Tom McFarlin

Software Engineering in WordPress, PHP, and Backend Development

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Should We Delete Old Repositories?

Anyone that does design or development (or even writing, really) as either a hobby or for a living knows that feeling of going back and looking at their old work – and cringing.

We know that we’re making progress in our work when we look at something we once did and think “What was I doing?”

The funny thing is, whatever we’re designing, developing, or writing today is going to be treated that way sometime in the not-so-distant future, right?

I digress on that point.

Anyway, for me, one of the things that I find myself debating is how long I should keep some of my open source code repositories around.

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Add a Post Class in WordPress: The More Tag

WordPress’ `post_class` function makes it really easy to write out a variety of class names to post containers that give us a finer-level of control when working on styling WordPress posts.

But there are times in which you may want to actually add a custom class to a post (or to a single post) depending on the nature of the content of the most.

And sure, you can easily add additional parameters to the `post_class` function, but those are still static parameters that will be applied to every posts.

What about in cases where you want to add a class if, say, no more tag is present in the content?

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Using WordPress For Web Application Development

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As WordPress continues to grow in popularity and continues to evolve as a web application, developers are beginning to see how it can be used for web application development.

This isn’t to say that it should replace any of the frameworks or foundations that are already available, but that it should be considered as a serious contender for certain types of web applications.

In my latest series on Envato, I’m going to be taking a look at what it means to use WordPress for web application development, how it differs from existing frameworks and foundations, how to think about it in the context of design patterns, and why its existing facilities provide a solid foundation outside of the box.

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See All of Your WordPress Page Template Info

For me, one of the minor annoyances with working with WordPress page templates is that you often have to look at a specific page’s edit screen to see what page template it has been assigned.

That is to say that there’s no way to get a global view of the pages and their associated templates.

In order to make it a bit easier, I wrote a quick plugin that makes it easy to see which page template is assigned to a given page on the All Pages screen in the WordPress dashboard.

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If You’re Looking To Guest Post, Do It Here

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Periodically, I’ll receive emails from others who are have stumbled into a problem with WordPress, and they aren’t sure how to solve it; however, before I can reply, I end up hearing from them again.

They end up sharing something like:

Nevermind! I figured it out. In case you’re curious, here’s the code that I used…

I love it when that happens, but who doesn’t, right?

And from there, I normally like to take a look at the code, ask any questions, and/or make any suggestions (if there are any to make).

This past week, someone sent me something that they had done that was really cool, and they mentioned that I could share it on my blog, if I wanted.

Instead, I asked:

Word up.

Filing this away for future reference unless you’d want to do the first guest post I’ve ever had . . . . . . . :)

No pressure.

He obliged, but this was interesting, because I’d been toying with extended guest posting for sometime.

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