Alex Mansfield

How to keep the menu visible in the WordPress editor

alexmansfield — Tue, 02 Sep 2025 21:12:12 +0000

For some reason, the default WordPress editing experience hides the dashboard menu. This can be confusing for beginners (“How do I exit the editor?”) and annoying for power users (“Why so many clicks to get to where I want to go?”). Yes, there is a user-configurable option for whether or not to show the dashboard menu in the editor. However, I don’t expect a beginner to know about that setting…

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How to hide WordPress content from search results

alexmansfield — Tue, 20 May 2025 20:31:11 +0000

While it is easy to drop in some code to hide content from search results, it can have some unintended consequences because WordPress uses the same search query loop for both frontend and backend searches. To hide content on both the front and backend, we can use the following code: Notice on line 3 there is an array. This array contains the IDs of content that will be hidden from search…

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Website Blueprint Settings

alexmansfield — Thu, 15 May 2025 16:05:53 +0000

While it is incredibly useful to use a blueprint site as a starting point for all new website development projects, it also makes it easy to forget what our default site settings are. This article is part checklist, part reminder what default settings I use for reference when create a new blueprint site. Since there are a wide variety of monitor sizes, it is often useful to set a maximum width…

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External Slide Navigation in Bricks Builder

alexmansfield — Sat, 22 Mar 2025 02:00:39 +0000

Bricks Builder has a flexible slider module called “Slides (Nestable)” which allows each slide to be built from scratch within the builder. In some cases, it may be necessary to create external tab-like navigation. In order for the following code to work properly, we need 3 things: You’ll notice the 3 variables at the top of the code correspond with the 3 items in the numbered list I just…

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Parallels Desktop (Solved): The password you use to log into your account no longer matches your login keyring

alexmansfield — Sun, 26 Jan 2025 06:39:49 +0000

When using a Linux guest OS on Parallels, I was occasionally getting the following error, along with a password input: However, when entering the login password into the prompt, it fails. After going down this rabbit hole for a day or two, I cam across an old forum post with an answer that worked for me. Instead of typing your login password, just type “parallels” instead. It seems that by…

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Dealing with form spam

alexmansfield — Thu, 23 Jan 2025 02:49:49 +0000

Let’s start by looking at the timeline of a form submission, and then we can look at what can be done to combat spam at each section of the timeline. Now let’s look at our options: If the visitor is a human, this is probably not a good time to try to block them, because they will most likely be indistinguishable from a normal user. However, if the visitor is a bot, there are a number of…

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Remove formatting when pasting text by default

alexmansfield — Sat, 16 Mar 2024 11:37:58 +0000

When pasting text into the WordPress classic editor, the default behavior is to keep the formatting of the pasted content. The keeps things like links working, but it also keeps font colors, sizes, and other formatting that may be undesirable. To change the default behavior so that by default all formatting is removed, we can simply use the following lines of code: This works with the…

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Adding a menu item to the Beaver Builder admin menu

alexmansfield — Sun, 28 Jan 2024 11:31:34 +0000

Beaver Builder has a top level menu item in the WordPress admin menu. However, it doesn’t allow new menu items to be added using the standard WordPress methods. After reading a bunch of the Beaver Builder code base, I was able to find the filter that handles the submenu items in the /extensions/fl-builder-user-templates/classes/class-fl-builder-user-templates-admin-menu.php file.

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Improving Beaver Builder’s Video Lightbox

alexmansfield — Sat, 09 Dec 2023 06:18:28 +0000

For some reason, Beaver Builder’s video lightbox opens quite small, even on large screens. I wanted the lightbox to take up most of the screen, so I used the following CSS to make that happen: …and while I was at it I thew in the following code to improve the look and placement of the lightbox close icon: Please note: this code is specific to videos with a 16/9 aspect ratio.

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Disable WordPress Comments Programmatically

alexmansfield — Thu, 31 Aug 2023 06:12:23 +0000

This post exists primarily for my own future reference. Sometimes I want to disable all comments without using a plugin. The code below borrows heavily (maybe even copies blatantly!) from a couple GitHub repositories I came across a while ago: – https://gist.github.com/mattclements/eab5ef656b2f946c4bfb – https://gist.github.com/alexwoollam/2f4bcd4eb4740eb49562131290248f26 Here’s the code…

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