Category: Articles (Page 29 of 258)

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

Deactivating WordPress Plugins with SQL

December 12, 2019 / Tom

If you inherit a WordPress codebase, regardless of the age of the project, there may be a lot of context that you don’t have as to why certain decisions were made or how things were implemented.

This may include the server, infrastructure used to help power the site or the app, and other contextual information about the environment in which it was running.

This type of information can be server-related information, PHP version, database type, information that’s actually stored in the database especially if you do a database import, and so on.

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Ideally, all of this is handed over but that’s not always the case. Anyway, say you attempt to start it up and then when you attempt to start up the application, not only does it not work but it either shows a white screen or displays a message about technical problems with your installation.

How To Fix the Referenced PHPCompatibility Sniff Error

December 5, 2019 / Tom

There are a lot of nice packages that we can use in our PHP-based projects and if you’re using Composer or GrumPHP, PHPCompatibility is one that I recommend including your projects especially if you’re writing code for something that’s going to run across multiple versions of PHP (that is, on hosts that offer different versions).

This is a set of sniffs for PHP CodeSniffer that checks for PHP cross-version compatibility. It will allow you to analyse your code for compatibility with higher and lower versions of PHP.
PHPCompatibility Repository

This is something that be installed within composer and it’s something that I recommend for people writing code for WordPress because of how much variation exists within our hosts.

Occasionally, though, you may see a problem like this:

And if you run $ phpcs -i you may get a message that’s unclear.

Time Off 2019: Part 3 of 4 of Social Media Sabbaticals (No Time for Four)

December 4, 2019 / Tom

If you’ve followed along with the previous articles this year, you’ll notice that I didn’t actually take time off each quarter.

As I head into December of this year, this will be the final – and obviously the third – time I take off the social web for the remainder of the year. At least that’s the plan. I’m thinking of doing it a little bit differently this year.

For those of you who haven’t read about my doing this in years past, check out:

Though I don’t really do year in review posts, going back to read these and see how things have panned out over the years is always fun and is as close to retrospectives as I get.

With all of that said, I’d summarize the entire year by saying: It’s been a year, if nothing else. Some ways bad, some was fantastic.

On Retiring Site Memberships

November 26, 2019 / Tom

After two years after writing a lot of content and giving exclusive access to site members, this past weekend I opened the site to everyone.

In short:

https://twitter.com/tommcfarlin/status/1198689233017430017

But this wasn’t a small nor was it a quick decision and it’s not something that I opted to on a whim. For those who were subscribed to the newsletter earlier this year, I made an announcement that this was coming.

You Should Be Using PHP Filtering Functions, Part 2

November 19, 2019 / Tom

In the previous post, I talked about the reasons using PHP filtering functions is more useful rather than not.

In short, doing so helps to provide a level of validation that’s built into the language so that we don’t have to re-write something. Naturally, there are caveats.

For example, if you’re having to validate a value that is of non-Latin characters, then you’re going to go have to go it alone and implement validation with perhaps a regular expression.

But if you’re using email addresses, URLs, numbers, IP addresses, and so many more things, then you’re in a good position to use something that already exists.

Anyway, all of the above is still about filtering variables. What about inputs, though? That is, those that come from $_POST or $_GET. It’s possible to use a similar strategy with a different function and different filter set.

But if you understand the basics presented in the last post, then this post will not be very different.