Recently, I’ve been working on a project that requires a lot of work with dates. Depending on the nature of the work, there are times in which this can be easier than others.

On the one hand, if you’re making a simple comparison between, say, the values of two months then that’s not a big deal. On the other hand, if you’re dealing with months, days, years, the current date, timezone offsets, and different formats, then it can be a bit more complicated.

The point of all of the above, though, is not about strictly working with dates. Instead, it’s about the challenges that come with needing to write, test, and work with source code.

And if you’re in the habit of writing code, testing it in a browser, doing some form of debugging or dumping information onto a screen, and then repeating the process, there are easier ways to deal with this.

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When retrieving information from the WordPress database I prefer to avoid using direct database queries, but there are times in which they can be useful (and it’s important that it’s done right).

One use case in which it might be helpful is when you need to retrieve a set of data of a single type. Case in point: Say you need to load all WordPress custom fields.

At the time of this writing, there’s no function of which I’m aware that will do this, so here’s how I query the database to do so.

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Occasionally, when working on a project there are times in which it’d be nice to have an API function to help achieve whatever it is that needs to be done. Case in point: the ability to retrieve a taxonomy by term ID.

Granted, it’s not a hard thing to do, but having the ability to retrieve the information from pre-existing functionality is always nice.

But when that’s not possible, we write our own way to do it, right?

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