Category: Articles (Page 206 of 258)

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

Markdown Syntax (And Developer’s Tunnel Vision)

February 5, 2014 / Tom / 0 Comments

As far and and as exciting as text editing can get, one of my favorite introductions into the space in the last decade has been Markdown.

I remember the first time I read about it, I loved it – it was essentially simplified markup – and the first time I used it regularly was when Stack Overflow launched.

Then I began to write my text files using the format even if the tool didn’t support formatting because it help to make reading the text file that much cleaner (besides, sometimes word processors are just overkill, aren’t they?).

Notes for Mayer in Markdown

Then other development-oriented sites began implementing markdown parsers into their site much like Stack Overflow did when they started. For developers and others who enjoy writing in markdown, it’s been a really cool ride.

With tools and services like:

I’d say that markdown is more prevalent than it’s ever been.

And although I’m someone who clearly is clearly a fan, I can’t help but think that developers are developing a bit of tunnel vision as it relates to a way for everyone to write.

The Best Programming Language, Tool, and Technology is Here!

February 4, 2014 / Tom / 0 Comments

I think one of the biggest challenges that developers face – especially new developers – is this feeling of having the keep up with the newest, latest, and greatest technologies that come out almost monthly (if not weekly), and the guilt that follows when peers attempt to “hold them accountable” (for lack of a much better phrase) for not knowing or not using something.

Now, for the record, when it comes to the technologies that people opt to use for their projects, I don’t really care – to each his or her own. Whatever makes you more productive and gets you solving problems faster, then awesome.

Sure, there’s something to be said for a team using a unified set of tools, but that’s content for another post.

Generally speaking, can’t we stop with espousing every latest-and-greatest language, tool, framework, whatever as the next best thing?

Because it’s probably not.

How To Retrieve Posts with Multiple Taxonomies

February 3, 2014 / Tom / 0 Comments

Get Posts with Multiple Taxonomies

I think that one of the more underestimated aspects of building solutions with WordPress comes with leveraging custom post types and custom taxonomies.

For those who are currently building products for others – be it plugins, custom themes, or web applications – then you’re likely familiar with how powerful these two features can be.

Specifically, if you’re used to the ideas of models and views, or data objects and a presentation layer (or whatever language your framework of choice uses to describe this information), you can think of custom post types as a bit of a hybrid of models and views.

Similarly, you can think of taxonomies as an easy way to stamp your data – in WordPress, we think of these as categories and tags – but sometimes, I think the terminology may limit us in thinking how we can leverage the features.

Nonetheless, if you’re used to working with WordPress, custom post types, and custom taxonomies, then you’ve likely faced a time when you’ve needed to query information based on a combination of the two.

And though there are a variety of different ways to retrieve custom post types and how they are tagged, here’s one way to grab information that’s stamped with multiple taxonomies.

Believe The Best (Don’t Assume The Worst) About Your Fellow Programmer

January 31, 2014 / Tom / 0 Comments

Developers can be very quick to judge another developer’s work – be it code, a blog post, or even a tweet – as to why they would opt to share one method of solving a problem rather than another.

And that’s a bit of paradox, isn’t it?

I mean, developers know that for any given problem, there are likely multiple solutions, yet they often challenge why one solution was chosen – or at least shared – over another situation.

And it’s not enough to actually challenge it, but it’s gotta be done with condescension or passive aggressiveness; otherwise, it’s just not enough, is it?

Programmatically Delete Files in WordPress (and Their Associated Meta Data)

January 30, 2014 / Tom / 0 Comments

This is post two of two on how to upload files in WordPress and created associated meta data. Read the first post here.

In the first post in this series, I mentioned that I’ve been working on a plugin in which the users needs to upload a file to a custom post type without the use of the Media Uploader.

This is basically done via use of an `input` type of `file`, WordPress `nonce` values, and some basic PHP functionality, but if you’d like to read more, then be sure to review the first post.

As mention in the first article, the second part of being able to store files and their associated meta data is so that you can also remove the files (and the meta data) when the user triggers the appropriate action.

Specifically, the plugin must do the following:

Verify the request’s incoming `nonce` value
Use (or somehow retrieve) the specified meta key for the file to be deleted
Delete the file from the file system
Remove the database entries – that is, the meta data – associated with the file

Just as in the last article, we’ll take a look at each step and the code required for each, as well.