Author: Tom (Page 275 of 428)

Updating a WordPress Post in the Save Post Action

April 24, 2014 / Tom / 0 Comments

For those who have worked with WordPress long enough, you’re likely familiar and comfortable with how hooks works – that is, you’re familiar and comfortable with the event-driven design pattern.

Sure, it’s a bit different than many other frameworks and foundations that use MVC, MVVM, and some other remix of the model-view paradigm, but I don’t think that’s really here nor there in terms of which is better. This is what WordPress uses and it’s easy enough – and powerful enough – to work with once you’ve got it.

But that’s not to say it’s not without it’s nuances.

For example, one of the challenges of working with event-driven design is understanding how hooks work throughout the page lifecycle, how it’s possible to actually get stuck in an infinite loop if you’re not careful, and how to work with the various hooks to prevent this from happening.

Regarding Our Efforts at Pragmatic Programming

April 23, 2014 / Tom / 0 Comments

To me, one of the most frustrating aspects of programming comes in something as seemingly trivial as how to best name and organize files. And by that, I mean the process of figuring out what to name directories and files all the way down to how to best name classes, variables, and functions.

If it doesn’t sound trivial, then maybe it just sounds silly especially to those who are more experienced programmers.

Interestingly enough, this is a bit more of a challenge for some, but not so much for others. After all, isn’t this is where standards come in to play? That is to say, isn’t this where they help us make decisions on how to avoid problems just like this?

Sure, in some ways, but there are times in which standards may not cover all cases or certain aspects of what we’re trying to do.

So what then?

If I Knew Then What I Know Now (About Code Reviews)

April 22, 2014 / Tom / 0 Comments

When I draft posts, I normally don’t aim to write to any particular age group, demographic, or personality type – I generally just share my opinions on certain WordPress-related topics and/or development-related material.

But everyone mixes it up a little bit every now and then, right?

And so if I had to define a specific type person to whom this post is most relevant, it would be any one of the following:

Those who are just getting into software and/or web development,
Those who have been into development for a while but have yet to share code online,
And those who spend time critiquing others who are working to get better by publicly sharing code.

Maybe this is geared more towards the usual audience, but whatever the case: this is more of a retrospective post that I would have like to have read prior to where I am now.

Title Capitalization for WordPress

April 21, 2014 / Tom / 0 Comments

When it comes to drafting and editing posts, one of the things that I often have to refer to is how to properly capitalize certain headings. I’d figure after this long, I’d actually have all of the rules memorized, but apparently that’s not the case (no pun intended :).

Anyway, in order to help with this, I was using a third-party tool for double-checking proper capitalization of post titles and heading elements. But, over time, that became a bit tedious so I created a small plugin to automatically and properly capitalize post titles and the heading elements of post content.

Stretching myself as creatively as possible, I’ve opted to call the plugin Title Capitalization for WordPress.

Thoughts on WordPress Developers, Communities, and Products

April 18, 2014 / Tom / 0 Comments

For those of you who are involved in working with building things for WordPress- specifically, premium plugins and themes – then you’re likely plugged closely into what many refer to as “the WordPress community.”

Granted, I’m not saying it’s not a community – it is – but it’s just part of the community, right? I mean, the word encompasses people who use WordPress to blog, people who are fans of the software, those who have contributed to it, those who build things with it, and so on.

All that to say, the community has a variety of facets.

And the challenge to this is that when we spend so much time with our subset of the community, it’s easy to accidentally develop a degree of tunnel vision such that we become at least partially focused on writing things, designing things, or buildings things with our part of the community in mind rather than our customers.