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Programmatically Create Recurring Events with Event Calendar

February 28, 2017 / Tom

Modern Tribe’s Event Calendar is likely the most popular calendar plugin available for WordPress. I’ve talked about querying events using WP_Query in a previous post but that’s applicable to both the free and premium versions.

The premium version offers a lot of great features, but if you’re looking to programmatically manipulate the calendar, it’s a little more difficult to work with it.

there isn’t clear documentation on how to take advantage of certain features from a developer’s perspective
the places where people have asked how to do so occasionally leave something to be desired.

Case in point: When we need to programmatically create recurring events.

Scheduling Time (With “Less, but Better”)

February 27, 2017 / Tom

This weekend, I was talking with a friend who runs their own small business, and we spent some time on the topic of scheduling time and how much of our time we spend on different tasks each week.

Scheduling Time

Of course, this isn’t unique to a few group of people. I mean, we all have the same amount of time, and we’re all spending it on something. When we’re trying to be productive, it’s often a matter of:

how much time are we spending on something,
and where are we spending it?

I mention this because we’ve all felt that bit of frustration, right? We’re trying to get something done but we get interrupted, and either can’t find the groove to get back into it, or we can’t finish what we set out to do by the end of the workday (or whatever deadline we’d set).

Whatever the case, we all have our things – those we want to do, those we don’t particularly want to do, those that prevent us from doing either, and those that are likely a waste of time.

And this year is one of those where I’m trying to be far more intentional and make a more concentrated effort on how I’m organizing spending my time.

Blog Overhaul: One of My Tasks for 2017

February 24, 2017 / Tom / 0 Comments

Earlier this year, I shared a few of the goals I had for 2017. Some of those include the changes I want to make is to do a whole blog overhaul (versus the other one).

But I’ve yet to talk about some of the changes I want to make, so I thought rather than just drop a bunch of changes at once, I’d talk a bit about some of the changes I’m looking to make and the rationale behind each of them.

Domain Rules (Or What Are We Codifying, Again?)

February 23, 2017 / Tom

When it comes to building software for other people – regardless of if it’s a WordPress plugin, a mobile app, a desktop app, or something else – one of the most important things we can do is to test the project.

And I know: Talking about testing is boring. It seems to be disconnected from the act of implementing a solution and being able to say “Hey, look what I did!”

Testing, on the other hand, is sitting there making sure our code works. But, please, our code definitely works because we can see it happening, right? The truth is, we know this isn’t the case.

And so we’ve got all of these various tools to help us write unit tests, acceptance tests, behavioral tests, we grab groups of people and have them perform usability testing, and all of that’s important.

But before doing any of that, I think it’s important that we actually understand the rules of the problem that we’re aiming to solve. Sometimes we see this referred to as domain rules; sometimes, we don’t see it mentioned at all.

Multiple Objects Writing Data: How to Avoid This

February 22, 2017 / Tom / 0 Comments

You know those times when you’re working on a program, and there are some places in your code that, depending on the requirements or a bug that manifests itself in some way, is directly related to the fact that you have multiple objects writing data to the same data store? That’s not a good thing.

That’s a terrible way to start a post. Let me try that again.

Tom McFarlin

Programmatically Create Recurring Events with Event Calendar

Scheduling Time (With “Less, but Better”)

Blog Overhaul: One of My Tasks for 2017

Domain Rules (Or What Are We Codifying, Again?)

Multiple Objects Writing Data: How to Avoid This