Category: Articles (Page 75 of 258)

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

WordPress Templates for Beginners: HTML Calling PHP

November 7, 2017 / Tom

Yesterday, I sketched out how to conceptualize how many of us are likely used to working with WordPress templates.

Though the separation of concerns with CSS and JavaScript is solid, templates are problematic whenever there is a lot of PHP mixed with our markup.

To be clear, we can’t help but include template tags because that’s the nature of how WordPress and general PHP-based content management systems work.

The problem comes whenever we’re working with templates that contain code making more complex calls to various APIs. Though I demonstrated this using WP_Query (and will continue to do so), it’s not just that query.

Anyway, though, what are we supposed to do with this?

WordPress Templates for Beginners: How It Is

November 6, 2017 / Tom

When I first started thinking about templating in WordPress, I thought about regarding two aspects:

content specifically for members,
content that could break down into a single post.

But the more I thought about it, the more I realized that it could (and arguably should) be explained over the course of a few posts.

So I’m going be breaking down the current state of WordPress templating and then practical ways we can take organize, say, our plugins so that we’re using standard PHP.

After that, in a future series, I’ll look at what it means to use other templating engines (both PHP and JavaScript in the work we do).

For starts, though, I want to take a look how we often see templates written within the context of both WordPress themes and plugins.

My Newsletter, Memberships, Prices, and More

November 3, 2017 / Tom

One of the aspects of publishing content on a frequent basis (sometimes daily, sometimes every other day), is that it can become a bit of a chore to keep up with.

Or so I’m told. 😏

But seriously, I get it: We all have sites we check daily and sometimes we have time to read them, sometimes we don’t, sometimes we end up having to “mark all as read” in our reader, or sometimes we throw it into Pocket or Instapaper where it’s never really read again. The void of what we want to read but never find time to read.

The Void

I get it. Been there, done that.

In order to mitigate some of that, though, I do send out a monthly newsletter. I’ve had some questions about it so I thought I’d cover what to expect in a post that you can reference (and even create a page that you can use to sign up – but more on that in a moment).

Using Homebrew to Install Node (To Install Gulp)

November 1, 2017 / Tom

In a previous post, I’ve talked about Homebrew (and why it’s part of my setup).

Using Homebrew to Install Node (To Install Gulp)

I’ve also talked about Node, Gulp, and a few starter packages that I recommend for getting started with using them in WordPress development.

But one of the things I’ve not talked about is how to install Node using Homebrew.

Setting Up a 2017 MacBook Pro for WordPress Development

October 30, 2017 / Tom

Last Thursday was rough. If I were to explain everything that went down both with my computer and my personal life, you’d think I was making the whole thing up.

It’d be like the adult equivalent of “my dog ate [the last month of] my homework.” Or something like that.

First, as far as my personal life is concerned, this has nothing to do with the well-being of my family. Just a local debacle of waiting two hours during the workday to get something handled. Irrelevant other than, you know, taking a hefty chunk out of a workday.

Secondly, the computer stuff can all be summed up easily: There was a completely pathetic series of unfortunate events that led to its demise. Essentially, “I killed the car.”

Setting Up a 2017 MacBook Pro for WordPress Development

So I had to order a replacement in short order (which is not something I wanted to do), had to have to delivered the next day before noon (which is not something I like to pay for) nor is it something that I had planned as a business expense for at least another year or two.

But here we are.

And this leads me to write this post: It’s a walkthrough of the process I follow and of the applications I install whenever setting up a new machine and how I configure it.

It’s not going to be incredibly detailed, but it’s a starting place for if this ever happens again or for any developer looking to set up a new machine or repurpose an existing machine.