Category: Articles (Page 68 of 258)

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

An IDE for WordPress Development (Regardless of Experience)

February 15, 2018 / Tom / 0 Comments

In the previous article, I walked through the process of setting up a local development environment using a package manager. Specifically, I talked about using Homebrew to install Valet and Composer.

The former offers the Nginx web server, a MySQL database server, while Homebrew allows you to install PHP. Composer gives you the ability to deal with PHP dependencies. If you’ve not read the post, I highly recommend it as this post is predicated on that entire environment.

Specifically, I’m going to be talking about IDEs. It’s a hot topic, I guess, but if you don’t have a preference then I’m going to walk you through the process of picking one that I think is best (at lest to start with), configuring it, and using it in the context of the environment established last week.

Modify Image Containers on the Server-Side in WordPress

February 13, 2018 / Tom

Whenever you’re building custom solutions for other people, you may find yourself having to deal with nuanced cases of how WordPress is rendering the content.

This usually comes down to the theme, at least one plugin, or the combination of both. And if you need to work with images individually, then it can be a bit of a challenge. The problem with even trying to write a post like this is that it’s hard even to describe a situation in which you may need something like this.

Even still, I’m going to do the best I can. That is, I want to share how to modify image containers on the server-side before rendering them on the client-side and do so using PHP’s DOMDocument library.

Sound like a lot? Hopefully, I can break this down easily enough.

A WordPress Development Environment (Using a Package Manager)

February 7, 2018 / Tom

At this point, I’ve written about as much of the OOP Fundamentals that I believe are necessary to begin looking at more in-depth topics (such as design patterns and how to apply these topics in WordPress development).

But when planning the content, I kept coming back to a few other things that I think are also necessary to cover eventually. These are things such as Composer, Yarn, build tools, and so on.

Above that, though, I kept asking myself:

If I’m going to be writing about this material at length, should I assume we’re all using the same environment?

And that’s a tough question to answer because some of the people reading this have been writing code for quite some time. That is, they (or you) have your tools, your setup, and how you like to organize your projects.

On the other hand, there are those (or you), who are looking for a different way or looking to start from the ground-up. And to that end, I think it’s important to cover two things:

How to Setup a Local Development Environment
What IDE, Add-Ons, and Tools are going to be used

For some, it’s not the most exciting topics and it’s certainly putting a pause on the more advanced aspect of object-oriented programming. Since those of you who pay to read this material have access to the comments, I have to assume that – at some point – comments will come through asking about how to achieve certain things.

And to that end, I’m going to assume that we’re all working off of the same playing field. If not, there’s only so much that I can do to provide help beyond actual programming questions.

So before going any further into the depths of object-oriented programming, I’m going to spend a few posts covering the above topics in detail to make sure that we’re all on the same page.

If you’re comfortable with your tools and your setup, then please bear with me. If you’re looking for a definitive way to setup your environment, then the following posts are for you.

And with all of that said, let’s get started with talking about how to cleanly set up a local development environment that’s easy to maintain.

[restrict paid=”true”]

Templating and Conditional Logic with OOP in WordPress

January 30, 2018 / Tom

Templating is becoming more common in WordPress, and I consider that a good thing.

But that doesn’t mean that there aren’t projects that we manage that use a more traditional approach to displaying templates or partials. Furthermore, it also doesn’t mean that we’re exempt from maintaining codebases that use code that does not use a templating engine.

Though I think templating is good, I don’t think it’s always necessary. That’s content for another post, though.

Instead, I want to walk through the process of using the conditional logic of whether or not to display a partial within a template and do so using object-oriented programming.

Looking At Polymorphism In-Depth

January 26, 2018 / Tom / 0 Comments

When I started this series, I talked about the four pillars of object-oriented programming. Each of these topics is listed and linked below.

At this point, I’d normally want to begin moving on to the next topic. Before doing so, though, I’d like to spend one more post exploring the concept of polymorphism.

In my career, thus far, I’ve seen few topics give those getting into object-oriented programming more confusion and problems than polymorphism. So I’d like to discuss it a little more in-depth within the context of object-oriented programming and outside any particular framework or application (like WordPress).

In this post, I’ll do a quick review of what we’ve discussed thus far, then hop back into polymorphism.