Many WordPress functions have a standard version which outputs the results directly and an additional version prefixed with get_ that returns the output – useful for adding to a string and manipulating before output.

One such exclusion is the_shortlink, which returns a short link to any page or post – there is no get_the_shortlink, so many people have to resort to just outputting the result in a FORM field for people to cut & paste.  However, here is a quick way to add the capability to your blog – simply add the following 5 lines to your theme’s function.php file…

function get_the_shortlink() {
    $post_id = get_the_ID();
    if ($post_id!="") {$shortlink=home_url()."/?p=".$post_id;} else {$shortlink="";}
    return $shortlink;
}

Or, in one line…

function get_the_shortlink() {if (get_the_ID()!="") {return home_url()."/?p=".get_the_ID();} else {return;}}

Now you just need to call get_the_shortlink() from within your WordPress loop and it will return the shortlink URL.

Unlike the_shortlink it doesn’t accept any parameters, but this is a quick and simple solution.

WP README Parser version 1.1 has been released with the following changes…

• Improved code display – particularly code multi-lines
• Fixed a file fetching bug
• Added a new option to suppress specific lines of output

Full details, including a download link, are available on the plugin page.

Today I’ve launched a new WordPress plugin – WP Relative Date.

This provides a much needed improvements to WordPress’ ability to display relative dates (e.g. “This post was added 4 days ago.”) A simple change to your theme code and you can benefit from improved levels of reporting (WordPress, for instance, only shows a maximum of months, hence a post that is a number of years old will display as a large number of months instead).

I wrote this as part of the recent site re-vamp and initially included the functionality within my functions.php file. In the end I converted it to a separate plugin, however, and updated it to be of release quality.

More details and download instructions are on the plugin’s dedicated page.