Author: Tom (Page 62 of 427)

WordPress Widgets: Refactoring, Part 4

December 19, 2018 / Tom

We’ve implemented a significant amount of changes to the WordPress Widget Boilerplate. If you’ve not been following along, I recommend starting at the beginning of the series and catching up.

If, however, you’ve been following along and you’re also running some of the code quality tools that examine the state of the project, then you’re going to notice a handful of errors in the console.

Normally, this is the point where I recommend paying attention to what it shares and then fixing whatever it reports, but we’re not there yet.

For example, some of the errors that our tools are showing right now are based on the fact that we have unused variables. Of course, that’s the case, though, because we haven’t started building a widget.

But there are still a few concrete classes we need to implement.

Back to Twentyseventeen for My Blogging Theme

December 18, 2018 / Tom

In the last couple of months, there have been a handful of theme shops that have been acquired by larger hosts. There are obvious benefits to those who run both the shop, the hosting company, and to the customers of the given hosting company.

This also, however, leaves niche theme shops in a unique position. I’m in the process of slowly re-building my business’ site. And in the meantime, I’ve asked the following a question (a few times, actually – yes, I’m quoting myself in a tweet 🤷🏻‍♂️):

with all of the theme shops being acquired by hosts, what are some of your favorite niché shops? (i’m still a fan of @thethemefoundry)

— Tom McFarlin (@tommcfarlin) December 6, 2018

The reason I ask, though, is two reasons:

for the past half-a-decade, we’ve watched the entire theme landscape change,
with the changes that have been introduced into the editor in WordPress 5.0 and what’s coming in the future phases as outlined in the State of the Word, I wonder how this impacts small businesses but bloggers as well.

And the purpose of this post has more to do with the latter point than anything else.

Custom Archive Templates: A Short Guide

December 13, 2018 / Tom

Whenever you’re working with archive templates in WordPress, posts are typically listed by date in descending order. That is, the most recent posts are listed at the top, and then it goes from there.

Lately, I’ve been working on a few projects that integrate with third-party APIs. These APIs return dates – sometimes two dates, a start date, and an end date – for a given event and customers want to use that information to list posts rather than the date of the post. That is, they want custom archive templates.

It’s not too hard to do this, but before doing so, I think it’s important to give some background information on how the project is built so there’s a bit more context around why, say, a custom query is needed and why you may or may not need to look into pre_get_posts.

I’ll start with a TL;DR first, though. That way, you can get the idea before reading the whole thing.

WordPress Widgets: Refactoring, Part 3

December 12, 2018 / Tom

In terms of updating the WordPress Widget Boilerplate (all of which is tracked in the develop branch), we’ve come a long way in terms of refactoring how it’s organized.

Thus far, we’ve:

looked at how the WordPress Widget API provides an example of object-oriented programming,
how we can use this API to determine object-oriented programming in other areas of WordPress,
installed tools to help us evaluate the quality of the code,
found errors that currently exist in the code in terms of modern programming standards,
and began re-organizing the code base so that it fits with more modern practices.

Now we’re ready to start refactoring this code in a much more object-oriented manner.

So if you’ve yet to catch up with the previous posts (any of them, really), I recommend doing so because it’s going to take a little while to bring this up to date. There’s a lot of code to write an explain.

Let’s get started.

Subtitle Migration: From a Theme to a Plugin

December 11, 2018 / Tom

Recently, some theme shops have been acquired by larger hosting companies. Thus, getting a copy of a theme that you want is now more difficult unless you use said host.

For those who typically read this site via RSS (or some other means), then it’s worth noting that I’ve changed this site back to a stock theme (Twentyseventeen, actually).

Subtitles Migration: A Change to Twentyseventeen

The short reason being that this is a theme that is likely to be long supported since it’s built by the WordPress.org team and it’s going to play well with all of the new and upstream features.

But when changing themes, I lost one of my favorite features: Subtitles. That is, each post that I wrote had its subtitle to help explain and give context to what the rest of the article was about.

I’ve been familiar with Philip Arthur Moore’s Subtitles plugin for some time.

Subtitle Migration: Moving to Subtitles

And the way the previous theme was built along with the way this plugin is built made it possible for me to write a small plugin to migrate all of the previous theme subtitles to the plugin subtitles.

Here’s how where it is, how to use it, and how it works.