Category: Articles (Page 40 of 258)

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

WordPress Widgets: Refactoring, Part 13

March 13, 2019 / Tom

We’re finally at the final post of the series on refactoring the WordPress Widget Boilerplate. By the end of this post, we’ll have the development branch of our code done, and we’ll be ready to merge everything into the master branch.

There is, however, still a bit of work to do. Namely:

The last thing we’re going to look at after this is tightening up some of the conditional logic along with a word about caching data (since we’re already doing a bit of that in earlier posts).

So those are the two things we’re going to be looking at in this post. Specifically, we’re going to look at handling conditional logic for the front-end and then how to implement basic caching.

Suggestions for Organizing Procedural Code

March 12, 2019 / Tom

For as much as I write about – and am a fan of – object-oriented programming, I don’t write much about the times in which I’m working with a procedural code base.

Procedural programming is a programming paradigm, derived from structured programming, based upon the concept of the procedure call. Procedures, also known as routines, subroutines, or functions, simply contain a series of computational steps to be carried out.

Sometimes, I come by this from the requirements of a project, sometimes it’s from a project that I’ve inherited, or sometimes because of something else.

I think it’s important that, as programmers, we don’t hold one paradigm so high that we shy away from working with other ways of writing code. After all, the act of writing code is, at its core, about solving a problem.

How the problem is solved may be considered secondary.

Regardless, whenever I’m working with a code base; however, it’s written, I still try to make sure it’s organized in a way that’s cohesive, as easy to follow as possible, and is able to be maintained over time.

Organizing Procedural Code

I thought I’d share how I approach writing WordPress plugins using procedural programming versus object-oriented programming and how I go about organizing procedural code.

If nothing else, perhaps this will give you some ideas for a current or future project.

WordPress Widgets: Refactoring, Part 12

March 7, 2019 / Tom

As far as refactoring the WordPress Widget Boilerplate is concerned – especially given how far we’ve come since the project started eight years ago – we’ve done a lot of work.

We’ve brought it up to a far more modern standard and we’re making it far easier to work with it such that building future widgets should be easier. And this is not only from the standard of the boilerplate but from an object-oriented standard so that maintenance and code quality is higher.

In the last post, we wrapped up much of the work for the administration area and are ready to begin our work on code for the front-end.

We said:

Next, we’re going to look at rendering content on the front-end. We’re nearing the end, of the refactoring of the Boilerplate but there’s just a bit more to do before we’re ready to merge it into the master branch of the codebase.

So in this post, we’re going to pick up there. Now if you’ve been following along up to this point then you should have everything you need from the develop branch.

If not, be sure to pull it as that’s where we’re going to pick up in the remainder of the post.

Taking Aspects of WordPress for Granted

February 28, 2019 / Tom

Because of the open-source nature of WordPress, one of the luxuries that many of us are used to having is complete control over the environment in which we’re working. Given that, you might even say that we take certain aspects of WordPress for granted.

And I’d say that for the majority of projects on which we work, this is true.

By that, I mean we’re not only able to customize, extend, and even limit the software (for certain types of users), we’re also able to change certain aspects of its configuration.

But if you’re in the business of doing work for others – an employer, as part of a contractor, or in some other situation – you may be limited in just how much customization you’re able to make.

Use the Current User ID with Pods for WordPress

February 27, 2019 / Tom

The Pods Framework for WordPress, a specific utility that’s been around for a long time, offers a lot of functionality that can make working with advanced content types, custom settings, and so on.

Current User ID with Pods: Pods Framework

I mention this because Pods is a popular utility and there are some features available that provide some nice functionality.

Through the use of shortcodes, it’s possible to perform some powerful database queries to retrieve information to populate forms dynamically.

One use case that I see showing up in a few results is how to populate a shortcode with the current user’s ID. There’s a forum post about it here and a continued discussion about it on Stack Overflow, too.

But if you’re looking for a way to filter the content to do this without reworking some of the existing shortcodes, there’s another way to do it.