Category: Articles (Page 129 of 258)

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

Displaying The Most Recent WordPress Query

April 25, 2016 / Tom

Looking the most recent WordPress query that is run on a given page can be useful for several reasons:

you see how the information in the database is retrieved,
you learn how the underlying query system works,
you’re able to benchmark your custom queries,
and more.

In a recent article for Envato, I share a 60-second video on how you can quickly take a look at the last query executed on a given page.

Pressware Partnering with Evermore

April 21, 2016 / Tom

When Evermore was first released in 2014 and participated in some in-depth coverage and discussion with Post Status, my interest was piqued.

Evermore on Post Status

That is to say that I was interested in what they were doing, but I had no clue if it would pan or not. After all, in the last few years, we’ve seen an influx in various WordPress hosts some of which are managed, some of which are simply aiming to cater to the WordPress market.

But Evermore positioned themselves differently.

Evermore

Two years later, they are going strong (“stronger” would probably be the more accurate term to use) and delivering a unique solution for a certain type of client in the WordPress economy.

And I couldn’t be happier to announce that Pressware is officially partnering with Evermore.

A WordPress Plugin Bootstrap File

April 19, 2016 / Tom / 0 Comments

The longer I work with building custom solutions for others in the form of WordPress plugins, the more I am a fan of having a WordPress plugin bootstrap file.

Honestly, this isn’t anything new, but it’s something I like to discuss periodically because the methods in which we build plugins, the ways posts can become outdated, and the strategies that we employ as we get better at what we do for a living change over time.

At least I hope they do. If you’re doing the same thing now that you were three or four years ago, then you’re a stellar developer. Or you haven’t grown that much. :)

But that’s content for another post.

When it comes to the work I do for others, the work is primarily in the creating plugins (which I enjoy building). So it’s only natural that I’d have things to add continually to this topic, right?

We Need to Be Writing Good Changelogs

April 18, 2016 / Tom

Writing good changelogs seems to be one of those things that many of us talk about doing talk about wanting to see, but often don’t do it.

Or maybe it’s better to say that we often complain about the types of changelogs that we see, but don’t offer any advice of updates them ourselves.

And maybe that’s not the right thing to say. I mean, we do offer advice on how to update them. But does that stop us from writing better changelogs ourselves?

Installing WP-CLI with MAMP

April 13, 2016 / Tom / 0 Comments

About four years ago, I shared a post about WP-CLI. It wasn’t exactly a new project at the time, but it was far less developed than it is now.

The WP-CLI Homepage

As I mentioned in yesterday’s post, one of the things that we’re doing with is making sure that all of our work is unit tested from the initial version.

And when it comes to unit testing in PHP, many of us are familiar with PHPUnit; however, when it comes to unit testing plugins that are integrated with WordPress, it helps to have a test environment set up.

Sure, it’s possible to set aside a test database, test content, and then defined mock objects based on interfaces (and I’m not here to dissuade anyone from doing that). But WP-CLI offers a much easier way to go about doing just that in a more automated manner.

But first, it’s important to make sure that it’s correctly installed on your system.