Category: Articles (Page 42 of 258)

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

WordPress Taxonomies: Terms, Parents, Children

February 14, 2019 / Tom

Programmatically creating taxonomies seems to be a point that comes up now and again for those who are building solutions for others on WordPress.

Taxonomies themselves can even be a little confusing; however, I’ve found that the following usually helps to solidify the concept a bit:

Hierarchical taxonomies are analogous to categories; non-hierarchical taxonomies are analogous to tags.

But still, let’s say that you’re creating a solution for someone such that you need to import information as a post and apply a taxonomy to it. Further, perhaps you want to apply a parent taxonomy to the post, as well.

How can we do that?

WordPress Widgets: Refactoring, Part 10

February 13, 2019 / Tom

As far as the WordPress Widget Boilerplate refactoring goes, we’re at a good place. A lot of work has been done such that introducing new classes, features, and functionality should be much easier.

And not only that: It should be easier to follow.

Thanks the work in the last post, we have a lot of work to build off of – namely, an basic administrative interface.

Finally, the last post said:

Over the next few articles, this is going to continue to evolve but, as you can see, we’re making sure that we have a single base class of functionality for talking with WordPress and a class specifically for rendering the administrative form.

And that’s where we’re going to pick up in this article. Specifically, we’re going to look at sanitizing and serializing the data as well as retrieving the data saved in the widget.

Lessons on Launching (Three of Them, for Now)

February 7, 2019 / Tom

One of the biggest things I’ve learned since trying out this whole podcasting thing (the second episode should be out next week, for those waiting with bated breath 🙃) is that achieving whatever arbitrary level of perfection before releasing something is hard.

Practical WordPress Development Podcast

You’d like I’d know this after so long in working in this field, right?

But there are several lessons on launching that I am trying to keep in mind especially as I’m working to get a few other projects off the ground all the while working in my day job.

WordPress Widgets: Refactoring, Part 9

February 6, 2019 / Tom

Though the last post in this refactoring series wasn’t incredibly long, I do think it was a bit dense. That is, it required a fair amount of work to get the code in a place that we can more easily work with it.

But that’s just it: All the work we did should make it easier to move forward with the rest of the code we need to write.

And to make sure that we’re taking advantage of the work and the foundation we’ve laid thus far, we’re going to round out the series with a set of shorter, more focused articles that should take less time to read, implement, and understand what we’re doing with the code.

WordPress Programming: Separating Concerns

February 5, 2019 / Tom

When it comes to creating classes for WordPress plugins, I’ve been asked about why I bother separating functionality into subscribers and into other classes.

I think this is a good question because it helps to understand two things:

the role of a subscriber as it relates to the WordPress architecture,
the role of the other classes as it relates to what it is you’re building (and how this can help with other things like unit testing and so on).

So I thought why not respond in the form of a short post? It’ll document the why behind the what [and it will give me a place to update if things change in the future].