Author: Tom (Page 352 of 429)

You Can’t Ask Users To Upgrade WordPress To Fix Their Problems

February 6, 2013 / Tom / 0 Comments

I think one of the major characteristics of anyone who’s a digital native – that is, anyone who spends a vast amount of time on the Internet and that has a certain level of proficiency – has no problem upgrading their apps to the latest version and tinkering around with the new features and/or looking for new bugs.

I mean, we can always roll back, right?

And when it comes to WordPress – especially for those who build things for the platform – it’s not at all uncommon to see us urging our users and others to upgrade, as well.

I love updates as the next geek, but we can’t blame others for wanting to wait to upgrade WordPress immediately, nor can we expect everyone to upgrade WordPress as quickly as we do.

Save Custom Post Meta – Revisited, Refactored, Refined.

February 5, 2013 / Tom / 0 Comments

About a month ago, I shared a post that discussed the code that’s required to save custom post meta data. Generally speaking, this is a lot of boilerplate that’s required to make sure that the data being saved is permitted and that the author has permissions to do so.

Of course, depending on the nature of your project, the code will vary a little, but for the majority of the cases, it’s all the same.

But thanks to several commenters and contributors, the code has been completely refactored, and I’ve actually been using it in a recent project.

Startbox WordPress and View Page Templates

February 4, 2013 / Tom / 0 Comments

One of the things that I love about the open source community is not only how others can contribute to your work to create a better product, but how your work can be folded into someone else’s work.

Last week, Brian Richards (who works on Startbox WordPress) tweeted me:

@tommcfarlin I really want to appropriate this page template column idea (http://t.co/3ox9IcCv) directly into @wpstartbox. May I?

— Brian Richards (@rzen) January 31, 2013

And I was more than happy to oblige.

This whole short exchange brought up several aspects of open source software that I really appreciate.

Apps or Programs?

February 4, 2013 / Tom / 0 Comments

As with practically anyone who considers themselves a digital native, I dig using Twitter. One of the things I love the most is seeing various people’s opinions on many things (not everything, but I digress), especially when it’s related to an interest of my own.

Last week, Baratunde tweeted the following:

https://twitter.com/baratunde/status/296319290263629825

Though I respect the opinion, and definitely get where he’s coming from – probably more than I’m going to convey in this post – I disagree with the sentiment.

Finding Functions in WordPress (Those Not in The API)

February 1, 2013 / Tom / 0 Comments

As significant as the WordPress API is in building plugins, themes, and applications, there are often times where we may find ourselves needing to write custom functions to achieve something that we know WordPress already does.

Case in point: With Page Template Dashboard, I wanted to be able to show the name of the template rather than the filename. I knew WordPress was doing it, but I couldn’t find an actual API function for it.

So what’s the best thing to do in this particular situation?