Aside from the new Shortcode Generator, we also now list user defined template tags in the tags tab of the “Output Settings” page so you can see what tags are available for you to use as you add them. No more digging through code and trying to remember all of the tags you added to the template system. This is a HUGE plus in my book and hopefully you all will like it as well.

As usual, if you have any problems during the upgrade, please open a support topic in the forum and I will try to help you as best I can. Thanks again for using TB-Testimonials!

-Travis Ballard

So far for the 1.7 upgrade we have these changes in store:

• Removed option to switch to template API introduces in 1.6. It is now active by default.
• Added list of user defined tags to the “tags” tab on the Output Templates page. Should make remembering your custom tags a little easier. Especially if you have a few of them.
• Fixed a few bugs that are present when using a filtered post type
• New shortcode generator with more options and a better user experience!

Here’s a preview of the upcoming tags screen ( a feature I’ve been wanting to add for a long time ):

Here’s a preview of the new shortcode generator:

If you have anything else you would like to see added, please chime in and let’s talk about it and see if we can’t make this thing that much better for everyone that uses it.

Here ye is:

To display the paginated testimonials we will create a new page and then insert a shortcode into it pointing to a new template we’re going to create named ‘paginate’. the shortcode is as follows

[testimonial id="rand" template="paginate"]

and here’s the template code that is used. You add this under Testimonials / Output Settings in your wp-admin. You will probably need to switch it up a little bit to fit your needs a little more but that’s ok.

Now that you have created your template to use we need to include the class I was talking about aptly named TBTestimonialPaginate. Save it to your theme folder and then open your functions.php and add require_once("tbtpaginate.class.php") to the bottom of it. This is assuming that you named the file tbtpaginate.class.php.

At the bottom you will notice we pass a 5 to the constructor, that’s the number of testimonials to show per page and you can easily change it by editing this number. That’s it, now you can view the page you created with the shortcode in it and see some testimonials with pagination links when the per_page quota is met.

Creating the form

First thing first we need to create a page template with the form for our page. We’re going to use a basic form with 5 fields; Name, Email, Company, Website URL, and Testimonial Body.

My code for this looks like so:

After you get the form page all done you can go ahead and create a new page in your wp-admin and apply the template to it. Preview it and see if you need to edit any CSS or anything. Most likely you will in order to get it to look presentable.

Now the form’s finished, let’s submit this thing and validate some user submitted data…

You’ll notice I left the action for the form blank. That’s so the form submits to the page we are currently on. You will also notice that the names of all my input fields are an array named new_testimonial[], that is so we can easily tell when the data is being submitted without a big huge conditional checking for $_POST['this'] or $_POST['that'].

First we need to validate the data that is being submitted. We do that like so:

Now if you noticed, we add our own action hook named tbtestimonial_messages that handles the output of the error and success messages for our form. we will need to add 2 functions to handle these. They look like this:

You can display those messages ANYWHERE in your form by adding do_action( 'tbtestimonial_messages'); anywhere in your form. I’m going to put it right after the entry-content div at the top of the form.

Now we’re cooking, all that’s left is to insert the testimonial into WordPress

Now that we have created the form and validated some user input to make sure that it is in fact what we want it to be, we can move on to inserting the testimonial (post) into WordPress and attaching the meta-data for the user’s company name, email address, and website url.

We do that like this:

Finished Page Template for Adding Testimonials

Hope that helps! Also you could use wp_mail() to send you a notification letting you know that a new draft testimonial has been created and you should go and either publish it or delete it. Food for thought!

Earlier I received notice (http://wordpress.org/support/topic/plugin-tbtestimonials-tbar-wow-thats-ballsy-and-not-in-a-good-way) that a user felt betrayed by me and TB-Testimonials and said I “just ruined his fav Testimonal Plugin” with the addition of TBar in the last update. This makes me feel bad that one of my users isn’t happy and now I’m on a mission to find out how the rest of you feel about it and see if maybe we can come to a resolution. Not really sure what to do here, I feel like it could be a very valuable asset to my freelance business and bring in a lot of leads.

So who better to ask what happens next than my users themselves? Do we remove the request a quote stuff? Disable it by default and put a nag notice on the settings page? I’d love to hear your thoughts!

Note that I’ve read the plugin guidelines at http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/about/guidelines/ and I don’t feel like I’ve violated any of them.

-Travis

Along with a new site comes a section devoted to my WordPress plugins as well as support forums for them. Hopefully this will help me provide better support to my users and maybe even eventually turn them into clients one day.

$query = new WP_Query( array( 'post_type' => 'post', 'post_status' => 'publish', 'category' => -34 );

that I would do something similar for my own custom taxonomy. In this case it’s ‘news_category’ so I ended with up this:

$query = new WP_Query( array( 'post_type' => 'news', 'post_status' => 'publish', 'news_category' => -34 );

That didn’t give me the results I expected so I checked the codex and didn’t see anything. I also tried category__not_in, news_category__not_in and had the same luck. So after putting my google-fu to good use I ran across someone with the same issue on the WordPress Answers StackExchange (http://wordpress.stackexchange.com/questions/51797/exclude-posts-with-custom-taxonomy) where I found out about tax_query.

So I go back to the codex, ctrl+f and low and behold, I’m blind. It’s right there under Multiple Taxonomy Handling in the Taxonomy section (http://codex.wordpress.org/Class_Reference/WP_Query#Taxonomy_Parameters).

Here’s the query I ended up with that does what I want

$q = new wp_Query( array(
    'post_type' => 'news',
    'post_status' => 'publish',
    'posts_per_page' => 5,
    'orderby' => 'date',
    'order' => 'desc',
    'tax_query' => array(
        'relation' => 'AND',
        array(
            'taxonomy' => 'news_category',
            'field' => 'id',
            'terms' => $press_cat,
            'operator' => 'NOT IN'
        )
    )
) );