Category: Articles (Page 103 of 258)

Personal opinions and how-to’s that I’ve written both here and as contributions to other blogs.

Control Activation of a WooCommerce Extension

December 27, 2016 / Tom

When creating a WooCommerce extension, it’s important to consider that when the extension is activated, the user may not have WooCommerce installed or active.

And though an extension might activate, it won’t do anything. This can ultimately provide a level of confusion for the user.

WooCommerce Extension

In cases like this, I think it’s important to make sure an extension can only be activated if the core plugin is installed and active.

PHP Autoloading: Object-Oriented Programming

December 26, 2016 / Tom

PHP autoloading is a topic that, once you’ve begun to employ it in your projects, is hard to avoid doing so in any project moving forward.

The challenge with learning how to do it, though, is learning aspects of object-oriented programming and what facilities the PHP standard library has to offer. On top of that, there are other advanced tools like Composer that make it possible, as well.

You have to walk before you can run, as they say, so in a recent series on Tuts+, I walk through how to perform PHP autoloading using object-oriented programming in the context of WordPress.

Plans for 2017: WordPress, React, Pressware, and More

December 21, 2016 / Tom

This is that time of year where people do all kinds of posts – from retrospectives to upcoming plans, from taking a break to writing more than they have all year.

Honestly, I’m a fan of reading it all.

And though I don’t normally do a retrospective post (though I’m thinking of going back and following-up on the developer fitness post from last year), I do have plans for what I’m aiming to do come the new year regarding general stuff online so I thought now would be the usual time to do that.

For starters, I’m going to move on from WordPress. Peace out. It’s been great, but it’s time to move on to new things! ✌️

That’s not true at all. There are some new things I’m looking to introduce, though.

WooCommerce Menu, Part 2: A WooCommerce Page

December 20, 2016 / Tom

In the previous post, I walked through the process of adding a custom WooCommerce menu to the My Accounts page. It’s straightforward enough, but if you’re creating a custom menu item, then you’re likely going to need a custom WooCommerce page.

That is, you’re going to want to have a page that corresponds to the menu item so that people who are logged into your store can view something related to the custom menu item that’s been added.

Adding a Custom WooCommerce Page

Granted this isn’t always the case, but if you’re adding a custom menu, the odds are you’re going to be adding a custom WooCommerce page. The thing is, WooCommerce expects these pages – which are actually templates – to reside in a specific location.

And if you’re distributing a plugin for others to use, making sure the template is in the right place should be done programmatically.

WooCommerce Menu, Part 1: Adding a Menu

December 19, 2016 / Tom

I’ve written a few posts about some of the work I’ve done with WooCommerce over the last couple of months, but one of the things I’ve yet to cover is how to add a custom WooCommerce menu.

Using Google or Stack Exchange or some other bloggers will yield some solid results, but my situation is two-fold:

Introduce a new video menu item,
Create and display a custom template for the menu.

The latter is a little more complicated, so I’ll cover it in a follow-up post, but the former is something to be covered in a post all its own.