Author: Tom (Page 374 of 427)

Two Tools I Use For Testing Mobile and Responsive WordPress Projects

October 12, 2012 / Tom / 0 Comments

For developers, the terms “mobile” and “responsive” are already a bit cliche. It doesn’t really matter though, right? They’re here to stay which means that part of our job is to test mobile WordPress projects as best as we can.

Because mobile devices render content different, there are two aspects to the problem:

Some have browsers that are powerful enough to render sites just as they would on a desktop, and thus will need responsive layouts.
Users who don’t have responsive-sites use plugins such as WPTouch to give their site mobile capability which is essentially an entire other site.

This means that we, as developers, are responsible for testing:

Responsive-ready projects
Sites on which users have installed some of our work – like a plugin – that may not be compatible with, say, WPTouch.

On top of that, we do development on localhost rather than a publicly accessible environment so it can be cumbersome to have to deploy a project and get an environment setup just to go through the process of testing a site or a project only to rinse and repeat until we get it fixed.

Thankfully, it really isn’t that complicated. Here are two tools that I use to test mobile WordPress projects:

Going Above and Beyond The WordPress Coding Standards

October 11, 2012 / Tom / 0 Comments

@tommcfarlin Likewise : ) Very nice post. I’d love to see some examples re: your response in a later article of where you go above/beyond

— Brian Krogsgard (@Krogsgard) September 24, 2012

Recently, fellow tweep @Krogsgard asked about some of the things that I do to go above and beyond the basic set of WordPress Coding Standards.

To be clear, I think that the Coding Standards are the foundation on which you need to be building your coding style. They’re the foundation of writing professional-grade code for WordPress, so start with that and build on top of it.

Everything else is just bonus.

So, with that said, here’s what I try to do to go above and beyond the WordPress Coding Standards.

Ajax in WordPress: How It Works, Building a Plugin, and More

October 10, 2012 / Tom / 0 Comments

A couple of months ago, I did a short series on Envato on Ajax in the WordPress Dashboard. This month, I’m continuing to talk about Ajax in WordPress and how to include it on the frontend in your themes, plugins, and other projects.

Though the Codex has two great articles on Ajax in WordPress – that is, the introduction and how to use it on the server-side – there’s not a lot of documentation for how to implement it on the front end

Simple Country, State, and City CSV’s for Download

October 9, 2012 / Tom / 0 Comments

If you're only interested in the files and without implementation details, then you can grab them.

Every now and then, I end up working on a project that requires a form that includes county, city, and state information. More often than not, the client doesn’t about the rich data associated with any of the above – that is, they’re not particularly interested in latitude, longitude, population, or even zip code.

Simply put, they want the user to be able to select their country, select their city, and then select their state from a predefined list of options.

For the past couple of projects, I’ve been using three, very simple CSV’s for this and thought I’d share them here should anyone else want to use them. Additionally, I thought I’d share a simple implementation of how they can be used in WordPress projects.

What Constitutes Clean Code in WordPress?

October 8, 2012 / Tom / 0 Comments

When it comes to writing code specifically for WordPress, I try my best to follow a combination of the WordPress coding standards, tips and advice from various books I’ve read (which I hope to cover in a future post), tips from others in the community, and certain habits that I’ve developed along way the way.

The thing that I’ve always struggled with determining is what constitutes clean code. There is code that follows standards, then there’s clean code, and I think that the definition is almost somewhat subjective.

With the open source nature of WordPress, the desire to improve education around the platform, the desire to improve the plugins repository, and the existence of things such as Theme Review team, Theme Unit Test, and tools specifically for helping us write code, there’s an innate desire for programmers to write clean code – I just think that we could do a better job defining it.

To be clear, I don’t believe that clean code is synonymous with quality code, nor do I believe that clean code is synonymous with good code. They’re absolutely all related, but they aren’t the same thing.

With said, what does constitute clean code specifically in the context of WordPress development?