Software Engineering in WordPress, PHP, and Backend Development

Author: Tom (Page 327 of 429)

Preprocessing Comments in WordPress

For a recent project, I needed to inspect the data incoming comments before any of the other filtering on the data took place. Sounds like a big snore-fest, right? In WordPress, preprocess comment filtering is something that’s actually really easy to do, but the thing is that the documentation was lacking.

Anyway, I did actually find a hook that allowed me to do what I needed to do, though there was no official Codex page explaining exactly how to use the filter.

As such, here’s a break down of exactly what I was trying to do, and then a link to the of the Codex article I drafted after I ended up getting familiar with the hook.

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My Interview with WP Engine

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Last week, I had the pleasure of being featured on the WP Engine blog for their “Finely-Tuned Consultants” series.

If you’ve been following them on Twitter or their blog for any time now, you know they’ve interviewed some really neat people doing some really cool things with WordPress, so I consider it an honor to be able to be featured with the other consultants.

In the interview, I talk a little bit about how I got into computers, how I got into WordPress, and then answer a series of questions provided by Austin Gunter.

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Two Months of Free Flywheel Hosting!

Today, I’m happy to share that I’ve recently partnered with the guys at Flywheel to offer you guys two months of free Flywheel Hosting.

As much as I enjoy talking about development and related topics on this blog, one of the things that I dig the most is being able to do giveaways primarily because I appreciate the time you guys take to read and comment on various articles.

But enough of all this emo stuff – let’s talk about Flywheel, the service, and how you can take advantage of the giveaway.

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The Great Expectations of Modifying WordPress Themes

Earlier this week, I was talking with Chris – our product midwife at 8BIT – about the differences in expectations between engineers, developers, designers, tweakers, and end users when it comes to modifying WordPress themes.

I started my career in software engineering – specifically, I used to work in .NET followed by Ruby on Rails – as well as object-oriented programming before moving into fulltime WordPress development.

And you know what they say: Old habits die hard.

Old Habit Die Hard

Did someone say “die hard?”

Case in point: ask my team what I did when I first became the lead developer of Standard. I spent more time yanking out template code, abstracting it into `functions.php` and a collection of other files all of which would make sense to someone comes from a different background, but not WordPress.

And here I am, years later, where I’m significantly more familiar with “the WordPress-way” (even writing blog posts on Coding Standards and various APIs even) and there are still issues to be solved around this very issue.

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Markdown Code For WordPress 0.2.0

A couple of weeks ago, I released an extremely simple plugin for easily using markdown code syntax within the WordPress post editor.

I receive a lot of great suggestions in the comments (many of which I’m still planning to get around to working on); however, I had a few minutes to introduce one more feature: markdown code for comments.

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