Software Engineering in WordPress, PHP, and Backend Development

Author: Tom (Page 385 of 427)

The WordPress Page Lifecycle

When working with WordPress, one of the most important things that a developer can learn is the WordPress Page Lifecycle.

Understanding this single topic will make it exceptionally easy to know when to properly include your various hooks and filters so that they don’t interfere with the rest of the application and so that speed or other data isn’t compromised in the process.

If you’ve built web applications using other frameworks, then you’re likely familiar with the typical page request lifecycle, though there are nuances that exist between each platform.

WordPress’ unique action and filter model, although powerful, may end up confusing some people coming from other backgrounds. Of course, the WordPress Codex provides a terrific article on the topic, but if you’re more of a visual learner it may not be of much help.

In that case, check our Rarst’s diagram – it’s an excellent breakdown of the core application’s life cycle along with a high-level overview of the page lifecycle.

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Notes From WordCamp San Francisco

The Internet has made the world flatter but that doesn’t mean it’s made it any easier to miss out on events that you’d like to attend, right?

Last weekend, WordCamp San Francisco – arguably the WordCamp to attend – was happening and those who are involved in WordPress in some capacity were tweeting all about the awesome things happening.

Jealousy!

In all seriousness, it was evident from the various tweets and blog posts that it was a killer time for everyone, but here’s something cool for those of us who weren’t able to attend: 23 pages of notes taken from the various sessions held throughout the weekend.

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Ending Development on WP Social Icons

WP Social Icons

About a year ago, I launched WP Social Icons – a premium plugin based on Tipsy Social Icons that attempted to make it easy to include social icons on any WordPress-powered site.

It offered the ability to sort your icons, upload your own icons, change the size, adjust the orientation, and so on.

WPCandy covered some of my thoughts on developing it, and I had the pleasure of joining Jeffro on the WordPress Weekly Podcast to talk about it.

On top of that, I gained experience on what it was like to release a small, commercial product into the WordPress Marketplace and how it compares to the free version.

Overall, the plugin was a success. But as of today, I’m officially ending development on WP Social Icons.

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Two Ways To Optimize Adding JavaScript in the WordPress Dashboard

Once you’ve been working on WordPress-based projects for a while, you quickly learn how to properly include stylesheets and JavaScript dependencies for the administrative dashboard or the public-facing aspect of a theme or plugin.

That is, you’re familiar with admin_enqueue_scripts and wp_enqueue_scripts.

And although these two hooks provide a way to segment the way in which scripts are loaded, it’s possible to further optimize how JavaScript dependencies are loaded by only loading them on the page that they are required.

Specifically, there are two ways that you can add JavaScript in WordPress in the dashboard:

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