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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.

Custom Meta Box Tabs in WordPress

August 26, 2014 / Tom / 0 Comments

One of the things that has become relatively common within themes that offer a lot of options is the use of tabbed navigation. That is, options that are related are logically grouped into tabs and then the user can navigate through each tab in order to select the options.

Whether or not this is a good thing for themes is outside the scope of this particular post; however, another place in which tabs may also be used is within the context of custom meta boxes.

That is, a custom meta box sits below the post editor and it offers several options or additions to the post meta data each of which is group together in their own tab.

Though I personally find this a bit more effective than using tabs of pages for screen options, that discussion is outside the scope of this post.

Regardless, there are ways to improve the ways in which custom meta box tabs are created such that they are organized in a more maintainable way, and each tab has its own view, partial, or template so that it’s easier to work with over time.

WordPress Theme Updates Are New Themes

August 25, 2014 / Tom / 0 Comments

I know that there are different ways that people approach building WordPress themes and I’m not one to argue that there’s a single right way to do it. Sure, some ways are better than others, but that’s true of a lot of things.

Personally, I approach building themes, plugins, and so on as I would as if I was building some type of software. That has to do with my background. Similarly, someone who has a background in design and in front-end development will conceptualize what they are building in a different way.

Like I said, all of that’s fine (in fact, I think it’d be interested to see how different people view building themes, but I digress), but I do know that one common thing we always have to think about as it relates to updated our WordPress themes is the actual front-end design.

Specifically, does it make sense to completely change the design of a theme for a different version of the theme?

How Do You Blog? (Wanna Have an Event?)

August 23, 2014 / Tom

For those of you who blog regularly, you likely get a fair share of feedback and it probably comes in many forms.

Praises
Critique
Donations
Profanity
Love
Hate
…and anything and everything in between

You name, it’s been said either in comments, emails, and tweets. But yet, we still write and a bunch of people – perhaps more than ever – are interested in digital publishing in some capacity.

Keyboard

This may be writing a personal blog, this may be writing a business blog, this may be writing a technical blog, or this may be writing a blog about anything and everything. Whatever the case, there are a lot of resources out there that tell you how to be successful at what you do.

That is, they offer prescriptive solutions on what you should do in order to be successful in blogging, but I’d venture to say that if you asked 10 people what it means to be successful in blogging, you’d get 5, 8, maybe even 10 answers.

So where does that leave us, and where does that leave the people espousing all of the information on how to be successful doing it? Continue reading

Tom McFarlin