Category: Articles (Page 53 of 258)

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

Adding Custom Information to a WordPress Category Edit Page

September 11, 2018 / Tom

Adding additional meta boxes, fields, and other information to WordPress is easy if you know the right hooks and the proper APIs to follow. But what if you want to add information to a WordPress taxonomy page?

For example, say you want to create a custom WordPress category edit page or, at the very least, add some custom information to a taxonomy page?

It’s still possible to do that, and it’s still relatively easy but, again, you need to know the right hooks to use, and it also depends on if you’re working with the built-in taxonomies or a custom taxonomy.

For this post, I’ll show how to do this using a custom, hierarchical taxonomy (or, in simpler terms, a custom category).

The Why and How of Custom jQuery Events

September 6, 2018 / Tom

As far back as 1.0, jQuery has provided a trigger function that allows us to:

Execute all handlers and behaviors attached to the matched elements for the given event type.

But it wasn’t until 1.3 that this particular function became significantly more useful, at least as far as I’m concerned. I say that because that’s when we gained the ability to define custom events and then set handlers for them.

Custom jQuery Events

What, though, is a likely use case in which custom jQuery events are useful in the context of WordPress? Off the top of your head, you may be able to come up with many. Or maybe not.

It hasn’t been until lately that I’ve been using them significantly more than usual. So I thought I’d share how I’m using them if for now other reason than showing you how to wire them up to your work.

Aim to Break Programs into Smaller Components

September 5, 2018 / Tom

One of the things that programmers often talk about is the desire to break programs into smaller components, or functions, so that it makes them easier to trace, easier to read, and easier to debug.

But it’s not all that uncommon to see monolithic functions with a lot of code comments to help explain what’s going on in the program.

Breaking Things Into Smaller Components: Monoliths

A monolith ala 2001: A Space Odyssey.

I’m not knocking this, really, because I don’t know the constraints under which a programmer was working. That is:

What was the budget s/he had when building the program?
How much time was given to complete the project?
Were there many people working on the project?
Was the programmer given time to write the code so they could unit test it, refactor it, or merely make it easier to read?

In short, there’s a lot of reason – I believe – that we can read “bad code,” and it doesn’t always have to be the fault of the programmer (that’s just the most natural thing we have to throw out when we read something we dislike).

Does this mean, though, that we shouldn’t strive to refactor or write code in such a way that makes it easier to understand? Of course not. Assuming we have the time to do so, how might we do it?

Writing Messages to the WordPress Debug Log

September 4, 2018 / Tom

Whenever I’m working on a project, I often have WordPress set in debug mode, and I like to write messages to the error log that I can easily view, trace, and follow whenever I’m working on a project.

WordPress Debug Log: Monolog

When I do this, there are two ways (and it just depends on the project):

I’ll use a library such as Monolog,
I’ll use my own, simple log function.

In this post, I’m going to cover the latter. That is, I’m going to share how I write messages to the WordPress debug log and then some of the things you may need to pay attention to whenever you’re doing the same.

A Stub for Working with Database Queries in WordPress

August 30, 2018 / Tom

As much as I am a fan of certain WordPress APIs for querying the database such as:

WP_Query,
WP_User_Query,
WP_Meta_Query,
and so on

I’m also a fan of querying directly against the database when needed.

As you’ll notice, there’s a consistent way that I go about doing this and since there are times where I’ve been doing this more frequently, as of late, here is a basic format for working with database queries in WordPress.

If I do this, though, there are generally do things that I keep in mind:

always make sure the query is parameterized (especially in the case of user input),
return in the information in the form of an associative array.

The first case is for security; the second is more or less for convenience to make iterating through the data simpler via PHP array functions.