Author: Tom (Page 84 of 428)

Code Quality Per Language Settings in Visual Studio Code

April 10, 2018 / Tom

In previous posts, I’ve talked a bit about Visual Studio Code, and though I’ve tried a variety of other editors, I keep coming back to this particular IDE.

An IDE For WordPresss Development: Visual Studio Code

Over time, it’s matured quite a bit, continues to do so, and allows plenty of customization especially for those of us working in PHP, Sass, JavaScript, and, more generally speaking, WordPress.

If you use any linters, though, you’ll find that one of the things each will talk about is the amount of whitespace that should exist before a given line of code.

So if you’re using Visual Studio Code, these are the extensions and the settings I recommend for making sure your code is up to par with whatever code quality tools you’re using.

Customizing the WordPress Administration Menu (For User Experience)

April 9, 2018 / Tom

For some projects, there are going to be times where there’s not a lot of new stuff to explore, you know? You get the requirements, you know how to solve the problems, and then you move forward with building the solution.

Then other projects that come your way and though you may not know how to do them at the beginning of the project, you know you’ll be able to do so programmatically because if it’s written in code, it’s going to be possible.

And the more you become familiar with a given set of tools or platform (like WordPress), then the more likely you are to “think in terms” of that platform, right?

Perhaps one case in point is working with the administration menu in WordPress. When it comes to projects that others build, I don’t know if they aim to create as positive experience on the front-end as the back-end, but I think it’s import to consider the entire application as an experience for the user.

Customizing the WordPress Administration Menu

And that’s why when it comes to little things – even the menu, for example – that it’s important. But what do I mean by that?

Writing Unit Tests with PHPUnit, Part 1: The Set Up

March 29, 2018 / Tom

Earlier this month, we began looking at installing PHPUnit in Visual Studio Code with the ultimate goal of learning how to write unit tests for our WordPress-based projects.

To that end, this post assumes that you’ve read the following posts and it assumes that you’ve caught up with a handful of previous posts:

And, of course, installing PHPUnit in Visual Studio Code as linked above. Once that’s done, we’ll be ready to proceed. But one thing to keep in mind is that this will night be a traditional or a comprehensive course in writing unit tests.

Intalling PHPUnit in Visual Studio Code: Installing the PHPUnit Extension

Instead, it’s all about writing unit tests for WordPress projects.

How To Remove Special Characters from Permalinks

March 27, 2018 / Tom

Whenever you’re working with WordPress and third-party APIs, there’s always a chance that you’re going to run into issues where the third-party API is not prepared to handle certain characters that exist in a permalink.

Depending on one’s permalink settings, though, this may or may not be an issue. For example, you may have your permalinks set to something like ?p=123 for each post. In that case, it’s not much of an issue.

But if you’re using “pretty permalinks” and your permalink includes something like a trademark symbol or a copyright symbol, then it may cause problems whenever you’re communicating with said third-party API.

Removing Duplicate Items with JavaScript

March 23, 2018 / Tom

As ES6 becomes more and more popular in web development, we’re likely going to be seeing – and writing – less code using other libraries. When it comes to WordPress, jQuery is still very common.

Personally, I don’t think there’s anything inherently wrong with using jQuery (though you might not need it) but I also think it’s important to keep your skills sharp and up to date with newer technologies.

Removing Duplicate Items with JavaScript: You Might Not Need jQuery

But learning to write ES6 code is not the purpose of this post, nor is how to achieve something using ES6.

Instead, it’s still about WordPress and jQuery. I’ll come back to ES6 at the end of the post. One of the things I’d love to cover, though, is how to remove duplicate items from a list with a common property.