Software Engineering in WordPress, PHP, and Backend Development

Author: Tom (Page 366 of 427)

Talking About WordPress in High School

This past year, I’ve participated in a number of different meetups and speaking engagements all of which are oriented around blogging, WordPress, development, or something similar.

Generally speaking, I’ve enjoyed the events that I’ve attended. I always try to keep it really laid back (I make a lot of my presentations in Paper, even), and do what I can to make the events more of a discussion rather than a lecture.

For the most part, it goes well, but yesterday was a bit of a different audience: high school students.

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Object Oriented and Procedural Code in WordPress Plugin Programming

WordPress Plugin Programming

One of the things that makes developing for WordPress so fun is the nature of its extensibility through plugins. When it comes to WordPress plugin programming, there are actually two ways that you can write your plugins:

  1. Object-Oriented Programming
  2. Procedural Programming

In the lastest series running on Envato, Stephen Harris and I provide an in-depth discussion on both of these strategies.

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Everything’s An App (Even If We Don’t Know It)

Ever since smartphones have become mainstream, there are apps for almost everything. Prior to this revolution (if that’s what you’d like to call it), we had phones that a had a few [weak] tools on them, but most of our work was done on a computer.

And the computer had software, or computer programs, or applications – whatever you’d like to call them – and that’s how we got work done.

This is likely going to make me sound a bit weird, but for the past few months I’ve been periodically asking people how they define an app. Of course, I don’t ask it like that. Instead, it’s goes something more like:

So, hey, what’s an app?

And nine times out of 10, I end up getting the same response:

A little program (or icon, even!) on a phone.

Some people have responded that it’s also something on their tablet. Fair enough.

I definitely attribute this change in vernacular to Apple. After all, they’re the one’s who started the App Store with the vision that people could create an app for anything.

But what is an app?

From a problem-solving standpoint – not even a computing standpoint – I have this idea that almost everything is an app.

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Installing Git For Command Line on Mac OS X

For The TL;DR version, you can download Git For OS X in its Google Code Repository.

When sharing my WordPress Developer Toolbox, I mentioned that GitBox is my Git client of choice. As with most software that offers a command line variant, I occasionally end up using a Terminal session to manage some of my Git repositories.

Depending on what other applications you have installed on your system, you may not actually have command line access to Git. If that’s the case and you’d rather not install the full Xcode development suite (because it does include the command line utility), there is an alternative.

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WordPress Settings Sandbox: A Working Example of the Settings API

A few months ago, I completed a series of articles for Envato called The Complete Guide To The WordPress Settings API.

The purpose of the series was to walkthrough the WordPress Settings API taking a look at sections, settings, fields, and how they all fit together to properly build a WordPress project using menus, tabbed navigation, input elements, and data sanitization all of which interact properly with the WordPress database.

As part of the article, I also provided an open-source project called the WordPress Settings Sandbox that was to serve as a working demonstration of the WordPress Settings API. Continue reading

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