One of the more interesting challenges I have faced with Wordpress is offering custom pages. These could be pages such taking a survey, asking a question, or suggesting a topic. Previously, I had gone about coding these kinds of pages by just sticking the php file in the web root.

I have a friend that wants to update a banner on his Wordpress blog homepage without changing the template files. I tell him I'd be glad to help him out and start working on a plugin that provides a custom administration page to allow for this. As I am a firm believer in the power of a lazy coder to get things done faster and better, my first thought was: "Why don't I just see if I can hijack the 'Select Image From Gallery' page to do this?"

Once again, my Wordpress friends had to hit me up for some help. These are the same friends that I helped with a Custom Field Search Plugin. They have been maintaining a community site, SuccessNet Online™, and an email mailing list of several hundred thousand participants for Business Networking International.

In my previous post on implementing a custom field search in Wordpress, I showed how to modify the internal SQL LIKE search that is the default search engine of Wordpress. There are other search engines that Wordpress can make use of, most notably Sphinx Search.

Some friends of mine that have started offering custom Wordpress designed sites and consulting hit me up a couple of weeks ago for some help. They had a site for a client that was utilizing custom fields to provide some additional CMS-like functionality to Wordpress and had hit a snag. Their custom fields were not being searched.

The new Braindonor Network site is up and running!