Updated: February 2nd, 2011
WordPress has a great way of letting you use simple text tags called shortcodes to provide a whole bunch of functionality, including custom PHP code. In this article, I'm assuming that you already know what shortcodes do and how they operate (if you don't, head over here: Shortcode_API).
One glaring omission in the way shortcodes are set up by default is that they only get triggered in the content of your post, leaving the sidebar and comments out. I'm sure this is done for security, so that your readers can't screw something up by posting shortcodes they're not supposed to – after all, shortcodes are PHP snippets on the backend.
However, let's assume you really know what you're doing …
The Problem
If you use the Recent Comments sidebar widget in your WordPress installation, it's possible that you want to customize this widget's style.
You will quickly find, however, that as soon as you add the widget to your sidebar, it injects the following inline, hardcoded CSS into the containing page (using !important to make things worse):
<style type="text/css">.recentcomments a{display:inline !important;padding:0 !important;margin:0 !important;}</style> |
The code above comes from recent_comments_style() (found in wp-includes/default-widgets.php), which is in turn called by WP_Widget_Recent_Comments() in the same file (this is just an old-style PHP4 constructor – same as PHP5's __construct()), which is triggered when the Recent Comments widget is used:
beer planet is a blog about technology, programming, computers, and geek life. It is run by Artem Russakovskii - a local San Francisco geek who is currently pursuing his own projects and regularly enjoys hacking Android, PHP, CSS, Javascript, AJAX, Perl, and regular expressions, working on Wordpress plugins and tools, tweaking MySQL queries and server settings, administering Linux machines, blogging, learning new things, and other geeky stuff.
