Author: Tom (Page 390 of 427)

Programmatically Create a User in WordPress

July 12, 2012 / Tom / 0 Comments

If you're an advanced developer or just want the TL;DR version of this, skip to the code.

When it comes to building a certain type of web app, I obviously think that WordPress is a viable option. Out of all of the contract work I’ve done in the past couple of years, about half of the projects have required some form of user management.

That is, they usually want users to create their own accounts, set a few fields such as their name and email address, and then be emailed when all is setup.

Out of the box, WordPress offers easy user management through its dashboard and if you’re running some type of blog or editorial site, there’s no need to deviate. But if you’re building an application, there are alternative ways to handle users.

Case in point: say that designer has created a solid look and feel for the site. If you force users to use the built-in dashboard to create or manage their profiles, then you’re yanking them out of the site, dropping them into some new experience, and then returning them to the site from which they came.

Lame, right?

There are better ways to introduce user registration and profile management into an app built on WordPress. Though your mileage may vary based on the needs of you project, here’s a how you can programmatically create a user in WordPress.

WordPress Generators and Why I Dislike Them

July 11, 2012 / Tom / 0 Comments

WordPress Generators

At this point, it’s relatively easy to find a generator to do almost anything you want with WordPress. In fact, you can assemble an entire theme with custom post types, taxonomies, and options all without actually writing any code.

Bummer.

But you know what I’m talking about – generators are small web-based tools that are used to, er, generate code for you based on a couple of inputs that you specify on an interface.

Off the top of my head, I can think of…

Generators for custom post types
Options frameworks for easily creating settings pages
Generators for taxonomies
Custom theme generators
…and more.

Don’t get me wrong, I think that these tools have their place in the development space (in fact, my boilerplates have even been converted to generators!).

But as a profesional developer and someone who cares about writing quality code tailored exactly for the problem at hand and as someone who wants to create the highest-quality products that I can, I dislike WordPress generators.

PEAR Command Not Found

July 9, 2012 / Tom / 0 Comments

Over the weekend, I updated my MAMP PRO installation to 2.1.0. After doing so, I needed to reinstall PHPUnit via Pear but I hit a snag: I kept receive the “pear command not found” console message.

Luckily, it’s a relatively easy fix but it does come with a caveat:

Migrating To Standard 3

July 5, 2012 / Tom / 0 Comments

Getting Started with Standard 3

With the recent launch of Standard 3, John – responsible for business development at 8BIT and a professional blogger – is going to be hosting a meetup later this month during which he’ll be providing some practical advice for aspiring and experienced bloggers for migrating to Standard 3.

This will be a great opportunity for anyone that’s looking to get started with blogging, update an existing installation of Standard, or looking to migrate over to Standard to have their questions asked.

Here’s what we have planned:

WordPress For Application Development

July 3, 2012 / Tom / 0 Comments

As far as software is concerned, I’m particularly fond of working on web applications and have spent the majority of my career focused on exactly that.

Specifically, I spent the first few years of my career working on enterprise applications in .NET. Like any programmer, I spent a lot of my free time tinkering with various languages, frameworks, and tools partly because it was fun and partly because I wanted to stay current on newer technologies.

It’s funny, though: The longer you work on web applications the more you recognize that all of them – at some basic level – come back to the same thing: getting data into the database and getting data out of the database.

Sure, there’s a lot going on between the two and there are tons things to consider but, at the end of the day, that’s what’s happening and everything else is details.