Here’s a bunch of tiny plugins to solve weird little problems with WordPress and bbPress. They’re not much but they are improvements.

None of these are on Wordpress.org because they don’t really need to be. (If you’re desperate to have them on there, send me an email). Just download the zips from Github and install them on your site. You’ll never have to worry about what it might break in an update. None of them do enough to really ever need an update.

These could be added as snippets in your theme’s functions.php but that isn’t so good. You end up with a messy theme that you can’t change because it’s controlling your entire site. Better to split features into micro plugins that you can share with others.

Stop 404 Guess

You may not know this, but by default if you visit a page on your WordPress site that is not valid such as https://mysite.com/not-real - WordPress will try and guess which page you meant.

I don’t know about you, but I never want it to do that. I would rather a page return 404 Not Found than send users somewhere it thinks is alright.

So I built a teensy tiny plugin to do just that.

Get it from ryanhalliday/wp-stop-404-guess

bbPress Disable User Page

WordPress sites are pretty large targets for spam and even with Akismet and Captcha some still gets through. I’m more interested in making the threat irrelevant than struggle against it.

The User page in bbPress is a typical location spammers will load their content and attempts at backlinks into. You should have rel="nofollow" on all of these links anyway but they still look lame.

So to cut that off entirely, I made a plugin to remove the user profile page.

Get it from ryanhalliday/bbp-disable-user-page

bbPress Remove Avatars

bbPress doesn’t let users upload avatars by default, which is probably a good choice but also no one uses Gravatar anymore. Kinda sad but also not really surprising these days.

So the avatars are just randomly generated and waste space on your site. Better to get rid of them and have a clean design.

Get it from ryanhalliday/bbp-remove-avatars

Bonus: Tweaks for Paddle WooCommerce by WP Smartpay

We migrated to Paddle payments for a Woocommerce site and used an existing plugin for the bulk of the integration. That was nice as I had to write less code, but the customer experience left a little to be desired.

So I made a tiny plugin to fix some of the issues:

• Only allow countries supported by Paddle in the checkout
• Require postcode in countries that Paddle requires it
• Include the Coutnry & Postcode in the Payment request to Paddle so that customers don’t have to enter it twice.
• Add a tax disclaimer to the checkout & product page
• Warn admins if there are other payment gateways enabled with Paddle

I’ve sent the tweaks to the original plugin author, hopefully they add some of the suggestions. But for now you can add this plugin to include all those tweaks.

You do have to make one code change to the original plugin, which is a big no no. Never do that. Except for sometimes when you have no other choice. Let this be the reminder that while WordPress is good in some ways we really deserve better.

The instructions on how to install it are in the README.txt, so go get it from ryanhalliday/paddle-woo-tweaks

PS. I would like to convert the site over to Paddle Billing at some point in the future so may build an integration for that and Woocommerce. If you want it - send me an email.