Author: Tom (Page 146 of 428)

Once you’ve worked in the WordPress economy long enough, you become familiar with the larger players, smaller players, and everyone in between. You also gain a level of awareness with the various things people use as their WordPress tools.

The thing about “tools” is that it’s such a generic term, it depends on what it is you do with WordPress that defines what your tools may be.

• If you’re someone who creates sites for others through the use of off-the-shelf products like themes and plugins, then your tools may include a suite of various themes, plugins, and preferred hosts.
• If you’re a developer, then you may have a preferred piece of software for your local development environment, version control, staging environments, preprocessors, and so on.
• If you’re a designer, then you may have your sources of inspiration, your tools for editing photographs, designing collateral, and so on.

Regardless of what you do within the WordPress economy, it’s important to make sure that you know with whom you’re doing business.

And this sounds a bit like obvious advice, but hang with me for a few paragraphs.

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WordPress plugin design is not something that we often read about explicitly, is it? Instead, we often talk about functionality, performance, and things like that (not that they are unimportant, but they are just one part of the conversation).

When it comes to WordPress plugins, the functionality one offers may range from very small to incredibly large. And this is how it is with almost any type of product, isn’t it?

“Plugins extend and expand the functionality of WordPress. 46,537 plugins with 1,392,817,734 total downloads are at your fingertips.”

Sometimes, I think we have a tendency to want to say “focused, and lean” with smaller plugins as if a larger plugin can be described as such simply because of its nature.

But that’s not true.

There are very small, well-built plugins that offer one or two features. And there are large plugins that are also well-built that offer a plethora of features. On the flip side, either type may also be unfocused, cobbled together, and may be anything but what we’d like it to be.

When you look at the landscape of all that’s offered regarding WordPress plugins, it raises a few questions (at least from a developer’s perspective).

I’m going to cover them all in this post, too! Or not.

But seriously, one of the things I’ve been thinking about is this:

At what point do you begin organizing your code, so it includes namespaces, autoloading, dependency management, and other such features that take it beyond a collection of classes or functions?

This implies a lot about a given hosting environment and a developer’s level of familiarity with PHP and experience with other tools, but that’s secondary to the question (and I’ll cover all of that momentarily).

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CSV files are a topic that I’ve previously discussed on this blog. But one of the things that come with sharing information in this format over time is that new information, strategies, or techniques can be learned.

This is one of the challenges of others finding old content, isn’t it? But I digress on that.

For those who haven’t read my previous entries, you can see some of them here:

• Idiosyncracies of Creating a CSV File in WordPress
• Importing CSV Files: Preventing Timeouts

And it’s not that those are irrelevant. I might change a few things here and there, but that’s the purpose of this post. Instead, I want to build on some of the things mentioned above.

After all, working with CSV files in web applications is nothing new, and it’s not going anywhere anytime soon. So why not share some additional strategies that I’ve found useful in making my projects a bit more robust (and see what you have to add to it in the comments :).

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As it relates to uploading files in WordPress, the CMS offers some convenient API functions that make it easy for developers.

The standard uploads directory in a WordPress installation.

Some of these functions include:

• wp_upload_bits
• wp_handle_upload
• wp_handle_sideload
• media_handle_sideload

These functions, though, often require us to limit our files to the uploads directory. And many times, that’s great. It gives us a single place to store our files and it gives us one place to retrieve our files when needed.

But if you’re working on a web application or even an advanced plugin, this isn’t always the ideal situation. For example, let’s say that you have a plugin in which you want to have your own uploads directory, and that’s where you want to store your files.

What do you do in that case?

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