Author: Tom (Page 65 of 428)

WordPress Widgets: Refactoring, Part 1

November 28, 2018 / Tom

The last post included a lot of information on setting up code quality tools in your WordPress development environment, but they are necessary if we are going to be doing a lot of refactoring.

But as I mentioned at the start of this post, laying code quality tools first provides us with a foundation we can use as we refactor the boilerplate (which we clearly need to do given the amount of red shown by GrumPHP).

Honestly, I see these as necessary if you’re going to be doing any type of development hence the need to show how to set them up.

Regardless, the previous post shows just how much work we have cut out for us, right?

Screen Capture on 2018-11-20 at 12-50-27.gif

Now we’re going to start with refactoring the WordPress Widget Boilerplate.

This will not only improve the code quality but also walk us through some object-oriented principles that we can apply when building our widgets and we can apply in future WordPress development efforts.

A Helper Function for Admin Notices

November 27, 2018 / Tom

If you’re in the business of building plugins, or even themes for that matter, and are incorporating object-oriented practices into your work then you’re likely faced with serialization of some type. And one of the aspects of serialization that it requires some type of feedback for the user.

This can be a success message, a failure message, or a message simply warning the user that some went wrong or perhaps something should be updated.

Whatever the case, WordPress provides all of the facilities that we need; however, we can make it even easier on ourselves by writing a helper function for admin notices. It’s simple, too.

Discounted Memberships: Black Friday Thru Cyber Monday

November 23, 2018 / Tom

As with many other blogs, shops, products, and services during this time of year, I’m offering discounted memberships on this blog from Black Friday thru Cyber Monday.

Discounted Memberships: 2018

What does this really get you, though?

Happy Thanksgiving

November 22, 2018 / Tom

As is the same with every single year (well, save for last year when I forgot to write a post – or simply neglected to do so 🤷🏻‍♂️), we’re celebrating Thanksgiving in the United States.

I dig this time of year and continue to do so the more our family grows, and the more time we’re able to spend together.

Happy Thanksgiving 2018

WordPress Widgets: Starting with Standards

November 21, 2018 / Tom

The purpose of this series is to start doing a deeper dive into working with object-oriented programming in the context of WordPress.

And since the WordPress Widgets API is one of the APIs that does use object-oriented practices, it’s a logical place to start. Further, it will give us some foundational techniques that we can use to apply to future work as we see how to build more object-oriented projects on WordPress in future series.

So far, we’ve covered the following:

WordPress Widgets: An Object-Oriented Approach. The Widgets API provides a solid litmus test and example of how to get started with object-oriented programming in WordPress.
WordPress Widgets: How to Detect Object-Oriented Programming. The goal is to arm you with everything you need to detect object-oriented practices.

If you’re not caught up, now’s a great time to do so. And if you have, then you’ll recall from the last post, we ended with the following note:

That is, we’ll revisit the WordPress Widget Boilerplate and I’m going to be refactoring it in its current state to adopt more modern PHP standards.

To begin updating the WordPress Widget Boilerplate to follow said standards, we need to do a few things:

create a branch from the existing boilerplate,
install code quality tools,
ensure our IDE is properly set up,
and begin refactoring the code to said standards.

And that’s what we’re going to start doing with this post.