Author: Tom (Page 42 of 428)

Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays (For 2019)

December 25, 2019 / Tom

Every year, I try to take the time off from Christmas to New Year’s to be with family and friends and this year is no different.

During my time off, I’ve spent a bunch of time with my family, seen Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker (and it was great to share the experience with my kids to see the movie on the big screen!), and already spent some time with my in-laws to celebrate the holiday.

Quick Tip: Deleting a Git Tag

December 19, 2019 / Tom

When working with Git, there are a number of things that I find myself doing often enough that I assume I’m not the only one who has encountered the task.

So I thought I’d start a set of posts related to working with Git that may prove useful for anyone who’s also working with Git and who may be also encounter something similar.

These aren’t long posts. Instead, simple things that you can do that may help you with your work.

The only thing I want to note is that I don’t use a Git GUI. This does not mean they can’t work with a GUI (since you can use them simultaneously), but they are meant to be used on the command-line.

First: Deleting a Git Tag.

Remove Empty Shortcodes 0.5.0

December 17, 2019 / Tom

A couple of weeks ago, I shared a small plugin I was working on, Remove Empty Shortcodes, that will – as the name implies – remove empty shortcodes from posts and pages where shortcodes are no longer present.

Today, I’ve tagged another release of the plugin and its available for download on GitHub.

Deactivating WordPress Plugins with SQL

December 12, 2019 / Tom

If you inherit a WordPress codebase, regardless of the age of the project, there may be a lot of context that you don’t have as to why certain decisions were made or how things were implemented.

This may include the server, infrastructure used to help power the site or the app, and other contextual information about the environment in which it was running.

This type of information can be server-related information, PHP version, database type, information that’s actually stored in the database especially if you do a database import, and so on.

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Ideally, all of this is handed over but that’s not always the case. Anyway, say you attempt to start it up and then when you attempt to start up the application, not only does it not work but it either shows a white screen or displays a message about technical problems with your installation.

How To Fix the Referenced PHPCompatibility Sniff Error

December 5, 2019 / Tom

There are a lot of nice packages that we can use in our PHP-based projects and if you’re using Composer or GrumPHP, PHPCompatibility is one that I recommend including your projects especially if you’re writing code for something that’s going to run across multiple versions of PHP (that is, on hosts that offer different versions).

This is a set of sniffs for PHP CodeSniffer that checks for PHP cross-version compatibility. It will allow you to analyse your code for compatibility with higher and lower versions of PHP.
PHPCompatibility Repository

This is something that be installed within composer and it’s something that I recommend for people writing code for WordPress because of how much variation exists within our hosts.

Occasionally, though, you may see a problem like this:

And if you run $ phpcs -i you may get a message that’s unclear.