Author: Tom (Page 278 of 433)

Marked as Read Because of Lack of Time?

May 10, 2014 / Tom / 0 Comments

I rarely – if ever – write on Saturday, but this is something short and sweet so it seems to be okay. One of the aspects of this site is that I end to write articles that vary between 700 – 1000 words (not including code).

With as much information as we’re inundated with on a daily basis, I can’t help but wonder if some of those posts are being lost in the shuffle, marked as read because of the lack of time people have (and believe me, I know we all have a lack of time), or if it’s too much to digest each day of the week.

I know that a lot of people are against the daily blogging thing, a lot of people are for it, and that’s fine with me – we’ve got our opinions and our preferences to which we’re all entitled, and we have the ability to choose what we want to read, what we don’t want to read, and when we want to read it.

To that end, the schedule at which a person blogs has never been an issue for me; however, personally, I’ve noticed that longer form articles can be a bit of a time sink when I want to read them, but don’t have the ability to do so.

So I’ve got a question for those who are willing to give some honest feedback.

Title Capitalization for WordPress 1.1.2

May 9, 2014 / Tom / 0 Comments

A couple of weeks ago, I released the first version of Title Capitalization for WordPress. After the first version was released, I received some feedback both in the form of code reviews, issues, and some other minor updates.

In case you missed it, I released 1.1.2 to GitHub on May 4th (because you should always ship something on Star Wars day :).

Adding Multiple Sections on WordPress Options Pages

May 8, 2014 / Tom

One of the most confusing aspects of working with WordPress is the Settings API.

In an attempt to make a little bit easier to understand, I’ve written a series that takes a long look at the API as well as an example project that’s available for download for others to study (and to contribute to in order to improve).

But, as with most things in programming, there are still things that can crop up now and again that can leave you scratching your head. Case in point: Let’s say that you want to introduce two sections (or three or four, even) to a single options page.

Unless you do this correctly, you’re likely to notice that the ‘Save Changes’ button will only save the changes to the last group of options. Luckily, there’s an easy way to keep your options logically grouped while also maintaing serialization through a single ‘Save Changes’ button.

Isolating Styles When Creating a Theme-Specific Plugin

May 7, 2014 / Tom / 0 Comments

This is probably the most unique way that I’ve started a post since I’ve been writing here, but given the fact that my family continues to grow every couple of years or so, I figure that it stands to reason that the forthcoming example would be inevitable.

This past weekend, I was doing the usual routine of unboxing, ahem, diapers, refilling the wipe container and so on.

I told you this was going to start off weird.

There’s nothing spectacular or unique about what you see above, except for the fact that Huggies makes both the container and the wipes that fit within the container.

But here’s the neat thing: when you purchase the wipes made by the vendor of the container, they provide a separator to let you know exactly how many to get out to fill the container.

The divider separates how many wipes fit in the container.

I hesitate to say that this is kind of “neat” because, y’know, we’re talking about diapers. Additionally, we can technically buy any wipes and/or any container just so long as the wipes stay fresh, right?

But when you purchase both of the products from the same vendor, then there’s this small bonus that you get in terms of grabbing the exact amount of wipes you need for the container. Obviously, the two were made for one another.

So, naturally, I made the leap into thinking about WordPress themes, WordPress plugins, and theme-specific plugins.

It’s what anyone would logically do, right?

Data Models in WordPress – Their Perspective, Not Ours

May 6, 2014 / Tom / 0 Comments

When it comes to treating WordPress as a web application foundation (and I dislike the use of the word framework, because that’s not what it is), one of things that I think that we, as developers, need to do a better job of doing is to introducing features that more conceptually map to the model of the data we are tasked with introducing for our users.

Sure, it’s one thing to introduce domain language into the solution that we’re building for our users, but there are greater strides that we can make in terms of introducing features and components that do a better job of mapping to the user’s problem.

Marked as Read Because of Lack of Time?

Title Capitalization for WordPress 1.1.2

Adding Multiple Sections on WordPress Options Pages

Isolating Styles When Creating a Theme-Specific Plugin

Data Models in WordPress – Their Perspective, Not Ours

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