Software Engineering in WordPress, PHP, and Backend Development
In a previous posts, I’ve talked about how to:
There’s a lot more to do than just viewing the last query and selecting distinct rows, though. For example, you can also JOIN two tables in WordPress without having to write raw SQL.
So to be consistent with some of the previous posts, I thought I’d share how to do this using the WordPress API .
Years ago, I wrote a series of posts for Envato walking readers through how to use Ajax in WordPress.
Then, not long ago, I provided an updated walkthrough of how to do so with better practices (thanks to @gmazzap for the code review on that one).
One purpose of this blog is to provide articles for others who are getting started in WordPress development. That is, I want to share the things I’ve learned to help shortcut others’ learning.
Sometimes, this requires updating old content. Or it requires providing new ways of doing things already discussed.
Case in point: Using Ajax in WordPress.
If you need to write a query against the WordPress database, grab a reference to $wpdb and get to work, right?
In some instances, sure. I’m not opposed to this. After all, the API exists for a reason. But sometimes, I think we bypass built-in APIs. We go straight for $wpdb without looking to see if other hooks already exist.
If a hook exists, why not use it? It’s one level of abstraction above the database and it uses the native API.
As mentioned in a previous post, I want to cover a few ways to customize queries that run against the database.
Case in point: selecting DISTINCT records from WordPress. Continue reading
To me, one of the most interesting aspects of open source culture is the variations in open source philosophy we all have.
By that, I mean though many of us appreciate what open source has done, we have varying degrees on how much we use it. For example, some people use only open source software. On the other side of the spectrum, some people never use open source software.
Then, as expected, there are a lot of things that sit between these two points. You know: The proverbial gray area.
As of last week, an interest article has been making the rounds about Slack and FOSS projects. I’ll talk about it more in a moment.
But first, since I’ve never written about my own perspective on open source, I thought I might as well try it.
Have you ever had the, ahem, pleasure of customizing the WordPress query? One of the most useful things in debugging is displaying the last WordPress query.
Let’s say you’re working with taxonomies and/or post types and you’re passing custom parameters around. And then, you want to setup some debugging to see exactly what’s hitting the database.
This is helpful for a variety of reasons if for no other reason than to see what is running against the database. It gives you insight on what you’re requesting and thus what you’re presenting to the user.
Anyway, writing code to do this is easy.
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