Author: Tom (Page 84 of 427)

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.

Gracefully Handle PHP Version Support in WordPress

March 20, 2018 / Tom

As long as I’ve been working with WordPress, the conversation (and I do use this term loosely) around what versions of PHP it should or shouldn’t support has been ongoing.

The short of it is that some see it as an application as large and popular as WordPress that powers so much of the CMS-based websites should be able to use its clout to foster more innovative solutions.
Others see that people don’t often upgrade, are on budget hosts, or simply do not care (let alone bother to know) what version of PHP they are running.

These two points could yield a post and comments for days, but I’m not interested in that. Because my team and I are the business of building custom solutions for others, we have the flexibility of taking stock of where the users host their site or application, deploying it, and leveraging features of PHP offered by their hosts.

There are, however, times where I’ve encountered some people running versions of PHP as low as 5.3.

So what then?

How To Set Up JavaScript linting in Visual Studio Code

March 16, 2018 / Tom

I’m obviously a big fan of using coding standards whenever you’re writing server-side code (regardless of it being WordPress, PSR2, or whatever else – as long as you’re using something, I think it’s a good thing).

But when it comes to writing client-side code, namely JavaScript for this post, we don’t see it discussed as much though I think of it as being as equally important. Same goes for CSS, Sass, or LESS, but that’s content for another post.

For recent projects, we’ve been using Airbnb JavaScript Style guide for our projects. I’m a fan and think it helps to write clean, readable JavaScript (that looks as if it’s been written by the same person – the ultimate goal of coding standards, right?).

JavaScript linting in Visual Studio Code: Airbnb Styleguide

In this post, I’ll walk through the process of getting it setup in Visual Studio Code.

Easier Excerpts 1.5.0

March 13, 2018 / Tom

Just shy of two years ago (almost to the day, even), I first released Easier Excerpts for WordPress. It was, and still is, one of those plugins that I built for myself and ultimately decided to release for others to use.

It’s small and serves a very small improvement to the excerpt field in the post editor, but it’s something that I still use every day.

But over time, WordPress changes and improves, one’s ability to write code and build their tools changes. And that’s a lot of what went into this particular version.