Category: Articles (Page 223 of 258)

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

WordPress and MVC (Gloves Aren’t Made for Feet)

August 22, 2013 / Tom / 0 Comments

One of the topics that periodically crops up in discussions as it relates to WordPress is the idea of WordPress and MVC.

That is, developers wants to take an MVC approach to building WordPress applications. And I get it – I love MVC. It’s why I used to work with Rails, it’s why I was really excited when Microsoft released .NET MVC years ago (when I was working in .NET).

But the thing is that MVC is not the silver bullet of web development that we try to make it out to be. Yes, it’s an awesome design pattern, and I personally think that it fits the web application model like a glove, but not every framework or platform implements that design pattern.

Case in point: WordPress is not MVC.

And that’s okay. I think we need to leave the desire of trying to shoehorn it into our projects aside especially when the pattern WordPress provides is not only sufficient, but works well when leveraged correctly.

One Does Not Simply Use The Defaults Array

Understanding The WordPress defaults Array

August 21, 2013 / Tom / 0 Comments

Earlier this week, I received an email from someone who was asking about the Settings API. Specifically, he was curious as to how the WordPress defaults array works.

For those of who may have worked with theme development, plugin development, or the Settings API in general, then you may be familiar with functions that look like this:

/**
 * Provides a default value for the theme layout setting.
 *
 * @since    1.0.0
 */
function get_theme_default_layout_options() {

	$defaults = array(
	    'layout'                         => 'right_sidebar_layout',
	    'display_featured_images'        => 'always'
	);

	return apply_filters ( 'theme_default_layout_options', $defaults );

}

But if you’re not familiar with the Settings API or with how to `apply_filters` call works, then this particular function can be confusing especially when it comes to understanding the serialization lifecycle of saving options to the database.

Software Milestones: Keeping Track of All The Things

August 20, 2013 / Tom / 0 Comments

One of the challenges that comes with managing any software project is making sure that milestones and deliverables are handled on time. The thing is, it’s hard – from the project outset – to always to predict some of the things that will crop up within each milestone.

If you’re using source control, this can make it difficult to keep your source control in sync with what milestone on which you’re working.

For example, I typically like to work on a milestone, then tag it, and release it. After that, I may do something like `milestone-1.1` or `milestone-1.2` as changes arise, but the more work that arises with each future milestone, and the various impacts it has on previous milestones, the more difficult it can be to truly track each milestone.

So what are we to do?

The Danger of Third Party APIs

August 15, 2013 / Tom / 0 Comments

Generally speaking, the majority of the work that I do with third party APIs is done so in the context of WordPress, but the truth is that what I’m about to say is subject to whatever platform you’re work with – be it .NET, Rails, COBOL, or whatever you or your dad maybe using :).

But a feature in Standard recently quit working because of an underlying change in a third party API. Now, to our credit, we normally do a good job with following blogs and release notes when an API is going to change.

In this case, there was no documentation on any of this – something just stopped working, so we needed to dig in and fix it. The fix is under testing and will be released later, but the point that I’m trying to make is that there is always a danger in working with third party APIs.

WordPress Directories: inc and lib

August 14, 2013 / Tom / 0 Comments

In the previous post, I spoke briefly about WordPress directories. Specifically, I talked about placing files in an `inc` directory whenever building a theme. This lead to a comment by Richard that I thought was worth covering here:

In the theme folder, sometimes I see people use “lib” to include theme assets and other times I see them use “inc”, as you’ve done here. Is there a reason for one vs the other?

I gave a short response in the comments, but thought that this warranted a longer form explanation to share my perspective, and to hear what you guys have to say, as well.