Author: Tom (Page 87 of 427)

Modify Image Containers on the Server-Side in WordPress

February 13, 2018 / Tom

Whenever you’re building custom solutions for other people, you may find yourself having to deal with nuanced cases of how WordPress is rendering the content.

This usually comes down to the theme, at least one plugin, or the combination of both. And if you need to work with images individually, then it can be a bit of a challenge. The problem with even trying to write a post like this is that it’s hard even to describe a situation in which you may need something like this.

Even still, I’m going to do the best I can. That is, I want to share how to modify image containers on the server-side before rendering them on the client-side and do so using PHP’s DOMDocument library.

Sound like a lot? Hopefully, I can break this down easily enough.

Quick Tip: Check User’s Browser With JavaScript

February 9, 2018 / Tom

You’d think in 2018 we’d have a standard way to do browser detection or that the majority of browsers would handle standard idiosyncracies around CSS properly.

But here we are, and it’s still not happening.

This means that when it comes to working with JavaScript, we still may have to do a bit of browser sniffing to determine which browser it is with which we’re working.

Don’t get me wrong: It’s not as bad as it used to be, but there are times in which I’ve recently encountered errors with Chrome and Firefox, specifically.

A WordPress Development Environment (Using a Package Manager)

February 7, 2018 / Tom

At this point, I’ve written about as much of the OOP Fundamentals that I believe are necessary to begin looking at more in-depth topics (such as design patterns and how to apply these topics in WordPress development).

But when planning the content, I kept coming back to a few other things that I think are also necessary to cover eventually. These are things such as Composer, Yarn, build tools, and so on.

Above that, though, I kept asking myself:

If I’m going to be writing about this material at length, should I assume we’re all using the same environment?

And that’s a tough question to answer because some of the people reading this have been writing code for quite some time. That is, they (or you) have your tools, your setup, and how you like to organize your projects.

On the other hand, there are those (or you), who are looking for a different way or looking to start from the ground-up. And to that end, I think it’s important to cover two things:

How to Setup a Local Development Environment
What IDE, Add-Ons, and Tools are going to be used

For some, it’s not the most exciting topics and it’s certainly putting a pause on the more advanced aspect of object-oriented programming. Since those of you who pay to read this material have access to the comments, I have to assume that – at some point – comments will come through asking about how to achieve certain things.

And to that end, I’m going to assume that we’re all working off of the same playing field. If not, there’s only so much that I can do to provide help beyond actual programming questions.

So before going any further into the depths of object-oriented programming, I’m going to spend a few posts covering the above topics in detail to make sure that we’re all on the same page.

If you’re comfortable with your tools and your setup, then please bear with me. If you’re looking for a definitive way to setup your environment, then the following posts are for you.

And with all of that said, let’s get started with talking about how to cleanly set up a local development environment that’s easy to maintain.

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Blogging Plugins: Better Blogging With WordPress

February 5, 2018 / Tom

Every now and then I end up having to call a few false starts on projects. Sometimes it’s scheduling, sometimes it’s because I realize that I didn’t do a good enough job coming up with what I wanted to do, and sometimes it’s simply because something else has come up.

Case in point: Pressware Plugins.

If you go back and read the post (which I don’t think is necessary), you’ll see that the goal was simple: To create a better blogging experience.

For me, the challenge was to identify exactly what that’d look like, how the business model would work, and how would it translate for those who are already people who use WordPress but in a variety of capacities.

So I pulled back, re-evaluated, and have been talking with others for quite some time now about refocusing the idea. And thus comes Blogging Plugins.

Templating and Conditional Logic with OOP in WordPress

January 30, 2018 / Tom

Templating is becoming more common in WordPress, and I consider that a good thing.

But that doesn’t mean that there aren’t projects that we manage that use a more traditional approach to displaying templates or partials. Furthermore, it also doesn’t mean that we’re exempt from maintaining codebases that use code that does not use a templating engine.

Though I think templating is good, I don’t think it’s always necessary. That’s content for another post, though.

Instead, I want to walk through the process of using the conditional logic of whether or not to display a partial within a template and do so using object-oriented programming.