Category: Articles (Page 43 of 258)

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

WordPress Widgets: Refactoring, Part 8

January 31, 2019 / Tom

When it comes to refactoring the WordPress Widget Boilerplate, we’ve done a lot of work to bring the code base up to more object-oriented standard. Further, we’ve introduced a variety of other tools that allow us to bring our code up to more modern standards

Now that we’ve spent time doing that, it’s time to jump back into the code and begin refactoring it in such a way that allows for the use of abstract classes and subscribers (that work as part of the event-driven design pattern).

At the end of the previous post, I wrote:

In the upcoming posts, we’re going to look at how we can implement subscribers for the public-facing side of the site (that is, where the widget content is displayed). And we’ll do the same for the administration area of the site.

So in this post, we’re going to do exactly that. Specifically, we’re going to start with working on a subscriber for the widget and then getting the base widget to display on the administrative side of the site first.

Successful WordPress Freelancing By Andy Adams

January 24, 2019 / Tom

For those of you who have been reading this blog for some time (and by some time, I mean years), then you’ve likely heard me mention Andy Adams.

I’ve talked about him in the previous posts:

Though we don’t work professionally together anymore, we’ve kept in touch, and I’m incredibly proud to share that he’s just released a book: Successful WordPress Freelancing.

WordPress Widgets: Refactoring, Part 7

January 23, 2019 / Tom

In the last few posts, we’ve done a lot of work to bring the code up to the point of refactoring that’s going to be covered in this article.

Specifically, we’ve covered:

hooks,
a Registry,
and Subscribers.

All of these are going to play a role in what we’re going to do today.

What Are Source Maps (And Are They Needed)?

January 22, 2019 / Tom

If you work on the front-end of a site in any capacity – be it for a plugin, a theme, or even something outside of WordPress – you’re likely working with minification tools.

The benefits are obvious, right?

it lessens the payload,
it allows us to focus on development on our local environments

But one of the features that come with working with these technologies and that’s the ability to generate source maps.

And this raises a question (or maybe two): What are source maps? And are they even needed?

You can claim it’s late to the game to talk about this, but there are always people entering the industry that may not know this material.

So why not cover it?

WordPress Widgets: Refactoring, Part 6

January 17, 2019 / Tom

You should be well-versed in the refactoring we’re doing regarding the WordPress Widget Boilerplate. If not, I recommend catching up on the series thus far by:

reading the previous post,
or reading the entire series up to this point,
and looking at the development branch of the project on GitHub.

As far as the code base goes, we’re in a good place right now. We’ve begun to refactor much of the code into smaller, more focused classes. And we’ve just set up a Registry so that we can begin working with instances of objects throughout the plugin without the need for too much coupling.

But there’s still a problem we’re facing and it deals with namespaces and autoloading. I’ve talked a bit about this a couple of years ago but not as it relates to Composer.

And that’s what we’re going to look at in this post.