For some reason, by default, WordPress only includes the “Get Shortlink” button when editing posts; not when editing any kind of custom post type or when editing pages. Honestly, I’m not sure why, since pages and custom post types all use the same basic short URL as standard posts (example.com/?p=[post_id]).

The solution is simple, though. You just need to hook into the get_shortlink filter. Following is a simple function that will help you add the button to all “publicly_queryable” post types in your theme.

If you use WordPress (especially as a content management system) and you haven’t heard of Mark Jaquith’s “Page Links To” plugin, you should definitely check it out. Basically, the plugin allows you to set up a WordPress page or post to redirect to a different URL. It can be very handy for setting up redirects, adding menu items for pages that wouldn’t normally appear in those menus, etc.

One issue with the plugin, however, is that it does not (as of version 2.4.1) support custom post types. It only supports WordPress posts and pages. If you want to set a custom post type to redirect to a URL other than its permalink, you can’t do so with this plugin.

However, there is a pretty simple way to add support for custom post types to this plugin; and the changes do not require you to edit the plugin itself. Instead, you can make all of the necessary changes in your theme’s functions.php file.

Yesterday, Mark Maunder published a blog post making people aware of a vulnerability in the popular PHP image manipulation script TimThumb. Anyone that uses TimThumb should definitely read that article to make sure that the vulnerability gets patched. Almost a year ago, though, I posted (and I was far from the first) about a vulnerability in another extremely popular PHP image manipulation script; phpThumb.

As we continue to transition whole-hog into HTML5 with new Web development, there are a few things you might need to know before deciding how to handle certain situations. I have discovered two somewhat major gotchas over the last few months that really made me reconsider my usage of the new technology.

While articles, asides, headers, footers, etc. are a fantastic way to introduce semantics into your page designs, there are a few elements and attributes that might not do quite what you’d expect.

I am not really a fanboy of any company (other than Sega), but I do appreciate when a company does something well. For Microsoft, there have been a few bright spots over the last few years (even if they haven’t all been commercially profitable). Among those, I’d include the Zune as the best portable media player (note, I didn’t say “handheld entertainment device”, as the Zune and the ZuneHD were basically designed to do one thing, and do it extremely well); the Xbox 360 as quite possibly the best modern gaming console (though I do love my Wii, the Kinect kind of tipped the playing field slightly in Microsoft’s favor – or so I’ve been told; I don’t own a 360, yet); and Windows Phone 7 has, as much as Android and Apple fanboys would hate to admit, somewhat revolutionized the mobile touch interface.

Do I expect to see whole-hog clones of the WP7 Metro UI, the way we did with iOS? Absolutely not; but I do suspect that we’ll see subtle changes to touch interfaces over the next year or so as a result of the way the Windows Phone OS works.

All of that said, I can’t help but wonder what the Xbox team was thinking when it came up with the pricing structure for Microsoft Points or when they integrated Netflix into the Xbox ecosystem.

Because Opera is not an extremely popular browser, most developers probably aren’t aware of one of its greatest features: Opera Show mode. Opera Show mode is the official name of the full screen mode for Opera (technically, it’s only called Opera Show when a projection media style sheet – discussed below – is present); and it brings with it a great possibility.

More than two years ago, Opera added support for the projection media mode in CSS. Whenever the browser is expanded to full screen mode, it activates the projection media, allowing you to apply a completely different stylesheet to the full screen page than you have in other settings.

Unless you’ve been hiding in a bunker all day today, you’ve probably heard that Yahoo! has updated the terms and conditions for using Yahoo! Mail. Apparently Yahoo! will now systematically scan the contents of your mail messages in order to better target the ads they place in your mail. The update apparently includes the following statement:

The process of adding a new button to the WordPress visual editor is fairly simple; as long as you understand how to develop a new TinyMCE plugin (which is a somewhat involved and laborious process that I will probably cover at another time).

One thing I discovered yesterday, though, is that one line of code makes the difference between the Visual Editor using a custom, static image as the button and the Visual Editor using a span that you can stylize with CSS (to fit better with the native Visual Editor appearance).

As you may or may not know, Filezilla, the extremely popular FTP client, stores all of your FTP passwords in plain text on your hard drive. While I strongly disagree with this practice, I also understand that there are reasons not to do so. It would be really nice to have some sort of option to encrypt the passwords, but I don’t see that happening any time in the near future.

There are actually multiple levels of danger in using Filezilla (and, presumably, many other FTP clients). Unlike a Web browser, where, if you choose not to use the password manager none of your passwords are stored; Filezilla still stores all of the details from your most recent connection in a file called filezilla.xml and all of the details from your 10 most recent connections (at least, the ones you make by typing the information into the Filezilla interface; which is the only way to connect if you are not using the Site Manager) in a file called recentservers.xml, even if you choose not to use the Site Manager. These are plain old XML files with all of the information stored in plain, non-encrypted text. The format of the entries looks similar to the following.

Over the past few months, I have been going round-and-round trying to figure out how to link to individual events in a Google Calendar, allowing visitors to add the event to their own calendars. Google does a nice job of providing functionality to add an event to your own Google calendar, but they don’t seem to offer any functionality to add an event to other calendars.

Google does, however, provide a link to an iCal file for each calendar’s feed; which allows you to add the calendar itself to your own calendar program (Outlook, etc.). The problem with that, obviously, is that, instead of adding a single event (maybe a concert or conference you want to attend, a public meeting, etc.), it adds all of the events from that calendar.