Category: Articles (Page 42 of 258)

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

Shorter Blog Posts, Revisited

February 18, 2019 / Tom

A little over three years ago, I wrote a post about starting to write shorter blog posts. And in that particular posts, I made two comments that I think are still relevant but that I’ve gotten away from doing.

First, I wrote:

Because the truth is with the amount of information coming from other blogs, Twitter, and whatever other social networks and news sources you read, odds are that this site is one that can also be easily marked as read or thrown into Pocket oblivion never to be read again.

And I also wrote:

Secondly, it’ll aim to be more to the point than anything else. The idea being that you can load up the article, read through it quickly, save whatever information you’d like (or not), and then move on to whatever’s in your queue.

I don’t know if old habits die hard or if I’ve simply gotten away from it and back to writing longer form writing because that’s how I tend to write.

Shorter Blog Posts: Revisited

But I don’t want all of my posts to be that way.

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.

Shorter Blog Posts, Revisited

WordPress Taxonomies: Terms, Parents, Children

WordPress Widgets: Refactoring, Part 10

Lessons on Launching (Three of Them, for Now)

WordPress Widgets: Refactoring, Part 9

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