New plugins!

The first and newest plugin is No Nonsense. No Nonsense builds upon some of the same principles as my now defunct Core Options by Room 34 plugin.

This plugin is great for developers who build commercial WordPress websites for a living. You know what we really like and need? Core WordPress features. You know what we really don’t like or need? Some of the corny, unprofessional details that come with the stock WordPress installation, such as the “Howdy” greeting before your name in the admin bar, or the “Hello Dolly” lyrics at the top of admin pages. Our sites never have comments — if they even have a blog — and we don’t want our clients confused by that item in the admin menu. We don’t need outmoded security risks like XML-RPC to be turned on by default. And we want an easy way to clear up some of this, as I somewhat tongue-in-cheek call it, “nonsense.”

No Nonsense provides a clean, one-stop admin screen where you can selectively turn off these elements, along with additional tools like choosing which Dashboard widgets should display, and preventing subscribers from seeing any part of the admin interface at all. And it’s just getting started. I’ll continue to add more options in the coming weeks.

The second plugin serves a very particular purpose, having to do with link rot. Or more specifically… uh… “image rot.” If you’ve got a blog that has been around for many, many years — my main blog has existed in some form or another for longer than WordPress has — then over time your older posts will become afflicted with link or image rot. That’s where Remove Broken Images comes in.

By now you know, of course, not to pull in external images directly with offsite URLs in your <img> tags. But maybe many years back you didn’t know that. Or maybe you thought it was OK to just download and reuse images you found with a Google Image Search because, hey, they’re right there to download. (Tip: Do not do this. Copyright applies to most images you find online and big copyright holders contract out to companies with software that literally crawls Google Image Search for unauthorized uses of images, and they will come after you demanding hundreds or thousands of dollars for copyright infringement.)

Or, maybe you’ve just gone through your Media Library at some point and culled a bunch of old images, but… oops! you didn’t bother to keep track of which of your posts were displaying those images, and now you’ve got a bunch of broken image icons or blank spaces in your posts where the images used to be.

Ultimately, you’re going to want to go through and clean up those broken image tags — and version 2 of Remove Broken Images, coming in the first quarter of 2022, will do just that. But for now, version 1 has the basics covered: it dynamically checks for broken images as the page loads and automatically strips the affected image tags out of the DOM in the browser, leaving a clean page with no ugly broken image icons or awkward blank spaces.