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Musing on Modern Package Managers

July 10, 2018 / Tom

I was recently talking with a friend about all of the available tools that are on the market for us today (some free, some open source) that help us with our development needs.

Modern Package Managers: Yarn

These include things like:

Grunt
Gulp
Yarn
CodeKit
Composer
and so on.

Of course, each of the above is not necessarily comparable because some are front-end tools, others are backend tools, and there are some that offer a hybrid of sorts.

Further, some are premium, some are open source, some appear to be abandoned, and some have even lead to broken build processes.

This leads to a series of questions several of which I’d like to cover. So here, if nothing else but musings on modern package managers, are the things about which I’ve been thinking.

Split Strings and Integers in PHP Using Regular Expressions

July 6, 2018 / Tom

Working with strings, numbers, and regular expressions in PHP is relatively easy given the vast number of functions the language provides.

There are times, though, where figuring out how to split on certain criteria may not be immediately clear, or it may be clear what you need to do but not how to best do it.

Split Strings and Integers in PHP Using Regular Expressions

Photo by Agê Barros on Unsplash

For example, let’s say that you have a string that’s mixed with both numbers and digits. For this post, let’s say that a given string:

includes hours and minutes,
when the minutes are at 60,
the string should increase the value of the of the hours by one
the value of the minutes is reset to zero.

An example, problematic string, then, may be of the form T3H60M. How then might we split the string into strings and integers and properly rebuild it?

Installing WordPress for Local Development

July 5, 2018 / Tom

So far, we’ve covered some things all of which lead us in setting up our local development environment. If you’ve not yet caught up, I recommend reading the previous articles:

In the final article, I state the following:

Next, it’s time to get WordPress installed. It’s extremely easy, so if you’ve come this far, I’d state with confidence that the toughest part is over.

This is usually the easiest part (really), but there are two ways in which you can manage this, and I’m going to cover both. For those curious, it breaks down like this:

installing the latest stable version of WordPress,
installing the most recent nightly build of WordPress

There are reasons that you may want to use one versus the other. I tend to favor the latter when building out my own solutions for reasons I’ll cover later in the article but note that both of the above are covered in this post.

So with that said, let’s get started.

A Quick Note on Unit Testing Code in WordPress Projects

July 3, 2018 / Tom

The more work I do in WordPress, the more I try to make unit testing as much a part of my development as building out the actual feature set. (It’s what all the professionals say we need to do, anyway.)

But seriously, it does improve the quality because, if for no other reason, something breaks, you’re able to see which test fails or even if you’ve missed coverage in some area.

I’m not of the mindset of some that you have to have 100% code coverage (and there are reasons for why I think this), but I do think it’s important to have as much code coverage as possible of code that is not directly to WordPress.

Resizing Images Programmatically in WordPress

June 28, 2018 / Tom

If you’ve ever had to work with resizing images programmatically in WordPress, then you may have come across the image_resize function.

Resizing Images Programmatically: Deprecated Functions

Further, you may know it’s been deprecated (given that this appears at the top of the screen):

This function has been deprecated. Use wp_get_image_editor() instead.

And with its deprecation, as is true of all those who do a good job deprecating functionality, it’s not without its replacement.

In this case, we’re talking about the WP Image Editor. This is a class in WordPress that we can use to perform the same operations to go about resizing images programmatically that we once could with the original function.

Tom McFarlin

Musing on Modern Package Managers

Split Strings and Integers in PHP Using Regular Expressions

Installing WordPress for Local Development

A Quick Note on Unit Testing Code in WordPress Projects

Resizing Images Programmatically in WordPress