Software Engineering in WordPress, PHP, and Backend Development

Author: Tom (Page 133 of 428)

Stop Indexing All PHP Files in PHP CodeSniffer

If you’re working with PHP CodeSniffer in your WordPress project, then you’re likely familiar with how much time it takes to complete indexing all PHP files.

You start up your IDE, configure PHPCS, point it to your set of WordPress rules, and then wait for it to begin doing its job. Don’t get me wrong: I love having it sniff the code while writing it, but it also takes a bit of time for it to finish parsing it.

Indexing All PHP Files

Stop PHPCS From Indexing All PHP Files.

Granted, this is true of likely any PHP-based project, but how many of those do I write about here? 🙂

Continue reading

Tab Management in Chrome with Toby

Tab management is one of those problems that’s kind of funny.

Remember back in the day when we had browsers and we opened multiple windows so we could track all of the various sites on which we were browsing or on which we were working or whatever?

IE6

The browser everyone loved to hate.

Yeah. Those days.

Then remember when Firefox came along (or one of the open source alternatives), it was kind of nice to be able to install an extension or add-on that added tab management.

But now we’ve just kind of increased the problem exponentially. At least I have. Because I have multiple windows each with multiple tabs.

And yeah, the Merge Windows extension is nice because it helps bring everything together. But then we’ve gotta deal with saving our session (which there are some nice extensions for that) or keeping track of where we were.

That’s where tab management starts to get a little bit rougher.

Continue reading

View WordPress Page Templates in the Admin

Three years ago, I published a small plugin both on GitHub and in the plugin repository that made it possible view WordPress page templates in the admin.

I called it Page Template Dashboard – naming things isn’t easy, and even when you do, it’s obviously not great – but WordPress has changed a lot in three years.

View WordPress Page Templates with Page Template Dashboard

Remember when WordPress looked like this?

In three years, a lot can change in your personal life too, and this makes it hard to work on personal projects. But when you can steal a few hours – usually late at night – it makes it possible to revisit and update projects like this.

So last night, I release the latest version of Page Template Dashboard.

Continue reading

WooCommerce Integrations with WordPress Namespaces

WooCommerce Integrations, which I’ll talk at length about a bit more in the moment, is a neat way to provide your custom set of options into the native WooCommerce platform.

But if you’re using namespaces, WooCommerce, WordPress, and more then it can get bit cumbersome when trying to make all of it work together.

Luckily, thanks to the nature of open source and people involved, we don’t have to operate by ourselves, and there’s plenty of people and resources available to help us get our questions answered and get our work done.

I’ll talk a bit more about these particular individuals later in the post, but first I want to cover WooCommerce integrations and how to make them work with namespaced code.

Continue reading

Setting Up MailCatcher for MAMP and WordPress

Though it’s been around longer than Local (or previously Pressmatic), MailCatcher was brought to the attention of many WordPress developers.

MailCatcher, MAMP, and WordPress: MailCatcher

In short, it makes it easy to start monitoring local development emails sent from WordPress. And if you’re someone dealing with templates, email customization, and more then you know how tiring it can be to tweak, send, tweak, send, and repeat.

If you’re not using Local, it’s still possible – and easy – to set up MailCatcher. And if you do a lot of work with anything that deals with WordPress emails (especially in eCommerce), then I think it’s worth setting up.
Continue reading

« Older posts Newer posts »

© 2025 Tom McFarlin

Theme by Anders NorenUp ↑