Software Engineering in WordPress, PHP, and Backend Development
A previous post, I shared a strategy on how to separate comments, trackbacks, and pings in a WordPress post.
In short, the article covered how to create a template such that the comments would be listed first, then the trackbacks and pings would be listed second.
In addition to creating templates that separate the types of comments related to a post, I also find it useful to have a helper function to determine if a given post has comments and/or pingbacks.
The very idea of monetizing open source software – especially projects that have a list of contributors – is something that I spend more time thinking about than I’d like to admit.
One of the many Dev Practices
And I bring this up because there are a number of things that I’m working on (and that I’ve seen my peers work on), that are directly impacted by this.
As with anything, I’ve my own opinions about this, but I’m curious as to what you guys think as it relates to monetizing open source software.
For those who actually read this blog in a browser (rather than in a feed reader), you know that I’ve been using a new theme for the past few weeks.
Whenever you – or someone else – changes themes, it raises the question as to if you should go back over your old content and update your old blog posts so that they look well-formatted within the context of the new presentation.
If your blog is in its infancy and/or only has a few dozen posts, I think that makes sense, but if you’ve been writing for a while and have, say, several hundred posts or several years worth of posts, I don’t think it’s worth it.
This is post one of two on how to upload files in WordPress and created associated meta data.
In a recent project, I’ve been working on a plugin in which the user needs to upload a file to a custom post type by using an input element (of type file, obviously) rather than using the WordPress media uploader.
In addition to being able to upload the file, the user must also be able to view the file and remove the file (via Ajax) by an available anchor.
In order to do this, the plugin has to do the following:
The primary reason that you have to store the file’s location on disk is because you can’t rely on PHP to delete a file via remote requests.
To that end, you need to be able to store not only where the file is on disk (for the sake of being able to delete), but also the URL of the file so that visitors or viewers can access the file via their browser.
Over the next two articles, I’ll share how to programmatically upload files in WordPress and save their associated meta data, and then I’ll share how to programmatically delete the files in WordPress as well as their associated meta data.
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I was talking with a fellow developer recently about some of the more recent “tools of the trade,” so to speak.
That is, we were discussing some of the newer frameworks that have been made available, web server software, configuration management tools, and dependency management applications.
I don’t know if this is a good thing or a bad thing, but the truth is that for the past couple of years, my technology stack hasn’t changed all of that much: Everything from the database all the way up through the IDE that I use has remained the same.
This isn’t to say that learning new technologies isn’t important, but I think that there’s something in our culture – at least in the United States – that invites us to spend our time spreading ourselves very thin across a variety of technologies rather than becoming specialized in a smaller subset of tools.
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