Category: Articles (Page 120 of 258)

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

Running a Business Amidst Changing Technology

July 28, 2016 / Tom

Whenever I have the opportunity to speak at an event, I always try to cover the events, any slides, any footage, and any other material related to the event in my speaking category.

Sometimes, though, I’ll write an article on another property that spends more time diving into a talk or a presentation that I gave in an attempt to help reach people through a site with a larger audience.

And it in a recent post for Envato, I did exactly that. Specifically, I did a deeper dive into my WordCamp San Diego speech on what it means to focus on running a business while keeping up with changing technology.

Bootstrapping JavaScript Files in WordPress

July 25, 2016 / Tom / 0 Comments

We talk a lot about the idea of having bootstrap files in WordPress plugins, which I think are great, but we seem to limit it to those files that are responsible just for starting our WordPress plugins.

This isn’t exactly what I meant, but I dig the picture.

I mean, hooking into plugins_loaded and then instantiating some classes, setting up a service registry, or things like that are important. But what about other components that make up our plugins?

And by that, I mean what about our JavaScript files? Should they have their way to be bootstrapped?

Displaying Custom Messages in WordPress, Part 1

July 21, 2016 / Tom / 0 Comments

When working with the Settings API (or any other API that handles options, serialization, validation, and page redirections), dealing with custom messages in WordPress isn’t something that we typically have to worry about it.

Custom Messages in WordPress, Part 1

The API takes care of all of that for us, and if we need to use other pieces of information, like the query string, we’re able to take advantage of API functions like get_query_var to check for the presence of a given value without much thought for how it was added in the first place.

But what about when you’re working on your administration page, and you need to display custom messages in WordPress after a redirect?

Using PHP CodeSniffer with Pressmatic and Atom

July 19, 2016 / Tom / 0 Comments

Regarding my development environment, this is the first year that I’ve made drastic changes to my toolset in several years (once I find things I really like, I tend to stick with them).

Atom Packages for WordPress

Case in point, in the last few months alone:

I’ve moved to Atom
I’ve found a set of packages that I really like
I use Pressmatic (rather than MAMP)
I use WP-CLI more than I ever have before

And with these changes come some other necessary configuration changes. Specifically, I still use PHP CodeSniffer but, out of necessity, its setup and configuration have changed.

Using Xdebug with Pressmatic

July 18, 2016 / Tom / 0 Comments

A few weeks ago, Pressmatic made a grand entrance into the WordPress development space with its unique positioning as a WordPress-specific development environment.

Pressmatic with WordPress Trunk

Specifically, it describes itself as such:

Pressmatic is a robust local WordPress manager. You won’t be disappointed with the ease of use, performance, and features.

I’ve been using it ever since (and talked about it in a couple of previous posts). Generally speaking, I’ve been really happy with one.

One of the features that it claims as a major benefit is:

One-click integration of Xdebug + PHPStorm.

And that’s great if you are using PHPStorm; however, those of you who’ve read this blog for any length of time within the past year or so know that I’m a fan of Codebug (which is essentially a front-end for Xdebug) and that I’ve made the switch to Atom.

So if you’re working with anything other than PHPStorm and you’re looking make use of Xdebug with Pressmatic, here’s a step-by-step guide for how to do so.