Category: Articles (Page 61 of 258)

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

Working with Custom Rewrite Rules and Page Templates in WordPress

June 6, 2018 / Tom

The WordPress Rewrite API is a solid API assuming that you’re comfortable with regular expressions.

Rewrite Rules and Page Templates: The Rewrite API

And, honestly, even if you’re not, tools like PHP Live RegEx make it really easy to test your code before dropping it into the add_rewrite_rule API call.

Rewrite Rules and Page Templates: PHP Live RegEx

However, there are times where you may find yourself in a situation in which you need to work with rewrite rules and page templates. And when that’s the case, it’s not always as straightforward as making a simple call with a single regular expression.

The reason? If you have multiple pages using the same template, then you’re not always going to have the page located in the same index in the query that runs on each page.

To that end, we to have to handle it in a slightly different way than, say, simply accessing a numerical index of information in the global query.

Is It Really Worth Debating jQuery Versus ES6?

June 5, 2018 / Tom

When building WordPress plugins for myself or others, several of the things I take into account – as we all should – is the level of maintainability, scalability, and support for the plugin as WordPress continues to move forward.

Specifically, I’m talking about client-side development (or, more simply, JavaScript).

As the support for ES6 continues to rise, jQuery continues to move forward with development, and the desire to use new APIs to build out our solutions, I believe it’s worth asking the question:

Do we really need to stick with jQuery?

An Object-Oriented Way of Working with Models and Web Applications

May 23, 2018 / Tom

When we talk about the concept of Models in object-oriented programming, we’re usually referring to a class that is a representation of the data stored in the database.

That is is, when information is stored in rows and columns, we populate a class, its attributes, and so on with that information so that we’re able to pass it around the application, manipulate it as needed, and then possibly serialize the data back to the database.

But in a web application, it’s fair to assume that the model might need to be possible to the front-end to be used. That is, imagine a front-end request making a call to the server, requesting a model (or a collection of models), and then rendering them on the front-end.

Though this particular post isn’t code-oriented, I still think it’s worth thinking through the process of translating a model from the server and then rendering it on the front-end of the web application.

Does WordPress Hold You Back as a Developer, Really?

May 22, 2018 / Tom

One of the commentaries that we often read or hear about WordPress is its “low barrier to entry” and why this is good for the web.

The counterpoint to this is that it prevents developers (or “would-be developers,” as some may say) from embracing more modern technologies because WordPress doesn’t require them.

Does WordPress Hold You Back?

To be honest, I’ve even seen some go as far as to say that if someone says they are a PHP developer who has primarily worked in WordPress for their career, then you should subtract, say, three years from their “real” PHP experience.

Yikes.

I see reasons for this – I’m guilty of some of the “older” practices – but does that mean that WordPress prevents us from becoming high-quality, object-oriented programmers?

Where Are the Amazing WordPress Jobs?

May 16, 2018 / Tom

A couple of days ago, John O’Nolan who’s the guy leading the team behind Ghost shared the following tweet:

https://twitter.com/JohnONolan/status/996132104445378560

Amazing WordPress Jobs: Ghost

I quoted the tweet to give context to the following question:

This is a legitimately honest and unloaded question: How many companies built on WordPress have job postings like this?

I can think of *maybe* 5 off the top of my head, but I’m curious about what’s out there now.

At the time of this writing, I’ve received next-to-nil on responses, so I thought it might be worth sharing a few thoughts about it here.