Tom McFarlin

Software Engineering in WordPress, PHP, and Backend Development

Author: Tom (Page 116 of 428)

Sponsored Posts: They Should Be About the Reader

April 7, 2017 /

For as long as I’ve written on this blog, I’ve always approached it with the perspective that this is my content all based on my experience. And given that the blog tied to my name in the domain, it seemed to make sense.

Introducing Sponsored Posts: Never thought I'd be doing something like this back in 2010.

This site, as it were, back in 2010, courtesy the WayBack Machine.

However, the longer I’ve worked within the WordPress economy, the more people I’ve met who are doing some really incredible things with it. Some people are building some really cool plugins and themes for it while others are building tools specifically for those building said plugins and themes.

And as I’ve mentioned numerous times throughout the year, there are some changes coming to this blog – all for the better, of course (at least that’s the goal) – and the first change I’m looking to introduce is to begin offering sponsored posts.

Continue reading

Properly Filtering Post Content (And Understanding apply_filters)

April 6, 2017 / / 0 Comments

Now and then, whenever I’m working with pre-existing source code or performing a code audit, I’ll see others modifying the post content of a post object like this:

At this point, some will drop in and immediately say you’re doing it wrong. I hate that phrase (and it’s even littered throughout the WordPress codebase, but I digress).

There are ways to use other existing WordPress API functions to sanitize the data before setting it equal to the value of the post_content attribute, using those functions isn’t the best way to go about doing it.

Instead, we all should be using apply_filters. The problem? Some don’t know, some don’t know how it works, and some don’t know how to use it. That is it’s not clear how to go about properly filtering post content.

Properly Filtering Post Content

Raw content filtered by WordPress then written to the database.

But for those who may fall into any of the categories above, then perhaps this can help.

Continue reading

What Does It Mean to Use WordPress as a Proxy?

April 5, 2017 / / 0 Comments

If you’ve worked with WordPress for any length of time especially when it comes to using some type of Ajax functionality, then you’ve likely heard the phrase “use WordPress as a proxy” at some point.

And even if you haven’t the odds that you’ve actually done it are pretty high.

Though I think that, as time moves forward, we’re going to eventually see the REST API replace the traditional ways that we’ve used Ajax but that’s likely a different story for another time.

So what does it mean to use WordPress as a proxy whenever you’re working with Ajax requests? It requires a little bit of understanding cross-site requests, how routing a request through WordPress works, and then parsing the response.

Continue reading

WordPress Project Milestones: Scoping Them For Clients

April 4, 2017 / / 0 Comments

Up until the last year, one of the ways that I’ve scoped milestones is based heavily on the perspective of how I or my team and I were to be working the project.

There’s a problem with this approach, though: For those of us who try to include client feedback throughout the development process, it’s not as easy for them to take the jargon we use and still have them make sense of it.

To that end, I’ve started scoping WordPress project milestones a little bit differently so they are a bit more customer-friendly all the while still making sense to how a team of developers can accomplish what’s necessary to make sure things are functionality.

Continue reading

Separating the Vital Few From the Trivial Many

April 3, 2017 /

I’ve talked in earlier posts about my reading Essentialism and a lot of the information I’ve been gleaning from it. Granted, it’s slow going, but there’s a lot happening outside of reading at the moment.

The Vital Few: Discerning the vital few from the trivial many.

But I’ll share the point I’m going to be working towards regarding the rest of this post right now. One of the most timely quotes from the book is a bit long, but I think it’s worth sharing especially for those working on their business, their side projects, or even their day-to-day work wherever that may be.

Instead of making choices reactively, the Essentialist deliberately distinguishes the vital few from the trivial many, eliminates the nonessentials, and then removes obstacles so the essential things have clear, smooth passage.

In other words, Essentialism is a disciplined, systematic approach for determining where our highest point of contribution lies, then making execution of those things almost effortless.

Like I said, it’s a bit of a long quote, but if I could distil them for the sake of the things I’d like to share, I’d hit the following points:

  • distinguish the vital few from the trivial many,
  • remove obstacles that prevent that,
  • determining the highest point of contribution.

For some, this reads like a big snore-fest so you can either check out now or keep reading, but I found this timely, and I think it’s something that many people struggle with (at least post on those who I chat with) so maybe it’ll be helpful.

So here’s my take on these points.

Continue reading

« Older posts Newer posts »

© 2025 Tom McFarlin

Theme by Anders Noren — Up ↑