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The Beginner’s Guide to Type Coercion

August 16, 2014 / Tom / 0 Comments

This week, I started a new series on Tuts+ Code that walks readers through understanding type coercion.

Type Coercion

Generally speaking, the series of articles starts at the most basic level by discussing strongly typed and weakly typed languages, data types and how they work in different environments, and then begins to branch out more into how data types work within dynamically typed languages.

The main motivation for this is because people who are coming from a strongly-typed background, or those who are just getting into programming may end up finding themselves making a few mistakes especially as it relates to comparisons, conditionals, and other similar evaluations.

This series aims to mitigate that.

Why You Should Write Meaningful WordPress Meta Keys

August 15, 2014 / Tom / 0 Comments

If you’re someone who’s building solutions with WordPress regardless of if they are themes, plugins, or applications, then odds are you’ve had to deal with saving some type of information to the database.

Granted, anytime you create a post, a page, or anything that stores data, you’re entering information into the database.

But that’s not what I’m talking about.

Instead, I’m talking about times when you’re having to work with the Options API, the Theme Customizer API, or one of the meta APIs (like the Post Meta API). In this case, you’re working with the core application to save and retrieve information from the database.

When doing this – especially in development and possibly in staging – it’s likely that you’re having to write the code, run a test (automated or not), and then take a look at the way the record is stored in the database to make sure it saved as expected.

In my experience, there are a handful of things that can be done to make this process a little bit easier and make your code a little bit cleaner and one of these has to do with writing meaningful WordPress Meta Keys

Aim for a Single Way to Achieve a Single Task

August 14, 2014 / Tom / 0 Comments

When it comes to user interface design and user experience, I’m no expert (nor have I ever claimed to be). I’m barely an intermediate. if even that. I’m fortunate enough people to have peers who are willing to review certain projects in order to help tighten up certain aspects of my work.

I don’t think we should ever be afraid or ashamed to ask people who are more skilled than us in a certain area to help us out (or to pay them, even!). After all, we have nothing but to benefit from it.

This doesn’t mean that a couple of ideas, rules, and general practices haven’t come up over the years.

For example, one of the rules of thumb that I have whenever I am working on a user interface is to try to make sure the user only has one way of achieving something.

In other words, I don’t like it when there are multiple ways to do the same thing. I think that it confuses the user, it complicates the code, and it makes it more difficult to maintain over time. The code aspect of this is enough content for another post.

For now, it’s just about finding a single way to achieve one task.

Adding More Fields to the WordPress Media Uploader

August 13, 2014 / Tom / 0 Comments

Last week, I shared a short post on how to include your own instance of the WordPress Media Uploader in your theme or your plugin.

Though it walks you through everything that you need, on aspect of using the instance that I described is that it’s limited. This is fine for certain situations, but there are other times where you may want to grab more information from the user.

Case in point, the post received the following comment:

Now, how do you activate (turn on) the Insert Image via URL feature of the Media Uploader?

Which I thought was a good question especially given that most of us are used to seeing more options in the media uploader than what the previous post described.

Thoughts on Design Patterns in WordPress

August 12, 2014 / Tom / 0 Comments

Whenever the topic of talking about using WordPress as a foundation for web applications comes up, I always get mixed reactions. That is, I’ll hear anything from how that’s a silly idea to how a person wants to know more (as well as everything in between).

One of the more common things that I hear developers often try to do is to retrofit the MVC pattern around WordPress in order to try to make sense of how existing themes, plugins, and applications work, as well as how they can take advantage of MVC to produce their application.

Don’t do that!

WordPress doesn’t use MVC. It uses the event-driven design pattern. But for whatever reason, this doesn’t stop us from trying to wrap MVC around WordPress. When it comes to design patterns in WordPress, there are other approaches.

There are reasons for why I think this is a relatively common trend, but there are alternative ways to approach development on WordPress, as well.

Tom McFarlin