Tom McFarlin

Software Engineering in WordPress, PHP, and Backend Development

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Setting Up a 2017 MacBook Pro for WordPress Development

Last Thursday was rough. If I were to explain everything that went down both with my computer and my personal life, you’d think I was making the whole thing up.

It’d be like the adult equivalent of “my dog ate [the last month of] my homework.” Or something like that.

First, as far as my personal life is concerned, this has nothing to do with the well-being of my family. Just a local debacle of waiting two hours during the workday to get something handled. Irrelevant other than, you know, taking a hefty chunk out of a workday.

Secondly, the computer stuff can all be summed up easily: There was a completely pathetic series of unfortunate events that led to its demise. Essentially, “I killed the car.

Setting Up a 2017 MacBook Pro for WordPress Development

So I had to order a replacement in short order (which is not something I wanted to do), had to have to delivered the next day before noon (which is not something I like to pay for) nor is it something that I had planned as a business expense for at least another year or two.

But here we are.

And this leads me to write this post: It’s a walkthrough of the process I follow and of the applications I install whenever setting up a new machine and how I configure it.

It’s not going to be incredibly detailed, but it’s a starting place for if this ever happens again or for any developer looking to set up a new machine or repurpose an existing machine.

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More on Why Custom Image Attributes Are Useful

A few posts ago, I walked through the process of adding custom image attributes to an image in WordPress. I received a good question on Twitter:

So I thought it worth to work through why this may be important or something that’s worthwhile to do (I mean, I don’t know if it’s important, but it could be depending on the project :).

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When Is jQuery’s Clone Function Useful?

One of the challenges of learning a library (be it the standard library of functions that come with a programming language or a third-party project) is two-fold:

  1. learning the functions that are available,
  2. learning how to use said functions.

And, really, sometimes even learning how to use said functions isn’t all that hard – it’s knowing when to use a given function to help minimize code while still achieving the goals of the project.

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A Few Gulp Packages for Starters

Software like Gulp and other utilities aren’t new. For those who haven’t used them before, it can be a little daunting to get started (but it really shouldn’t be).

A Few Gulp Packages for Starters

In comparison to tools like CodeKit (which I still like and recommend, depending on the project), they have a little more overhead regarding getting them set up, configured, and ready to go.

But once you’ve got it all set it up, it can be really useful with a distributed team regardless of operating system, and it can help it make your build process a bit more robust.

That’s not the purpose of the post, though. Instead, here’s a list of a few packages for starters.

Think of them this way: If you’re looking for ways to work with Sass, JavaScript, and image optimization, these are good libraries.

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Adding WordPress Modal Dialogs (Using Static Data)

In the previous post, I walked through the process required to get WordPress modal dialogs to appear within the context of the administration area.

This uses:

  • the built-in WordPress API,
  • the provided Thickbox library,
  • and some example code for getting it to display.

In this tutorial, I’ll walk through populating the modal dialog with data. After that, I’ll share how to populate the data dynamically using Ajax.

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