Software Engineering in WordPress, PHP, and Backend Development

Category: Articles (Page 111 of 258)

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

MAMP 4 For WordPress Development

MAMP 4 was released recently, though, at the time, I was busy experimenting with Pressmatic. I think Pressmatic is a strong piece of software, though, for my day-to-day workflow, it doesn’t fully suit my needs.

So I returned to MAMP, and I’ve been thoroughly pleased with MAMP 4.

MAMP 4 Homepage

No, it doesn’t use a lot of the same technology some other applications do (such as virtual machines), but I’ve not found that to hinder the work I’m doing.

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Why You Should Learn Your Debugger

I’ve talked a bit about debugging (using an actual debugger) in a few posts, but I don’t know if I’ve ever talked about the challenges that come with debugging.

Learn Your Debugger: MacGDBp

MacGDBp is one of the available debuggers.

First, in this context, debugging refers to using an actual piece of software versus various language features. Secondly, using a debugger has its learning curve just like any other piece of software.

And in this tweet, Julia Evans captures it perfectly:

https://twitter.com/b0rk/status/768300858450640896

Not bad, right?

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Using WordPress Hooks Differently

Using WordPress hooks is one of those topics that you hang around any Slack channel forum, email thread, Twitter conversation, or whatever and you’ll find that understanding them and using them correctly is key to working with the application.

Using WordPress Hooks

But if there’s one thing that I get obsessive about, is using the right hook (as opposed to the left hook 🙃).

Sure, that reads weird, but look at it this way:

  • each hook offers a variety of parts of the application available at a given time,
  • and each hook is given a specific name.

So it would stand to reason that we try to hook our functions into the hook that’s most closely aligned and appropriately named for our particular requirement, right?

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WordPress Ajax Responses in JSON

WordPress Ajax responses are things that I’ve written about several times in the past (and it’s because I do a lot of work with Ajax in WordPress and because I often see other code that uses it in a variety of ways).

WordPress Ajax Responses: Implement a client-side call.

Implementing a call to the server from the client-side.

Of course, I’m not trying to set a definitive way to using WordPress, Ajax, JSON, and so on; otherwise, I wouldn’t spend my time writing posts about it, but there are things that I think are important to cover if for no other reason than to serve as reminders both to myself and those reading.

In the last year, I’ve written:

  1. Ajax in WordPress: A Strategy For Error Codes
  2. Writing a Custom Protocol for Ajax Responses
  3. An Example of the Ajax API

And sure, some of the above posts are a bit out of date. All the more reason to write updated content, right?

Since I recently finished a series on implementing custom protocols, I thought it important to also remember that there are already ways to send WordPress Ajax responses if you’re looking for something a bit simpler.

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Pragmatic Development in WordPress

Pragmatic development in WordPress is not a phrase or a term that I’ve found, read, or that exists (to my knowledge) outside this particular post. The idea has come from two sources:

  1. The Pragmatic Programmer by Dave Thomas and Andy Hunt,
  2. And a couple of projects that I’ve been working on recently.

I want to use the standard definition of “pragmatic” before I get into the rest of this post:

dealing with things sensibly and realistically in a way that is based on practical rather than theoretical considerations.

With that said, I think there are a few things we can learn from this as it relates to applying pragmatic development in WordPress projects.

Of course, this raises the question of what type of situations calls for this?

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