all sorts of horror stories on Wikipedia about people dying from ticks, fatal diseases and gruesome up-close microscopic pictures, we all concluded that we were going to die. Quickly pulling over, we all jumped out the Land Rover, pulling trousers down and turning our t-shirts inside-out. A quick look up, and we were all half-naked in the car park of a church!! haha!

Tired, Aching and desperately needing a poo!

11:00 – After a slight detour in to Tavistock to get insect-killing sprays and retardants we pulled up in a car park close to our next explore, the Dairy Crest factory in Great Torrington. Trousers round our ankles, covered in insect killer and stinking of TCP we happily sat eating ice creams whilst everyone must have thought we were mad!

14:00 – The Dairy Crest factory was a bit of a let down in all honesty. The site is massive and would have had huge potential a few years ago, unfortunately now it’s completely trashed and smashed.

With ROC’s well and truely off our radar now, we decided to head in to North Devon for our final explore before cutting the trip short a day early.

15:30 - Fremington Army Camp was a nice, relaxed explore – apart from the crippling need for a poo! – A lot of the outside buildings were locked but there was enough to keep us entertained for a couple of hours.

18:00 – And so that concludes our little exploring camping trip. We’re definitely doing it again, perhaps not Devon, maybe Dover way as it looks pretty interesting. So, until next time…

But not now!

James Young (@welcomebrand) had been talking about this exact kind of problem with his favourite tweets for a while and today managed to output his favourites to Instapaper, ... Read more...]]> Like many developers on Twitter I don’t have the time to read every interesting article or website that gets posted, so I just ‘favourite’ the tweet and forget all about it!

But not now!

James Young (@welcomebrand) had been talking about this exact kind of problem with his favourite tweets for a while and today managed to output his favourites to Instapaper, then outputted via RSS to Google Reader. Success!

This immediately sparked an idea. I’ve recently become the lucky owner of an iPad and was told to download Flipboard from the App Store from a fellow user. It’s fantastic! In its simplest form it pulls in RSS feeds of your choice and displays them in a magazine style layout.

Displaying my Twitter favourites couldn’t have been easier! I’ll definitely be reading through them tonight!

Steps:

Select 'More' from the home screen and touch, "Social"

Select 'Twitter' and then choose 'Your Favourites'

Choose "Add" in the top left to place it on your home screen

In all its glory, your Twitter Favourites, in magazine format!

For years I forgot ... Read more...]]> When I was 9 years old, I looked out my Aunty’s conservatory with a pair of binoculars dreaming of the day I could go to the Breakwater Fort in Portland Harbour and explore it. It’s been a dream of mine for over 18 years. A dream that was constantly the brunt of broken promises & false hope.

For years I forgot all about the Breakwater Fort, until recently. I had explored one of the most top secret bunkers in the country and I needed more. Something closer to home. That’s when a plan was hatched to explore the Fort.

The sheer scale of the Breakwater Fort becomes apparent as you approach the small, secluded harbour. We moored up and headed straight to the Fort, the outbuildings would have to wait.
Descending the iron, spiral staircase my heart was pumping so fast. I was living my dream!

Inside the Fort you’re immediately confronted with an atrium with eight sides. This octagonal floor housed the 32 ton cannons used to defend the harbour. The floor below is where it got really interesting.

Two circular passageways inside each other run around the lower floors of the Fort. Radial Passage 1 & 2. The former was used for lifting shells to the cannons above, while the latter stored the shells in its many storage rooms. At the very centre of the Fort at its lowest point was the impressive Engine Room.

The solution, remove a category from the results by adding ... Read more...]]> Sometimes you’ll want to generate an archive list in your WordPress blog to display month-by-month viewing for your visitors. I wanted to do exactly that, however, I had a category which was wasn’t related to my blog posts, in fact, I didn’t want these post showing at all in my archive.

