Software Engineering in WordPress, PHP, and Backend Development
When it comes to WordPress themes, one of the things that I used to think should be more common was the idea of style guides.
You know what I’m talking about: The documents that are either included with or ship with a theme that guide you on the typography, image sizes, video sizes, and other collateral to make sure that you use the theme exactly as it’s been designed to be used.
In other words, it prevents you from making the theme look ugly.
But are they really needed?
Importing CSV files (or something similar) is something that’s nothing new to web development.
If you’re writing a server-side code that’s responsible for importing a file in the context of WordPress, then you can be doing anything from programmatically creating posts to creating more complex relationships among post types, taxonomies, and so on.
In this case, it’s nice to have an abstract function that can help to do a lot of the repetitive work for you. After all, aren’t functions specifically for that?
Obviously, the majority of the content that I write for the site deals with WordPress in someway, but there are times where I talk a bit about JavaScript, related libraries, and so on.
The Face of Anonymous Functions
Generally speaking, a lot of the JavaScript that’s written in the context of WordPress is done using jQuery because it’s the library that ships with the core applications, it’s tried and true, and its a good fit for a lot of the DOM manipulation that happens in themes and in plugins.
But one of the things that I’ve begun to notice over the past few years is that writing maintainable JavaScript (using jQuery or not) gets a bit more difficult when using anonymous functions.
A few years ago, I started the WordPress Plugin Boilerplate project as nothing more than a GitHub repository used to store code that I found myself frequently using in both personal and client projects.
As I became more involved with WordPress, as I began to build more plugins for fun and profit, and as I began updating the repository, it grew into something a little more than I had expected.
Over time, people began to open issues, offer pull requests, perform code reviews, and create their own forks of the project. I learned a lot over the next few years, and I honestly couldn’t be more excited to see such a little project become, you know, such a slightly less little project.
Months ago, I mentioned that work on the next iteration of the WordPress Plugin Boilerplate was started and I’m excited to announce that, as of today, the WordPress Plugin Boilerplate 3.0.0 is officially ready for use.
And it comes with a lot of new and neat things to boot.
For those of you who aren’t familiar, the Pods Framework, it’s a relatively simple concept that introduces some really neat, advanced features into WordPress.
Straight from the website:
The goal was to create an interface and PHP codebase to easily create, extend, and manage content types within WordPress. While the normal WordPress content architecture is limited to the built-in tables, a primary feature of Pods allows you to base content types off of their own custom tables designed around each content types’ needs.
Neat, right? What’s even cooler is that the Pods development team is hosting their very first conference this October in DFW.
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