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The Shelf Life and Feature Creep of a WordPress Theme

January 15, 2015 / Tom / 0 Comments

With Mayer about to turn a year old (they grow up so fast), with a healthy backlog of features sitting in the queue, and with two other themes sitting in the planning stage for the first part of this year, I’ve been thinking a bit about WordPress themes as a whole.

Sounds like I have too much free time doesn’t it?

But seriously, one of the things that I do wonder about is how long a WordPress theme can actually be sold and continue to be viable for users especially since design trends change. Additionally, I think that there are times in which a theme has reached the maximum number of features it can justifiably offer before it just begins to feel a bit crowded.

A Guide To Merging (Based in Git)

January 14, 2015 / Tom / 0 Comments

In the previous post, I gave a working definition of branching (based on Git’s model of source control) and provided a conceptual model that I hope makes it easier to understand what’s happening whenever you branch code from the master branch of the application.

The thing about creating branches is that they’re typically merged back into the main application once a feature has been completed, a bug has been resolved, or something has been patched.

If branching is taking a copy of the code and creating an independent sandbox out of which to work on the program, then merging is the opposite – it’s taking the code from the branch and pushing it back into the main part of the application.

A Guide To Branching (Based in Git)

January 13, 2015 / Tom / 0 Comments

Whenever we introduce others to a new technology, service, application, or anything else, I think that we – as developers – don’t often do such a hot job of showcasing what the true “beginner-level” features are.

That is, we’re either so enamored at what we’re working with, that we’re eager to show what we’re able to do or we skip to more complicated things without explaining the foundation off of which said things have been built.

Maybe I’m off base, but one of the places I’ve seen this crop up in a few conversations is around the idea of Git branching and merging.

That is to say, I’ve had others ask specifically about understanding what a branch is and what a merge does.

For those who have worked with other source control systems, these terms are taken for granted, but for those who are just getting their feet wet and who are hopping into development (even if it’s with Subversion and its branches directory), these are concepts that seem to be glossed over in an attempt to get to more of the “exciting” parts of source control.

At least, as exciting as it can really get.

How To Set Cookies in WordPress

January 12, 2015 / Tom / 0 Comments

Given the state of many modern web applications, one of the things that I think surprises many developers when coming to WordPress is that the application is stateless.

That is, it doesn’t maintain any type of session using the conventional PHP $_SESSION utilities. If you’re building a web application on top of WordPress where users will be required to login, you may want to introduce something like this.

Dark Side of the Cookie

At the very least, you may be interested in using cookies to manage certain settings for users who have signed in on the front-end using some type of custom functionality you’ve built.

To that end, here’s how to set cookies in WordPress.

Using WP_Query and Multiple Meta Keys

January 9, 2015 / Tom / 0 Comments

When it comes to searching the WordPress database, there’s probably no better API than WP_Query. That doesn’t mean it’s not without it’s limitations, though (only which will be improved over time, I’m sure).

For example, consider the case where you have two types of meta data that are completely unrelated and you need to run a search for both of them. Essentially, you have WP_Query and multiple meta keys that you need in order to search for information from this database.

In this specific case, I’m not talking about a single piece of meta data that has multiple keys and that would support and AND or and OR clause.

Instead, I’m talking about the idea of having multiple meta keys each of which are associated with a given post, but must all be searched in order to find the posts that have the data associated with it.

In more technical terms, I’m looking for the intersection of post IDs all of which share a common set of multiple, unrelated meta keys.

Tom McFarlin