Author: Tom (Page 378 of 427)

How To Get a Page’s Permalink By Slug

September 19, 2012 / Tom / 0 Comments

If you’re used to working with The Loop, then you’re all too familiar with the_permalink. Simply put, it’s how to get the link to the post currently being rendered in the browser.

But if you’re working on anything more advanced than using the typical Loop, then you may be looking to get the permalink for a post by other means – perhaps by a page slug or by a page’s title.

I’ve had to do this in some recent work, as well, so here’s what I do when I need to get permalink by slug:

Why I’m Against Placing Custom Hooks in WordPress Themes

September 18, 2012 / Tom / 0 Comments

One of the things that I my team and I are often asked is if we’re ever going to place hooks in our core theme files for Standard. The short answer is “no,” but there’s actually a few reasons why I’m personally against placing custom hooks in WordPress themes.

Although this is stemming largely from building and managing a commercial theme, the discussion isn’t limited to that particular scenario. Rather, this is something that I’ve actually discussed with a number of other WordPress users and developers.

Overall, I’m generally against placing custom hooks in WordPress theme files, so I thought I’d share my reasons why I’m not a fan of doing this.

How I Organize My Files When Developing WordPress Themes

September 17, 2012 / Tom / 0 Comments

I recently shared how I organize my files when developing WordPress plugins, but since I also work with themes and have recently been building two applications using WordPress, I thought I’d also share my thoughts on organizing WordPress theme files.

For what it’s worth, I think that some developers – especially beginners – often try to make the plugin model fit the theme model or vice versa, and although both types of projects are aimed specifically at WordPress, they require different approaches.

Simply put, theme file organization differs from plugin file organization. With that said, here’s how I organize my files when developing WordPress themes.

Resolving wp_redirect and the “Headers Already Sent” message

September 14, 2012 / Tom / 0 Comments

I’ve been working on building a web application in WordPress on which I’m implementing a set of rewrite rules to introduce RESTful routing into the application.

Once the application is done, I hope to provide a significantly more in-depth post on how I built it, but in the mean time I figured I’d cover how I’m handling certain challenges that I’ve faced in development.

In this case, I needed to fire a call to wp_redirect after a certain event happened, but kept getting the PHP error:

Cannot modify header information - headers already sent by (output started ... )

Here’s how I ended up resolving the wp_redirect headers already sent message.

Use Markdown To Write Email (and Other Rich Text)

September 14, 2012 / Tom / 0 Comments

I dig markdown. Aside from the obvious uses on GitHub, I’ve also begun to use it in changelogs, README files, and general text-based notes that I take.

The other day, I sent the following tweet:

i wish i could write email in markdown

— Tom McFarlin (@tommcfarlin) September 5, 2012

And it’s true. If I could, I’d use markdown to write almost anything in place of using rich formatting. Once you get the hang of it, it’s faster, it has clean syntax that are even easy to follow if they aren’t styled, and it’s much simpler than, say, markup (hence, ahem, markdown).

Thanks to a tip from Bobby Shirley, it’s completely possible – and easy – markdown email.