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Use Your WordPress Powers For Good

March 30, 2015 / Tom / 0 Comments

This past weekend, I had the opportunity to speak at WordCamp Atlanta about the Importance of Following The WordPress Coding Standards.

I had a blast talking with the audience, meeting new people, answering questions, and being exposed to some ideas and techniques that I’d not previously considered.

During the talk, a friend of mine happened to snap a picture of two young guys – between 11 – 13 years old or so – sitting on the front-row of the presentation.

Since I tend to be protective about sharing pictures of my own kids online, I’ve opted not to share the picture here, but it doesn’t matter – the important thing is that there were young kids present at this WordCamp soaking up every word that was being present and even asking questions.

This is something that I’ve yet to see at a WordCamp – at least in Atlanta – and it’s really got me excited for the future of computer science, of WordPress, and of programming in general.

The Importance of Following The WordPress Coding Standards

March 28, 2015 / Tom

Today, I’m attending WordCamp Atlanta. I’ll be speaking on the topic of The Importance of Following The WordPress Coding Standards.

The WordPress Coding Standards

It’s been a couple of years since I was able to attend a WordCamp (primarily because my wife and I were growing our family and welcoming additional humans to Planet Earth :).

Anyway, I’m excited to be back.

Include Bugs in Screencasting

March 27, 2015 / Tom / 0 Comments

For a number of years, I’ve been doing screencasts that help to teach others how to use WordPress – the majority of my work has been done for Envato, but I’ve also done some one-on-one screencasting as well as some screencasting for smaller teams.

Personally, I think it’s a really invaluable way to show people how to get started with using a given project without having to have them trudge through the documentation that often ships with software or with the manual that walks users through how to do a certain task.

Don’t get me wrong: I’m all for documentation, but I also know that when you’re sitting in your chair amidst all of this frustration and you have no idea where to turn, flipping through pages and pages of content hoping to find a solution isn’t always the best feeling in the world.

Anyway, the neat thing about screencasting is that aside from being able to show people how to use a project, it can always be a means by which we use to teach other people how to learn a new skill.

To me, that’s a really cool thing.

But up until this year – in fact, up until my latest round of screencasting – I always worked hard to make sure each video was as pristine as possible.

I don’t know if that’s always such a good idea, though.

Avoid Loops With save_post in WordPress

March 26, 2015 / Tom / 0 Comments

When working on WordPress projects, there may be times during which you have to do some sort of processing on the content or attributes of the post before saving it to the database.

There are a number of ways to do this, but one of the most straightforward ways to go about it is to setup a custom function hooked to the save_post action and then handle the attributes of the post in that function.

If you opt to go this route, there are a few considerations that you need to make (mainly that help you avoid some type of infinite loop) in order to properly adjust the content to your liking.

Debugging with Query String Parameters

March 25, 2015 / Tom / 0 Comments

There are a number of ways that we debug our WordPress-based projects.

Some people end up going through the code and setting up `print_r` statements or `var_dump` statements
Some end up working through the code and changing variables or function names until they find where something breaks (or changes)
Some use debugging software (or the debugging features in their IDE)
Some use a combination of plugins and other techniques
And some likely use some strategy that isn’t listed here

Personally, I’m partial to using some of the developer tools that are provided by WordPress through the use of setting constants and using plugins that are available to us, but I’m also a fan of using Codebug App (which is the content for another point).

Codebug App

But, for the purposes of this post, that’s beside the point.

Tom McFarlin

Use Your WordPress Powers For Good

The Importance of Following The WordPress Coding Standards

Include Bugs in Screencasting

Avoid Loops With save_post in WordPress

Debugging with Query String Parameters