Software Engineering in WordPress, PHP, and Backend Development
Professional WordPress Development is a topic that’s something I obviously discuss quite a bit here – I believe that WordPress has matured to a point where its potential for building not only blogs, websites, or content-managed sites has grown to where it’s a viable platform for building applications.
In order to share my thoughts on this with a wider audience, I’m currently running a series on Envato that’s all about professional WordPress Development.
I’m currently working on an application that requires users to register before logging into the site. The application is based on WordPress, but the registration process is using a custom template and requires some extra information.
As an example, I thought I’d share how I’m programmatically creating a user during the registration process, adding extra information to the user’s profile, and then displaying it in the user management dashboard.
One of the easiest mistakes to make as an early WordPress developer is understanding the difference in PHP’s include and require functions and WordPress’ built-in functions – such as get_template_part – for working with templates.
In my latest article on WPTuts+, I take a look at each of these functions.
Yesterday, I released two plugins for WordPress – Category Sticky Post and Tag Sticky Post – both of which serve the same purpose:
Allows authors to mark a post to be placed at the top of a specified archive. It’s sticky posts specifically for an archive.
The only difference is that one is specifically intended for category archives, the other with tag archives. And thus explains the clever names of each of the plugins.
As with my other plugins, I wanted to share my notes on what into building Category Sticky Post and Tag Sticky Post.
Category Sticky Post for WordPress is a plugin that allows you to mark a post as sticky within a specific category archive. It works exactly like the typical sticky post functionality within WordPress, except that it’s specifically for category archives.
This means that if you have a set of articles under one category, you can mark one to always appear at the top of the category archive.
Kinsta offers premium managed WordPress hosting for everyone, small or large. Powered by Google Platform and strengthened by Cloudflare, they take performance to the next level. All hosting plans include 24/7/365 support from their team of WordPress engineers. Get started with a free migration today.
If you are looking for WordPress guides and unbiased reviews, I recommend checking out WPKube. They also have an exclusive deals section.
© 2025 Tom McFarlin
Theme by Anders Noren — Up ↑