Author: Tom (Page 392 of 427)

Remove JavaScript Tags From WordPress Input Fields

June 20, 2012 / Tom / 0 Comments

When building custom functionality into WordPress, it’s important to make sure that you’re properly sanitizing data. WordPress provides an array of utility functions for doing this.

But there are times when completely sanitizing the input may be too much. For example, say you’re working on a widget that has a text field and you’re comfortable with allowing the user to input styles and markup but want to remove any JavaScript. Using strip_tags and strip_slashes is overkill, obviously. These would reduce the input into nothing but the raw text.

Here’s a simple way to removing JavaScript tags from input fields while still supporting inline CSS and HTML markup:

Introduction To WordPress Unit Testing

June 19, 2012 / Tom / 0 Comments

Unit Testing (or other testing methodologies) is one of those things that’s often relegated to larger software applications or enterprise-level projects and seems to be often overlooked in the context of WordPress.

Why is that?

WordPress is a web application and the tools, themes, plugins, and extensions that we build are software that run on top of said platform and the platform as well as the certain themes and/or plugins can be used anywhere from just a few hundred people up to several million people.

In some cases, I think this qualifies it as enterprise-grade. Regardless, WordPress should not be excluded from the best practices in software development. As such, I’m contributing a series of articles on Envato that is meant to help you get started with WordPress unit testing.

It’s targeted at beginners but aims to lay a foundation on which more experienced developers can build. Additionally, I’m providing working examples of plugins and themes both of which have been built using unit tests:

Throughout the series, I walk you through how to setup your local development environment to include both PHPUnit and the WordPress Testing framework along with giving a background of unit testing, what it is, why it matters, how it can improve plugin architecture and theme development.

All of the code is also available on my GitHub page:

Hello Reader is a sample plugin
Basic Theme is a sample theme

Configure Coda 2 To Connect MySQL

June 13, 2012 / Tom / 0 Comments

If you’ve recently installed or upgraded to Coda 2, are using MAMP to manage your development stack, and are looking to use the built-in MySQL frontend, here’s what you need to do in order to connect to MySQL in Coda 2.

Coda 2 and MAMP MySQL Socket

Setting up a connection between your project and its database is easy. It really only takes a single step though it assumes you know the username and password to your local database (which I can’t imagine why you wouldn’t know it :).

WordPress Ajax API Example

June 11, 2012 / Tom / 0 Comments

This plugin is no longer maintained; however, you can still view the source on GitHub.

As a developer, one of the challenges of working with WordPress as a platform is that finding information isn’t always easy. Sure, the Codex is a fantastic resource, but it lacks in a few areas.

On the other hand, it’s relatively easy to google for examples on how to do almost anything you’d like with WordPress, but these examples can often be of poor quality – just because something works doesn’t mean that it’s done correctly.

As I begin to shift my focus to talking more about WordPress development, I hope to be able to share a few thoughts on how to achieve certain tasks using the best practices with the WordPress API.

In recent weeks, I’ve been doing a fair amount of work using the WordPress Ajax API, so that seemed like a good place to start.

PHPUnit, WordPress, and MAMP

June 7, 2012 / Tom / 0 Comments

I’ve begun using PHPUnit, WordPress, and MAMP to introduce unit testing to my theme and plugin development. Obviously, this requires an installation of PHPUnit and the WordPress testing framework. Because I use MAMP for local development, I had to do some additional customization to get the frameworks setup.

Here are the steps necessary to install PHPUnit and the WordPress Tests on Mac OS X using MAMP: