Projects - Tom McFarlin

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Posts introducing, updating, and covering various projects to which I’ve contributed or that I maintain.

Introducing Markdown Code For WordPress

May 22, 2013 — 16 Comments

For those who have been reading this blog for sometime, you know that I’m a fan of using lines of code in my posts.

I’m not referring to the larger code block (I use SyntaxHighlighter Evolved for that), but for code that exists in a single line much like this. The thing is, when I’m drafting my posts, I often place those strings in backticks – like this – and then go through and replace them code tags prior to publishing the post.

Tedious, right?

And I love Markdown as much as the developer, but I’m not ready to fully abandon the WordPress editor for it. Instead, I’d rather have just a few tags supported that I frequently use and be able to have them replaced automatically.

So I wrote a really simple plugin for doing just that: Markdown Code For WordPress.

In Projects Markdown Code For WordPress

Announcing The WordPress Plugin Boilerplate 2.0

May 8, 2013 — 31 Comments

Back in December 2011, I released an initial version of the WordPress Plugin Boilerplate. The purpose of the boilerplate was to provide an easy way to build WordPress plugins.

Specifically, the project featured:

File organization
Documented code
Implementation of the Plugin API
Action and Filter Reference

After the feedback that I received upon thisl release, I officially published version 1.0 to GitHub on November 29, 2012. After over a year of various contributions from others and other improvements, I’m proud to release the second version of the WordPress Plugin Boilerplate.

In Projects WordPress Plugin Boilerplate

How To Find WordPress Comments That Are Missing Replies

April 9, 2013 — 7 Comments

A little less than two months ago, Pippin Williamson, Andrew Norcross, and I decided that we were going to collaborate on a WordPress comment reply plugin.

Specifically, we were going to work on a plugin that was going to make it easy for publishers to identify comments to which they’ve not responded. We also set the arbitrary deadline of having it completed by the end of WordCamp Miami.

We met the deadline, soft launched the plugin yesterday, and are officially launching it today.

In Projects Comments Not Replied To

Category Sticky Post 1.2

April 8, 2013 — Leave a comment

Last week, I release a relatively major update to Category Sticky Post. For those of you who have been reading this blog for some time, you know that I released the first version back in August of last year.

Since then, there are been several minor updates most of which were primary bug fixes or hot fixes.

Though this update is still a relatively minor update, it introduces a few things both behind-the-scenes and functionality-wise that should improve how it works especially with posts having multiple categories

In Projects Category Sticky Post

SysInfo For WordPress System Info

April 5, 2013 — 11 Comments

One of the neat things about attending conferences like WordCamp Atlanta is that you get the opportunity to get some facetime with other people that you may typically only interact with via Twitter.

Case in point: This past WordCamp Atlanta, I had the pleasure of hanging out with Dougal Campbell, Brian Krogsgard, Dave Donaldson, Mike Schinkel, Jonathan Davis, James Dalman, and others.

But one of the neater things that happened was, over lunch, Dave happened to demo something that he had baked into a number of his Max Foundry products. Specifically, it was a WordPress system info tool specifically for helping him diagnose errors while handling support requests.

During a brief conversation, he mentioned that he was considering releasing it as its own plugin and placing it on GitHub.

I dug the idea.

In Projects SysInfo

A Plugin To Display WordPress Tags Without Links

March 29, 2013 — 4 Comments

In a few recent client projects, I’ve had the need to display WordPress tags without links. Sure, this is relatively easy to do with a foreach loop, but I got tired of writing the same code.

So I decided to write a simple plugin that makes it way to display the tags without links.

In Projects Tags Without Links

Including a WordPress Page Template in a Plugin

March 7, 2013 — 21 Comments

Note that this plugin is just a working proof-of-concept. Do not use this in a production environment.

One of the challenges of working with templates within the context of WordPress plugin development is that there’s no easy way to bundle templates with your plugin and register them with WordPress.

Template are usually relegated to theme development. And rightly so, correct?

After all, page templates are used to provide layout and presentation which is precisely what themes are meant to provide.

But if you’re working on a larger, more complex plugin that introduces custom post types, page templates, and other advanced functionality then there may be a use case in which bundling templates with your plugin is necessary.

I’ve hit up against this exact issue in a recent project, so I thought I’d share the basics of how I solved the problem, and then provide an example plugin to make the process of registering page templates with WordPress themes a bit easier.

In Projects Page Template Example

Tag Sticky Post Updated To 1.2

March 1, 2013 — Leave a comment

Earlier this week, I received a following forum notification in my inbox regarding Tag Sticky Post:

I’ve downloaded the plugin Tag Sticky Post that will allow me to stick posts depending on which tag I’m currently browsing in my blog. The tag that will be checked is from the post’s custom_field “tag_sticky_post”. So, if I go inside the post and set post “A” to stick on tag “1″, if I go to http://www.myblog.com/tag/1 the post “A” will be shown on the top with a custom css class (to highlight it). So far so good.

The problem is that the plugin can’t seem to work when I’m browsing archives for 2 tags at the same time, like the example I gave above:

Example: http://www.myblog.com/tag/tag1+tag2

You can view the entire post here.

This prompted an update to the plugin that I’ll discuss in more length in another post, but first note that this particular use case provided a perfect example of the type of enhancement that fit with the vision of the plugin.

So yesterday, I officially released Tag Sticky Post 1.2.

In Projects Tag Sticky Post

jQuery Konami Code: Add The Cheat Code To Your Site

February 28, 2013 — 9 Comments

One of the things that I love about working on side projects is that they can be just as complex or simple, or as fun or mundane as you want them to be.

Case in point: A couple of years ago when 8BIT was first getting started, we had a really simple landing page, but we had the idea to incorporate something fun.

Considering we all group up during the 8-bit era of video games, we opted to incorporate the Konami code into our site. So I wrote a small jQuery plugin that makes it really easy to include the cheat code into your site or web application.

Simply put, it’s the jQuery Konami Code.

In Projects Konami Code

A Look at The UI Design Process in WordPress Plugins

February 22, 2013 — 17 Comments

I’m no designer. I don’t aspire to be one, nor do I claim to be one that; however, I am interested in the topic and enjoy seeing the work that others do as well as following blogs, articles, books, etc. on the topic.

Though user interface design is a bit of a different field, it hits much closer to home for me than other types of design. After all, a user interface is basically the face of the code that we’re writing.

And if we’re not careful, then we’re going to continue perpetuating the stereotype that developers do not care about design.

I’ve spoken previously about sharing case studies on WordPress projects, and though I don’t have a full project to share right now, I thought it might be fun to look at some I’ve been working on and the evolution of a particular user interface that evolved from a first pass, to discussion, then from mockup, to implementation.

In Projects WordPress

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