Software Engineering in WordPress, PHP, and Backend Development

Category: Articles (Page 126 of 258)

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

Supporting More MIME Types in WordPress

Please see this comment for updated information about this filter.

If you have a project for a client or perhaps just for yourself, you may find that you need to upload a file in the WordPress back-end that is not supported by the core application.

Depending on the type of file that you want to introduce, you may need to add support for additional MIME types. Luckily, this is easy enough to do.

MIME Types in WordPress

No, not that type of mime.

But before looking at the code for how to do it, I think it’s important to understand exactly what we’re adding (otherwise, we run the risk of copying and pasting code and not knowing what it is or what it does other than it works).

Continue reading

How Do You Give Proper GPL Attribution?

GPL attribution is one of those tangential topics to a lot of the GPL discussion around WordPress (which I’m not interested in discussing here).

The GPL homepage for GPL attribution information.

Instead, what I’m trying to answer is this:

How do you give proper GPL attribution when using someone else’s work in your work?

Case in point: Let’s say someone is building a theme and wants to bundle some code you’ve written (and it’s available on GitHub) and is trying to attribute it properly to you?

First, this is something that someone was kind enough to ask me when working on a project of his own. Second, I think it’s a great question as it’s something we should all know how to answer since much of our work is likely using other third-party, open source libraries.

Continue reading

When To Register Custom Post Types

Custom Post Types are arguably the feature that brought WordPress from being a standard blogging application up to a CMS. I’d even go as far to say that this feature also added new APIs for developers to use when building web applications.

Custom Post Types

Here’s a post, but this isn’t exactly representative of a custom post type.

Though posts, pages, and basically anything that as a title and the editor (among other optional features) are post types, custom post types are what allow us to actually create a model of information to store in the database, associated with metadata, and more.

The point of this post isn’t about how great custom post types are, though. Instead. it’s about how to handle the case whenever you receive the following message:

Fatal error: Call to a member function add_rewrite_tag() on a non-object

Fatal error? That’s never good. The nice thing is that this isn’t really terribly difficult to fix.

Continue reading

Improving WordPress Plugin User Experience

When working on a new WordPress plugin or generally speaking, a new feature of a project that will integrate with the WordPress back-end, I’m of the mind the all of the elements should inherit the styles provided by WordPress.

In short, I’m not a fan of when other people build things for the application and use the set of controls they think “look good” or that deviate from the core set of elements and style.

This isn’t to say that there aren’t improvements that can’t be made within WordPress, but there are also reasons for the look, feel, and usability of things as they currently are. And over time, I believe that these things will evolve just as they’ve done this far.

But what do you do when you’re working on a feature and you’re unsure of how it should work from a user experience perspective and you don’t really have a guide from which to draw?

Continue reading

The Facets of a WordPress Developer

Do a few Internet searches for “WordPress developer” and you’re bound to find more than a few posts on the topic. Though my goal isn’t to add to the plethora of articles that already exist, there are a few thoughts I have as it relates to the topic.

And all of it comes from time spent working in the WordPress economy, working with others, talking with others, and so on.

This isn’t a post about how to hire, what salaries should be, or how to interview a person. It just has to do with the type of work we do.

Continue reading

« Older posts Newer posts »

© 2025 Tom McFarlin

Theme by Anders NorenUp ↑