Author: Tom (Page 367 of 427)

A Two-Phase Production Deployment Plan

November 21, 2012 / Tom / 0 Comments

For anyone that’s been doing software development for any reasonable length of time – especially for web applications – then you’re likely familiar with Local (or Development), Staging (or Test), and the Production environments.

If not:

Local or Development refers to the machine on which you’re actually building the product.
Staging or Test refers to the server designed to represent Production, though is only accessible by developers, testers, clients, and perhaps some of the end users to evaluate features prior to the official rollout.
Production is the live version of the site. No development occurs on this server.

Most developers who are in the business or closely working with their client follow this particular setup.

In the past couple of months, there have been a few times when a single production rollout has fallen short and ended up either revealing bugs that were not caught in Staging or that did not hold up under Production-level loads.

As frustrating as that can be, I’ve ended up using a sort of two-phase Production deployment plan to help mitigate this.

How To Get Post Content By Title

November 20, 2012 / Tom / 0 Comments

I've updated some of the content in this post for more clarity thanks to Stephen's comment

When it comes to retrieving content outside of The Loop or retrieving content based on certain criteria, it’s usually a matter of setting up a custom query using WP_Query.

But sometimes, setting up a full custom query, executing the loop, then resetting the post data isn’t required.

Case in point: I was recently working on a project in which the client wanted a modal dialog to appear with the title and the text from a specific page. Easy enough: use get_page_by_title.

But there’s one minor gotcha that I’ve seen more than a few times when using this method. Here’s how to get post content by title and avoid the pitfalls of doing so.

On Offering WordPress Support and Documentation

November 19, 2012 / Tom / 0 Comments

Ah, the stock photo of Tech Support for the entire Internet!

One of the challenges of providing solutions built on top of WordPress is handling expectations of support and documentation. I’m not talking about running a support forum or writing elaborate API documentation.

Instead, I’m talking about providing instructions for how users can manage their site, application, or plugin once you’ve completed work on the project.

Over the past couple of years, there have been a few things that I’ve tried. I’m definitely curious to hear you guys’ thoughts on what you’ve done and what you’ve found to be successful, but first, here’s how I’ve historically handled WordPress support after a project handoff.

My Preferred WordPress Hosting

November 16, 2012 / Tom / 0 Comments

I’m a big fan of Site5

Earlier this week, I had a couple of people shoot me an email asking who I preferred in a WordPress host. The truth is, when it comes to preferred WordPress hosting, both developers and designers have their vendors of choice.

I’m no different.

As you can tell from the screenshot above, I’m personally a big fan of Site5. This is not a sponsored post – simply a reason as to why I prefer these guys.

Quick Tip: Including jQuery in WordPress The Right Way

November 15, 2012 / Tom / 0 Comments

Much has been said on the subject of properly registering and enqueueing scripts in WordPress, so I hate to write yet another “including jQuery in WordPress the right way” post, so I’ll attempt to cover it from a different angle.

Because jQuery ships with WordPress, it’s really just a simple matter of making sure you call:

wp_enqueue_script( 'jquery' );

In your functions.php file.

But that’s really only half of it. After that, you have a matter of actually setting up your JavaScript source.