Category: Software

WooCommerce: getAddress.io Postcode Lookup

Update: Version 2.2 released on 10th February 2022, on the WordPress plugin repository.

This, my third WordPress plugin (and also my third WooCommerce plugin, apparently I really like doing stuff with WooCommerce!) adds a postcode lookup tool to the checkout in WooCommerce 3.x that lets your UK-based customers quickly fill in their billing/shipping addresses based on their postcode.

It utilises the great getAddress.io API for the postcode lookup, and as such requires an API key for their service. I’d always recommend the £10 per month pricing plan, simply because it offers the best value, but they have a number of others available.

WooCommerce: Purchase Order Payment Gateway

Update: Version 1.1.5 released on 4th May 2021, on the plugin repository.

A recent project required the ability for customers on a client’s WooCommerce website to be able to request an invoice for their order (and thus pay offline) – but with the added twist that it required a Purchase Order number. This twist meant that simply changing the name of WooCommerce’s built-in “Offline” gateway was not enough.

I had a quick look around and found an existing plugin for WooCommerce that added this functionality, but as seems to be common when I do this, the functionality left a little bit to be desired.

First of all, the plugin required the customer to enter a postal address for the invoice (and curiously, didn’t automatically pull through the customer’s billing address) – I only needed a Purchase Order number field.

Additionally, it wasn’t very well internationalised – some strings were set as translated, but others – particularly in the HTML output that the plugin generated on the front-end and the admin back-end, were not.

So, I’ve taken it upon myself to learn a bit more about WooCommerce’s Payment Gateway API, and have written my own – which you can download below.

WooCommerce: Use Product Images as Category Images

Update: Version 1.3.1 released on the 25th August 2020.

So, earlier this morning I found myself wishing that WooCommerce had the capability to use a product thumbnail when displaying a category link in situations where the category doesn’t have its own thumbnail defined.

I went on a bit of a hunt and found a couple of small plugins. One didn’t work at all, which I attribute mainly to it having not been updated for two years and much changing in both WordPress and WooCommerce since then, and another one that I found didn’t work until I made a couple of code changes – and had a couple of noteworthy problems;

  • it would only fetch product thumbnails from that immediate category – not delving deeper down into the category tree and fetch product thumbnails from child categories, and
  • it did no filtering for products that had no thumbnails set, so would in some cases return products that had no thumbnail

So, I’ve made my own. A zip download can be found below, you just need to drop the folder inside it into your wp-content/plugins folder and then activate the “WooCommerce Category Product Thumbnails” plugin.

I’m using WordPress 4.9.4 and WooCommerce 3.3.0 – please let me know in the comments if it doesn’t work on other versions.

Update version 1.1 –  23rd March 2018: Add option (found under WooCommerce -> Settings -> Products -> Auto Category Thumbnails) to change the image size used for the automatic thumbnails. By default it remains as “shop_thumbnail”, but you may find that “shop_catalog” is a better choice.

Download

Download the plugin from the WordPress Plugin Repository

Source

This plugin is open-source – view the source code on the GitHub repository.

Thief: Deadly Shadows Tweaker (v1.2)

This software was originally released in April 2004, shortly after the release of Eidos’ Thief: Deadly Shadows, the long-awaited (but much maligned) sequel to Thief: The Dark Project and Thief 2: The Metal Age.

The idea was to provide an easy to use GUI to help players tweak their game settings in ways that the in-game settings menus wouldn’t allow.

The original text from the release notes is reproduced below, along with a download link.

Old games

I’ve now migrated across a couple of my older games, both made in Flash. So, no worky for iOS devices, but anything else should be OK.

Also, as I’ve just noticed it – oddly enough, the last few posts have all been around the start of the hour.

SWAT4 Dual Monitor Fix

SWAT4, released by Sierra in 2005, is a great tactical first-person shooter that puts the focus on saving lives as opposed to taking them.

Unfortunately, the game doesn’t like dual monitor setups and most of the time bluntly refuses to load without the screen flickering like hell as it tries to work out what resolution to run at. Using Alt-Tab to flick between tasks sometimes cures it, but more often than not you have to go into Task Manager and end the process, which gives you an error message about not being able to set the resolution, recommending that you delete the Swat4.ini file.

Mined Out

Originally published to this website in September 2003, Mined Out was my second attempt at a Flash game, and is inspired by an old ZX Spectrum game of the same name, published by Quiksilva in 1983.

The original Mined Out is credited as being the inspiration for Relentless Logic, which in turn inspired the development of Windows Minesweeper.

My version of the game is slightly different to the original, but the gameplay remains largely the same.

Simon the Fabulously Illuminated Kitten

My first Flash game, published in early 2003 and really created just to see if I could wrap my head around the concept of writing games in ActionScript.

It’s very silly, is incredibly repetitive (to the point of driving you to drink) and not really all that much fun, but is presented here for completeness.

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