Translation files are a very important part of the WordPress ecosystem. They allow your plugin or theme to be used by people in all languages. So, you need them. It’s less of a suggestion and more of a requirement 😉 Continue reading “How-to: Generate a POT file for a WordPress Theme or Plugin”
Automatically hide or expire products after a certain date
Say you have a shop, and you use WooCommerce and WooCommerce Bookings. Most of the time you want to have your Bookings available for people to buy, always! However, some Bookings are more seasonal, or one-off Bookings.
For example you might have a tour you offer for 1 month but only every few years. Or a seasonal booking like a sleigh ride. In those cases, you might not want to leave that Bookable Product just sitting in your store without anyone being able to buy it.
Sure, you can go in and manually set them to draft, or private, but what if you have a LOT of them or don’t have the time to do that?
Here’s where Post Expirator can help!
Post Expirator has a lot of options, but my favourite part is that it adds this Meta Box to your WooCommerce Products:
Just enable it, set an expiration date, and tell it how to expire! Magic! 🙂
Change order of Available Downloads in WooCommerce
If you’re running WooCommerce and you sell digital products, here’s how you can change their order.
By default, WooCommerce will order them from Oldest > Newest. So the first products you ordered go first, and the latest products you ordered go at the bottom. If it’s a subscription site, where customers continually get new digital downloads, it might be nice to have the latest downloads on top.
The first thing you will need to do is make a copy of the WooCommerce template, into your theme. You’re probably using a Child Theme, right?
- Copy
woocommerce/templates/my-account/my-downloads.php
into
yourtheme/woocommerce/my-account/my-downloads.php
If your theme already has this file there, you can just make your edits there.
- Change this line
<?php foreach ( $downloads as $download ) : ?>
to this
<?php foreach ( array_reverse($downloads) as $download ) : ?>
- That’s it! PHP’s array_reverse does all the magic for you. Now all your Available Downloads will be ordered with the newest on the top.
The order has been changed!
Converting epub books to mobi with Kindlegen
I have an old Kindle Reader from 2012 that I use pretty often. The problem I have with Kindles is that they don’t support epub books, only mobi. Sometimes I’ll download someone’s ebook and want to have it on my Kindle, and most processes for converting the files are pretty crappy and time consuming.
Enter Kindlegen.
It’s a super easy application you run from the Terminal to convert epub formatted ebooks into mobi formatted ebooks, and it’s free!
To run kindlegen, just download it from the link above, and open up a Terminal, and do this:
/path/to/kindlegen /path/to/book.epub
And that’s it! You now have a newly formatted mobi book ready to go for your Kindle.
How I use Skype to get almost free long distance
I have a lot of family and friends scattered throughout the world. Most of them live in North America, so I always need to find ways to call people, and do it cheaply.
When I moved to Canada, I started using cheap calling cards where you would have to enter in 400 digits to make a call, and that seemed to work fine (unless you made a mistake and had to enter in your PIN # again), but it was still expensive.
Then I moved to using Vonage, a VoIP service, which had pretty decent rates ($20 / month) and worked OK most of the time, but their customer service got worse ALL of the time.
Then I got a cellphone and started using Skype over WiFi – which worked pretty good but still wasn’t perfect.
Until eventually I found the best solution.
Skype Unlimited Calling + Skype To Go
This might sound complicated, but it’s really not. Here’s what I do.
- I have a Skype Unlimited account, which gives me free calling anywhere in North America for $30 / year. This means with a good Internet connection, I can call from my phone or laptop easily for an Unlimited number of minutes, anywhere in North America. However, I don’t like relying on a good Internet connection, so I don’t use it that often.
Skype-to-go, the secret sauce.
This is where the true magic happens! If you have a Skype Unlimited account, you can also use Skype to Go! Skype To Go basically let’s you assign local numbers to international numbers. As you can see above, I’ve assigned all of my family members local Canadian numbers. So now, I can just call them on my regular phone to a local number, and Skype does the rest. The way it works is that I can only call them to that number from one of my 20 registered phones. So technically you could share this hack with like 20 family members.
I’ve been using this system for about 2 years now and could not be happier, for about $30 a year I get unlimited calling to my family that lives all over the US.