Category: Articles (Page 183 of 258)

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

Making Anonymous Functions Maintainable

September 3, 2014 / Tom / 0 Comments

Obviously, the majority of the content that I write for the site deals with WordPress in someway, but there are times where I talk a bit about JavaScript, related libraries, and so on.

The Face of Anonymous Functions

Generally speaking, a lot of the JavaScript that’s written in the context of WordPress is done using jQuery because it’s the library that ships with the core applications, it’s tried and true, and its a good fit for a lot of the DOM manipulation that happens in themes and in plugins.

But one of the things that I’ve begun to notice over the past few years is that writing maintainable JavaScript (using jQuery or not) gets a bit more difficult when using anonymous functions.

Let’s Tilt The Pods Framework Conference!

September 1, 2014 / Tom

For those of you who aren’t familiar, the Pods Framework, it’s a relatively simple concept that introduces some really neat, advanced features into WordPress.

Pods Framework Homepage

Straight from the website:

The goal was to create an interface and PHP codebase to easily create, extend, and manage content types within WordPress. While the normal WordPress content architecture is limited to the built-in tables, a primary feature of Pods allows you to base content types off of their own custom tables designed around each content types’ needs.

Neat, right? What’s even cooler is that the Pods development team is hosting their very first conference this October in DFW.

Removing HTML Comments in WordPress

August 30, 2014 / Tom / 0 Comments

Some time ago, I began removing the HTML comment label from beneath the standard WordPress comment form (no, not the Jetpack-enabled form – the one that ships with a default WordPress theme).

Most of you are familiar with the form as it generally looks something like this:

HTML in Comments

Generally speaking I find that that block that usually sits between the textarea and the submit input to introduce complexity and likely cause more confusion than anything else.

For the Copy and Paste Programmers

August 27, 2014 / Tom / 0 Comments

One of the things that has been absolutely fantastic about the web is how much information we can publish and how much we can access it at any given time. I don’t know many who would disagree with that.

Even more so, for those who are interested in learning how to write software, there are various articles, podcasts, videos, tutorials, and so on all of which aim to teach a person the skills they need in order to actually get from not knowing how to write code, but knowing how to do so in a productive manner.

One of the downsides of this – and even more generally, open source – is that breeds this copy-and-paste mentality that completely undermines the very thing that it’s trying to teach: that is, how to write code.

Custom Meta Box Tabs in WordPress

August 26, 2014 / Tom / 0 Comments

One of the things that has become relatively common within themes that offer a lot of options is the use of tabbed navigation. That is, options that are related are logically grouped into tabs and then the user can navigate through each tab in order to select the options.

Whether or not this is a good thing for themes is outside the scope of this particular post; however, another place in which tabs may also be used is within the context of custom meta boxes.

That is, a custom meta box sits below the post editor and it offers several options or additions to the post meta data each of which is group together in their own tab.

Though I personally find this a bit more effective than using tabs of pages for screen options, that discussion is outside the scope of this post.

Regardless, there are ways to improve the ways in which custom meta box tabs are created such that they are organized in a more maintainable way, and each tab has its own view, partial, or template so that it’s easier to work with over time.