The solution, remove a category from the results by adding this to your functions.php file and changing the category ID number (on line 8) to suit your needs

add_filter( 'getarchives_where', 'customarchives_where' );
add_filter( 'getarchives_join', 'customarchives_join' );
function customarchives_join( $x ) {
global $wpdb; return $x . " INNER JOIN $wpdb->term_relationships ON ($wpdb->posts.ID = $wpdb->term_relationships.object_id) INNER JOIN $wpdb->term_taxonomy ON ($wpdb->term_relationships.term_taxonomy_id = $wpdb->term_taxonomy.term_taxonomy_id)";
}
function customarchives_where( $x ) {
global $wpdb;
$exclude = '1'; // category id to exclude
return $x . " AND $wpdb->term_taxonomy.taxonomy = 'category' AND $wpdb->term_taxonomy.term_id NOT IN ($exclude)";
}

After a few dead ends, near-misses with Police and nosey neighbours we finally found our way in – once again, staring right at us, so easy!

Dodging vans, security cameras & nosey neighbours (again) we ... Read more...]]> This site was definitely my favourite explore of our Dorset & Devon camping trip (OK, so it’s technically in Somerset!). It came on day 2 and didn’t disappoint.

After a few dead ends, near-misses with Police and nosey neighbours we finally found our way in – once again, staring right at us, so easy!

Dodging vans, security cameras & nosey neighbours (again) we found ourselves squeezing in to the main mill building fairly quickly.

The structure is quite magnificent, vast in fact. We made our way to the top floor and found the piéce de résistance, the winding machines and other remaining equipment.

The whole site is in a kind of “limbo” state. The previous developers ran out of money and the work has just stopped.

Security are still present on site and they make frequent patrols, as we found on our way out! We were spotted and escorted kindly off the land by one of the most charming and friendly security guards I’ve ever met! (Even if he did threaten to call the police at first!)

The camp, although abandoned, has a sense of feeling that it could quite easily be used again at the drop of a hat. Hardly any damage has taken place, nor has Mother ... Read more...]]> The last day of our Dorset & Devon camping trip took us to North Devon. A disused army camp in Fremington which is laid derelict and awaiting its fate.

The camp, although abandoned, has a sense of feeling that it could quite easily be used again at the drop of a hat. Hardly any damage has taken place, nor has Mother Nature really taken hold.

Nearly all the buildings on site are locked up tight, either under lock & key, or simply screwed shut! Luckily we found a couple which weren’t and the contents were fairly interesting. A theatre/stage set up which had been converted into a gym, lockers with a few personal items still remaining & a postal sorting room.

A rather basic, although very demanding-looking obstacle course remains, we were good boys and resisted a go!

The Dairy Crest factory has been derelict since 1993 and it shows. Every fixture, fitting and pane of glass has been smashed and torn down by vandals. Only one room held anything of ... Read more...]]> Unfortunately, the best thing about this explore was the ice cream I had in the car park before we entered! A fairly uninspiring factory, with minimal interesting features.

The Dairy Crest factory has been derelict since 1993 and it shows. Every fixture, fitting and pane of glass has been smashed and torn down by vandals. Only one room held anything of any real interest, if flaking paint is of interest to you? It sure is to me!!

The creamery site is huge and you’ll do well to explore every part of it. Especially with lorries still running up and down the length of the site to reach the businesses at the other end of the estate.

All in all not the best explore, but an explore nonetheless and wherever there’s flaky paint and the stench of rotting pigeons, I’m there!!

With the graffiti and sheer carnage aside, there’s still some nice features and machinery in place at ... Read more...]]> On the second day of our Devon & Dorset camping trip, we stopped at Bourton in North Dorset near Gillingham to check out Bourton Mill. Having only seen one report online of a fairly battered and near-ruin state we weren’t holding out for much.

With the graffiti and sheer carnage aside, there’s still some nice features and machinery in place at Bourton. The mill was actually mentioned in the Doomsday Book and has operated under many different guises. From supplying canvas to the Royal Navy it also produced boilers, steam lorries and gas engines. During the First World War, Mills Bombs were also made here.

My favourite part was the water feature running through the centre of the mill. We all heard running water but assumed the rain was coming down hard outside, we didn’t think we’d find such a diamond in the rough of this dereliction!

The mill has clearly been left to the elements and vandals. We walked around the site for over an hour without any trouble or seeing anyone else at all.