Author: Tom (Page 152 of 430)

Late Escape WordPress Data

August 17, 2016 / Tom / 0 Comments

When working with themes and plugins, it’s a common practice to escape WordPress data. Honestly, this is a standard practice in all web development:

Whenever you’re retrieving information from the database to display to the user, it should be validated and escaped so that nothing but clean, readable text is rendered to the user.

In WordPress, you’re likely to see this in one of two ways (or maybe both ways depending on your setup):

You’re retrieving information from the database via get_option and then displaying it to the user.
You’re retrieving information from the cache and displaying it to the user.

There may be other ways that you’re grabbing the information, but the specifics beyond what’s above are outside the purpose and scope of this post.

Instead, the point I’m working towards is that we should escape WordPress data in the context of a template file or a view rather than in the context of a function.

Why I Changed From Coda To Atom

August 16, 2016 / Tom / 0 Comments

Not long ago, I made the change from Coda to Atom though I never actually talked about the reasons behind this decision. Then, Bjarni sent me the following tweet a few weeks ago:

Interested to hear why you moved away from MAMP to @pressmaticwp and are you still using coda @tommcfarlin

— Bjarni Wark (@Bjarni) July 26, 2016

I’ll talk about the transition from MAMP to Pressmatic in a future post. In this post, I’m going to focus on the reasons and my thoughts on changing from Coda to Atom as it stands right now.

And for those who love a good software holy war, this is not the post fo rit.

Humbling Experiences as a Developer

August 15, 2016 / Tom / 0 Comments

When working to improve yourself, one of the most humbling experiences as a developer is when you have a breakthrough on a concept with which you’ve been struggling only to find out just how much more other people know and just how much more you have to learn.

This isn’t something that’s limited to WordPress, of course. This is something that isn’t even limited to programming. It transcends a variety of disciplines, hobbies, and so on (remember, say, when you were first learning to play barre chords on the guitar?)

Acoustic Guitar

But I don’t focus on other disciplines when writing on this blog (the zoomed in picture of the guitar not-withstanding).

Personal Involvement and Improvement in WordPress

August 12, 2016 / Tom / 0 Comments

A couple of weeks ago, a friend (who I finally had a chance to meet earlier this year) sent me two questions that I thought would best be covered in the context of this blog.

Specifically, the questions are around evaluating the skill of potential and existing employees in the context of personal development rather than if a person is worth hiring.

I’ll share the actual questions momentarily, but I think it’s important to note that my experience in doing this within the context of WordPress, let alone open source, is very different than when working in a corporate job working on a closed source application.

Involvement and Improvement in WordPress: The Original Cube Farm

No, corporate environments aren’t all like this. It’s fun to think of them that way, though :).

That in and of itself could probably be its post (and it’s not a bad thing any more than it’s a good thing), but I thought I’d offer whatever input I have with hopes of having others chime in via the comments.

Loading WordPress Assets, Part 1

August 11, 2016 / Tom / 0 Comments

Loading WordPress assets usually consist of making multiple calls wp_enqueue_script or wp_enqueue_style, but this makes for redundant calls and unnecessarily long methods.

So I’ve been experimenting with a variety of different ways to load assets. And though I’m not planning to layout the final version of the code for doing this in this post, I thought it’d be worth starting from the first pass at how we can improve our process.

After all, even if there’s one degree of improvement to make in your work, isn’t it something worth considering?