Category: Articles (Page 45 of 258)

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

Composer Without Continuous Integration

December 20, 2018 / Tom

If you’re a WordPress developer who is using Composer without continuous integration, then odds are you’re left with a crucial step of figuring out how to manage the vendor directory when deploying your plugins.

Composer Without Continuous Integration: Composer

That is:

We know it’s a bad idea to throw the entire vendor directory under source control,
Other developers who are familiar with using Composer should be able to get up and running without the need for much instruction,
Continuous integration isn’t being used for any number of reasons,
And we’re left with needing to provide a production-grade deliverable that uses certain dependencies but not others.

As much as the above points may describe our situation, it doesn’t tell us what we can do with it.

In other words, here’s the use case: You’ve built a WordPress plugin for someone. This plugin uses a variety of dependencies all of which are maintained by Composer.

You’re not checking the vendor directory into the repository, but you’re also not using continuous integration to deploy the plugin. Instead, the customer is, or a third-party is.

So what then?

WordPress Widgets: Refactoring, Part 4

December 19, 2018 / Tom

We’ve implemented a significant amount of changes to the WordPress Widget Boilerplate. If you’ve not been following along, I recommend starting at the beginning of the series and catching up.

If, however, you’ve been following along and you’re also running some of the code quality tools that examine the state of the project, then you’re going to notice a handful of errors in the console.

Normally, this is the point where I recommend paying attention to what it shares and then fixing whatever it reports, but we’re not there yet.

For example, some of the errors that our tools are showing right now are based on the fact that we have unused variables. Of course, that’s the case, though, because we haven’t started building a widget.

But there are still a few concrete classes we need to implement.

Back to Twentyseventeen for My Blogging Theme

December 18, 2018 / Tom

In the last couple of months, there have been a handful of theme shops that have been acquired by larger hosts. There are obvious benefits to those who run both the shop, the hosting company, and to the customers of the given hosting company.

This also, however, leaves niche theme shops in a unique position. I’m in the process of slowly re-building my business’ site. And in the meantime, I’ve asked the following a question (a few times, actually – yes, I’m quoting myself in a tweet 🤷🏻‍♂️):

with all of the theme shops being acquired by hosts, what are some of your favorite niché shops? (i’m still a fan of @thethemefoundry)

— Tom McFarlin (@tommcfarlin) December 6, 2018

The reason I ask, though, is two reasons:

for the past half-a-decade, we’ve watched the entire theme landscape change,
with the changes that have been introduced into the editor in WordPress 5.0 and what’s coming in the future phases as outlined in the State of the Word, I wonder how this impacts small businesses but bloggers as well.

And the purpose of this post has more to do with the latter point than anything else.

Custom Archive Templates: A Short Guide

December 13, 2018 / Tom

Whenever you’re working with archive templates in WordPress, posts are typically listed by date in descending order. That is, the most recent posts are listed at the top, and then it goes from there.

Lately, I’ve been working on a few projects that integrate with third-party APIs. These APIs return dates – sometimes two dates, a start date, and an end date – for a given event and customers want to use that information to list posts rather than the date of the post. That is, they want custom archive templates.

It’s not too hard to do this, but before doing so, I think it’s important to give some background information on how the project is built so there’s a bit more context around why, say, a custom query is needed and why you may or may not need to look into pre_get_posts.

I’ll start with a TL;DR first, though. That way, you can get the idea before reading the whole thing.

WordPress Widgets: Refactoring, Part 3

December 12, 2018 / Tom

In terms of updating the WordPress Widget Boilerplate (all of which is tracked in the develop branch), we’ve come a long way in terms of refactoring how it’s organized.

Thus far, we’ve:

looked at how the WordPress Widget API provides an example of object-oriented programming,
how we can use this API to determine object-oriented programming in other areas of WordPress,
installed tools to help us evaluate the quality of the code,
found errors that currently exist in the code in terms of modern programming standards,
and began re-organizing the code base so that it fits with more modern practices.

Now we’re ready to start refactoring this code in a much more object-oriented manner.

So if you’ve yet to catch up with the previous posts (any of them, really), I recommend doing so because it’s going to take a little while to bring this up to date. There’s a lot of code to write an explain.

Let’s get started.