Software Engineering in WordPress, PHP, and Backend Development
Personal opinions and how-to’s that I’ve written both here and as contributions to other blogs.
A few posts ago, I walked through the process of adding custom image attributes to an image in WordPress. I received a good question on Twitter:
I don’t understand the purpose for this though.
— idiot_girl (@idiot_girl) October 24, 2017
So I thought it worth to work through why this may be important or something that’s worthwhile to do (I mean, I don’t know if it’s important, but it could be depending on the project :).
One of the challenges of learning a library (be it the standard library of functions that come with a programming language or a third-party project) is two-fold:
And, really, sometimes even learning how to use said functions isn’t all that hard – it’s knowing when to use a given function to help minimize code while still achieving the goals of the project.
Software like Gulp and other utilities aren’t new. For those who haven’t used them before, it can be a little daunting to get started (but it really shouldn’t be).
In comparison to tools like CodeKit (which I still like and recommend, depending on the project), they have a little more overhead regarding getting them set up, configured, and ready to go.
But once you’ve got it all set it up, it can be really useful with a distributed team regardless of operating system, and it can help it make your build process a bit more robust.
That’s not the purpose of the post, though. Instead, here’s a list of a few packages for starters.
Think of them this way: If you’re looking for ways to work with Sass, JavaScript, and image optimization, these are good libraries.
In the previous post, I walked through the process required to get WordPress modal dialogs to appear within the context of the administration area.
This uses:
In this tutorial, I’ll walk through populating the modal dialog with data. After that, I’ll share how to populate the data dynamically using Ajax.
In the last post, I said we couldn’t afford some of the same luxuries that statically typed, compiled languages have. Specifically, I was talking about the idea of not having to deal with autoloaders.
Instead, compiled languages can take all of the files that make up the program, process them, and bundle them up into a single binary.
But to do that, it needs a specific type of a program to do that.
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