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Let’s Tilt The Pods Framework Conference!

September 1, 2014 / Tom

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.

Pods Framework Homepage

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.

Removing HTML Comments in WordPress

August 30, 2014 / Tom / 0 Comments

Some time ago, I began removing the HTML comment label from beneath the standard WordPress comment form (no, not the Jetpack-enabled form – the one that ships with a default WordPress theme).

Most of you are familiar with the form as it generally looks something like this:

HTML in Comments

Generally speaking I find that that block that usually sits between the textarea and the submit input to introduce complexity and likely cause more confusion than anything else.

Adding Plugin Config Files to WordPress

August 29, 2014 / Tom / 0 Comments

Almost everyone who has worked with WordPress has dealt with wp-config.php. I know – there are a lot of managed hosts out there that take care of a lot of this for you – but even though a person may not have directly edited the file, they have definitely interacted with it.

For those who are unfamiliar:

This file is located in the root of your WordPress file directory and contains your website’s base configuration details, such as database connection information.

Anyway, for sometime now, I’ve been working on a relatively large plugin for a client and have recently taken to introducing a similar type of configuration files. So this raised that question, do what you think of plugin config files?

Tips for Saving and Retrieving Post Meta Data

August 28, 2014 / Tom / 0 Comments

One of the common things that I’ve seen – and personally done – is mismanaging $_POST data as it comes into the server-side from a form or some type of input element from the front-end. This may be in the case of sending data via Ajax or by doing a standard page refresh.

Chill Out, Veruca. We’re getting there.

Whatever the case, whenever you’re dealing with $_POST data in WordPress and you’re looking to save information into the database, there may be times where you’re interested in saving empty values, and there maybe times where you’re interested in savings values only if they are not empty.

If you’re going after the latter, there are a couple of safe guards you should introduce in your code to make sure that rows are only being written when there’s data to actually be written.

For the Copy and Paste Programmers

August 27, 2014 / Tom / 0 Comments

One of the things that has been absolutely fantastic about the web is how much information we can publish and how much we can access it at any given time. I don’t know many who would disagree with that.

Even more so, for those who are interested in learning how to write software, there are various articles, podcasts, videos, tutorials, and so on all of which aim to teach a person the skills they need in order to actually get from not knowing how to write code, but knowing how to do so in a productive manner.

One of the downsides of this – and even more generally, open source – is that breeds this copy-and-paste mentality that completely undermines the very thing that it’s trying to teach: that is, how to write code.

Tom McFarlin

Let’s Tilt The Pods Framework Conference!

Removing HTML Comments in WordPress

Adding Plugin Config Files to WordPress

Tips for Saving and Retrieving Post Meta Data

For the Copy and Paste Programmers