TJ Singleton Developer and Preacher

Adding Cachable Javascript and CSS links to your Wordpress Theme

Here is a great technique for adding a timestamp to your the javascript and css for your theme using enqueue_script and enqueue_style. The benefit is you can set a far future expires header and maximize the caching benefit without having to worry about cache invalidation. This technique should be familiar to any Rails devs as it's baked in.

The magic is that the one of the optional parameters of the enqueue_* functions is a version. We can use php's filemtime function to get the last modified time of the file as a timestamp and use it for the version. Wordpress appends the version to the end of the url like "http://yoursite.com/wp-content/themes/your-theme/style.css?ver=1265429348". Now you don't have to worry about serving stale data since every time you edit the file the url will be updated.

Here is some example code:

function theme_assets() {
  stylesheet_url = get_bloginfo('stylesheet_url');
  stylesheet_path = TEMPLATEPATH."/style.css";
  stylesheet_mtime = filemtime(stylesheet_path);
  wp_enqueue_style("my_theme", stylesheet_url, false, stylesheet_mtime, "screen");
 
  javascript_url = get_bloginfo('stylesheet_directory')."/my_theme.js";
  javascript_path = TEMPLATEPATH."/my_theme.js";
  javascript_mtime = filemtime(javascript_path);
  wp_enqueue_script('my_theme', javascript_url, false, javascript_mtime, true);
}
 
add_action('template_redirect', theme_assets);

Home Title Not Displaying Correctly with All in One SEO Pack

A client contacted me that the custom home title had stopped working with their install of the All in One SEO Pack. The site was using a home.php file to provide a custom home template. The problem was that in the reading settings "A static page" was selected even though no front page or posts page was selected.

Once updated to "Your latest posts" it worked correctly. Hopefully this will save you some time if you run across the same issue.