Category: Articles (Page 35 of 258)

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

A Misaligned View: Prioritizing Peers Over Users

May 14, 2019 / Tom

How many times have you looked at someone’s code and stated:

I’m not using this because it doesn’t look well-written.

And in this case, “look well-written” might either be a substitute for:

“look like how I would write it,”
“seem to make sense to me.”

Sure – there are times where using open source code is risky. We know this from the various software and services that show up with vulnerabilities. But, at least for this post, treat those as the exception – not the rule.

This means we’re left with looking at something we may use but opt not to use because it doesn’t seem to be written in a way that we think it should be written.

Using Direct Database Queries to Quickly Update Data, Part 2

May 10, 2019 / Tom

This is the second, and final part, in a series about – as the title suggests – direct database queries. Specifically, it’s about changing post statuses (but it’s relevant to more than that).

Photo by Ross Findon on Unsplash

From the previous post:

This is yet another post that’s going to be an illustration of how to use $wpdb to quickly update information based on metadata.

And the code provided in that post works but if you’re looking to make it more object-oriented, then there’s more work that can be done.

Before jumping into the actual post, though, it’s important to note that when it comes to object-oriented programming, there’s a lot of work that can go into the class design and creating levels of abstraction.

At some point, you have to draw the proverbial line between when you’re going to use interfaces, how granular your classes are going to be in terms of what they are abstracting, and the like.

And the purpose of this post is to help provide a better object-oriented design but it’s not an exercise is making this as optimal as possible. I do discuss topics like this in another series of posts.

But keep that in mind when reading through the code throughout the rest of the post.

Privacy is Hard: File Syncing

May 9, 2019 / Tom

When we’re working on a variety of devices – be it our computers, our tablets, or even our phones – it’s definitely convenient to have access to certain types wherever we are, right?

And with files aside, our phones have such powerful cameras now; it’s nice also to have the ability to store our photos but also to free up space on our phones (although this may be a tertiary issue for you regarding file syncing).

Anyway, there are a lot of services that are available that allow you to store your files in the cloud and to access them anywhere. It’s easy to tout security and privacy and, yes, we can do things on our end like enable two-factor authentication.

But what about the actual files themselves? That is, we can make it more difficult to log in and access the files but what about those on the other side who work at the company responsible for storing the files?

Using Direct Database Queries to Quickly Update Data, Part 1

May 7, 2019 / Tom

This is not the first time I’ve mentioned this, but one of the challenges that come with talking about writing direct database queries to update information in the WordPress database is that you leave yourself open to something like:

Yeah, but there’s an API to do something just like that.

And, in many cases, that’s right. I’m a big fan of using ’em, too. But there are times where direct, parameterized database queries can be a more optimal choice.

No, it’s not a database but wouldn’t it be awesome if they looked like this? Photo by Tobias Fischer on Unsplash

This is, of course, contingent on the environment in which you’re working the requirements of your project.

So this is yet another post that’s going to be an illustration of how to use $wpdb to quickly update information based on metadata (without using something like WP_Query or WP_Meta_Query to handle it).

Using cURL to Determine If the Specified URL Is a Valid Page

April 30, 2019 / Tom

Earlier this month, I wrote about finding the destination of a redirect using cURL in PHP. This can be a useful function to use whenever:

you know the URLs with which you’re dealing are going to redirect,
you know that the number of redirects will be limited to one.

Granted, in the latter case, it’s becoming more difficult because sites like, say, Twitter, have multiple redirects before you get to the destination.

But that’s a topic for another post (unless you just want to implement a recursive or iterative way of working through requests until you find the final destination).

Anyway, there’s another thing that can also be useful whenever you’re working with redirects and with cURL, and that’s determining if the specified URL takes you to a valid page.