This is a one-off, but it’s interesting to me so I’m sharing. I have a site with very pretty archives. It came with a video Custom Post-Type, but no archives for that type. Now I could have edited the theme, or overwritten the CPT, but I decided instead to embrace what I had and add on. What if I made a shortcode for [recent-videos] that showed me the recent videos?
This code was specifically designed for the custom post-type ‘Videos’ in the News Theme by Theme Hybrid.
add_shortcode('recent-videos', 'recent_videos_shortcode');
function recent_videos_shortcode($atts) {
extract( shortcode_atts( array(
'posts_per_page' => '10',
), $atts ) );
$args = array(
'post_type' => 'video',
'posts_per_page' => $posts_per_page,
);
$vidlist = new WP_Query($args);
if ( $vidlist->have_posts() ):
$return .= '<div class="display-vidlist archive" style="margin: 0 0 0 -20px!important;">';
while ( $vidlist->have_posts() ): $vidlist->the_post(); global $post;
$image = '<a class="image" href="'. get_permalink() .'">'. get_the_post_thumbnail($post->ID, thumbnail, array('class' => 'news-thumbnail')).'</a> ';
$title = '<h2 class="entry-title"><a class="title" href="'. get_permalink() .'">'. get_the_title() .'</a></h2>';
$date = '<div class="byline"><abbr class="published" title="'. get_the_date('l, F jS, Y, g:i a') .'">'. get_the_date('F j, Y') .'</abbr></span></div>';
$excerpt = '<div class="entry-summary"><p>' . get_the_excerpt() . '</p></div>';
$output = '<div id="post-'. get_the_ID() .'" class="hentry videos publish author-'. get_the_author_meta( 'user_login' ) .' has-excerpt">' . $image . $title . $date . $excerpt . '</div>';
$return .= apply_filters( 'display_posts_shortcode_output', $output, $atts );
endwhile;
$return .= '</div>';
endif; wp_reset_query();
if (!empty($return)) return $return;
}
The heavy lifting was formatting it to look right, and I’m not happy about my hack in class="display-vidlist archive" style="margin: 0 0 0 -20px!important;" but I also wasn’t 100% sure I wanted to separate the css just yet.
Most people will need to change 'post_type' => 'video', to their CPT, and remove the style hack.
I can already see where I’d extend this if I wanted to allow more arguments. The only one I put in was for the number of posts: [recent-videos posts_per_page=10] — You could easily add in one to allow ANY post type:
function recent_videos_shortcode($atts) {
extract( shortcode_atts( array(
'posts_per_page' => '10',
'post_type' => 'post',
), $atts ) );
$args = array(
'post_type' => $post_type,
'posts_per_page' => $posts_per_page,
);
Then call [recent-videos post_type="video"] — Of course, if you do that, you should probably fork this into ‘Recent Posts Shortcode’ and rebrand recent-video to something else.
Which you totally can do (this, as with all my code, is licensed GPL2).
It’s time for a little example in debugging!
After Ron’s comment kicked my pants, I went to that table and thought to myself “Where are the caches?” I knew this from ages back, that anything named _transient… was a cache. There are tons of transient feeds in your wp_options table because the RSS feeds you see on the dashboard are cached. Cool, right? Well, what if, just what if one of them was corrupted? You can delete them without hurting your site! So I hovered my mouse over the update alert and noticed the mouseover said “1 Plugin Update.” Then I looked at the transients and found this:
But. That doesn’t work for all themes. And this is where we have to do the ugly things we don’t want to do. We have to edit CSS. In and of itself, this is pretty easy but I think it’s a poor choice because all this will do is hide the icons from displaying, and that means the code still gets rendered and call and that means you’re putting more work into loading your page than you need.
How about a (mostly) pluginless solution?
Imagine you’re at the coffee shop and you make your order. Plain coffee. The guy behind you jumps up, RIGHT as they’re making your order and shouts “I want the exact same thing, but a latte with no foam!” Then the guy behind him chimes in “I want an espresso!” and “I want a hot cocoa!”