Currently with Gravity Forms, there is no (easy) way to change the input fields to only accept 5 digits (or any other number) and/or change the submitted state selection to their USPS equivalents. If you’re trying to use your data to generate mailing labels or anything similar, the way it is setup can be messy and/or problematic.

Hence, the solution Mr. Connerton, and now myself, have developed. It is written as a plugin so all you have to do is download the file below, unzip it and put it in your WordPress plugins folder. It will then modify the submitted entry prior to it being saved to your database, and BAM! You’re a happy camper.

So what does this plugin do in short? –

• Trim submitted zip codes to 5 digits
• Convert full state names to their USPS state abbreviations

Enjoy! > State and Zip Code Modifier for Gravity Forms (633)

Note: the link to Gravity Forms only works if you’re logged in to their support forums.

Often, when using WordPress multisite as a content management system rather than a blog network, I have the need to use a blog slug in image paths, or when doing DB queries or whatever. There are lots of reasons, but here’s how you get it >

// This is one way
$blog_details =  get_blog_details($GLOBALS['blog_id']);
$slug = str_replace('/','',$blog_details->path);
echo $slug;

// This way makes more sense to me since there's already a global $var for the path
$slug = str_replace('/','',$GLOBALS['path']);
echo $slug;

I find the $GLOBALS variable to be really useful. If you’d like to see all the stuff you can get out of there, just drop this line in your theme somewhere (it’s quite long, so best not to do it on a production site)-

print_r($GLOBALS);

Enjoy!

For someone like me though, who is implementing a WordPress Mu site using “blogs” as content sections instead of the traditional community of blogs, I’d like to be able to have breadcrumbs that go more like this-

Home (root uri) » Blog Home (blog uri) » normal breadcrumbs

To accomplish this, I just made a few modifications to Dimox’s code and with the power of WordPress, Shazam!, it was done.

Here’s the chunk of code I added/modified (note, this code goes in your themes’ functions.php file):

// change the value of $home to your site's root URI (first level in the breadcrumbs)
$home = 'http://foo.com/';

// add two new variables for your blog info (second level in the breadcrumbs)

$blogURI = get_bloginfo('url');
$blogName = get_bloginfo('name');

// directly above the first line of code below in the original source, add the second row that references the new vars you've created  (for good measure I also nofollowed the home URI)

echo '<a href="' . $home . '" rel="nofollow">' . $name . '</a> ' . $delimiter . ' ';
/* if blog is home blog, don't display the blog name */
if ($blog_id != 1) {	echo '<a href="' . $blogURI . '">' . $blogName . '</a> ' . $delimiter . ' '; }

And that’s it, now just do everything else as Dimox suggests on his site.

Enjoy!

Unfortunately, the plug-in doesn’t let you display events by category (which is weird, otherwise, why have the categories?) but anyway, I wrote/hacked together a custom function and WordPress shortcode today to display the events by category.

Now, I know there are going to be the naysayers who say “This code isn’t very pretty”.  Yeah, well maybe not but it works.  And if you can improve on it, DO!  I’m totally open to it.  For instance, the edit I did makes more than one query to the DB which isn’t optimal.

Okay, so without further ado, here it is. Open up the file in your events-manager/ folder called ‘marcus-extras.php’.  Around line 264 you’ll find a function called dbem_get_category().  I added my custom function and shortcode right below it :

define('DBEM_EVENTS_TBNAME', 'dbem_events');

And then:

function dbem_display_categories() {
	global $wpdb;
	$categories_table = $wpdb->prefix.DBEM_CATEGORIES_TBNAME;
	$events_table = $wpdb->prefix.DBEM_EVENTS_TBNAME;
	$sql_categories = mysql_query("SELECT * FROM $categories_table ORDER BY category_id");
	while($category = mysql_fetch_assoc($sql_categories)) {
		extract($category);
		$events = mysql_query("SELECT * FROM $events_table WHERE event_category_id = '".mysql_real_escape_string($category_id)."' ORDER BY event_start_date ASC");
		$category_list .= "<div class=\"event\">";
		$category_list .= "<h2>$category_name</h2>";
		while($event = mysql_fetch_assoc($events)) {
			extract($event);
			$start_date = date('m/d/Y',strtotime($event_start_date));
			$end_date = date('m/d/Y',strtotime($event_end_date));
			$category_list .= "<li>Event: <strong><a href=\"http://www.wilderness-adventure.com/camp-dates/?event_id=$event_id\" title=\"$event_name\">$event_name</a></strong>
					<ul>
						<li>Dates: $start_date - $end_date</li>
					</ul></li>";
		}
		$category_list .= "</div>";
	}
	echo $category_list;
}
add_shortcode('dbem_events_by_category', 'dbem_display_categories');

The shortcode is – [dbem_events_by_category] and you can just insert it into your post or page whereever you want it to go.

By default it outputs ALL events under ALL categories but you could hack it up pretty easily to only display one category, etc. I may do that later if enough people ask for it but it’s not what I needed so, didn’t get done. :)

Hope this helps some folks. Let me know if you have any questions!