Author: Tom (Page 356 of 427)

A Screencast on Advanced WordPress Plugin Development

January 10, 2013 / Tom / 0 Comments

When it comes to building things for WordPress, one of the things that I enjoy most is building plugins.

Sure, themes are fun and I dig the functionality that they bring, but because themes often require a significant time in design – a weakness of mine – and plugins are more oriented to adding extesibility and functionality – more or less a strength of mine – I’m more partial to it.

I spend a lot of time talking about how to do certain things with WordPress, viewing it as an application framework, and trying to provide scaffolding for projects – be it plugins or functions – but one thing that I’ve never done is actually provide a solid tutorial on my process for building plugins.

In my first premium screencast for Envato, I do exactly that.

Yet Another Blogging Podcast – Episode 2: Generating and Collecting Ideas

January 10, 2013 / Tom / 0 Comments

I released the first episode of Yet Another Blogging Podcast last week in which I offered some advice on how to find your niche in blogging and then how to go very narrow within said niche.

In keeping consistent with the previous podcast, this isn’t a “For Dummies” style of podcast, nor is it meant to be prescriptive. This is simply what I’ve found to work over the past couple of years of blogging, and what I’ve seen work for a few of my peers.

I can’t guarantee any type of success (especially since success looks different to each of us), but hopefully there’s some useful information in how to extract your own ideas for generating a backlog of content for your blog.

The Pro WordPress Subreddit

January 9, 2013 / Tom / 0 Comments

One of the things that’s nice about the WordPress development community is that there’s no shortage of places to discuss what’s going on in the community.

Aside from chatting with people on Twitter, we can hop into IRC chats, listen in to other developer’s podcasts, and naturally read and respond to what other’s are writing on their blogs.

But late last week, I noticed the following tweet show up in my stream:

Are you a redditor? Love WordPress but think /r/wordpress is lacking? Come join us on the "Pro" WordPress subreddit http://t.co/LwHjYlnP

— Macho Pirate Mick Rackam (@tw2113) January 5, 2013

It’s been a long time since I’ve paid any attention to anything like Reddit – probably since college, but this particular subreddit caught my attention.

Boise QuietComfort Headphones — Gotta have a good set of headphones!

How To Get Started Podcasting

January 8, 2013 / Tom

Over the past couple of months, I’ve been doing a bit of podcasting both with my team and now on my own. It’s had it’s fair share of learning curves, but nothing terribly complicated – just a bit tedious.

In a recent post on WP Daily, I share exactly what we needed to get started podcasting.

Save Custom Post Meta – Improving The Code

January 8, 2013 / Tom

Comments are closed on this post. See the updated version for more information.

Last week, I was talking to a couple of developers on Twitter about some of the code that’s required to save custom post meta in WordPress when working with plugins or themes.

For the most part, good serialization functions are consistently formatted in the same way:

First, we check for security. If the security check fails, then we exit the function.
If security passes, then we proceed with our serialization functionality.

The thing is, the security checks are generally the same thing across the board so much so that you may even consider it somewhat of a boilerplate.

This seems like an opportunity to improve developer’s processes a bit by abstracting out some of the code that is used to save custom post meta data.

So let’s try this: