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.
Occasionally, when working on a project there are times in which it’d be nice to have an API function to help achieve whatever it is that needs to be done. Case in point: the ability to retrieve a taxonomy by term ID.
Granted, it’s not a hard thing to do, but having the ability to retrieve the information from pre-existing functionality is always nice.
But when that’s not possible, we write our own way to do it, right?
In my talk for this year’s WordCamp Atlanta, I’m going to be talking about namespaces and autoloading in WordPress.
When I don’t yet have the images I want for my presentation, I use stock photos.
While working on my presentation:
All of this is primarily done to see how, if it isn’t obvious, others implement namespaces and autoloading in their projects. What’s interesting is that there seem to be three main ways in which people go about doing it.
I’ve mixed feelings about the WordPress admin bar, but that has to do with how third-party solutions add their options to it (plus, it can be disabled if you’re not a big fan of it).
Recently, I published a small plugin – meant primarily for developers – that allows users to toggle admin notices whenever they are working with WordPress (ideally in their local environment, though it can be installed anywhere WordPress is installed).
The plugin is simple:
But there’s a small nuance that I think is worth covering and that has to do with manipulating the WP admin bar styles using client-side code.
All of this is covered in the initial post, but one aspect of the code that I think is worth sharing for those working with the admin bar and those working with JavaScript.
Last week, I talked a little bit of how I schedule my time on a per week basis with a team of other people and the whole idea of “less, but better” from Essentialism.
Though this isn’t a regurgitation of that post (because that’d be dumb 😇), it is a meant to show one way in which I go about doing that when there are some projects, project management, presentations, and other responsibilities all happening at the same time as I’m writing this post.
So what are we do to when our plate is full of things to do, and we’re not sure how to manage the time and responsibility? Perhaps that’s how we know when to hire someone.
Or maybe not.
Working with dates in PHP is one of those things that you either have a good handle on, you’re working on understanding, or you’re stuck in the rabbit hole of the documentation that’s in the manual.
If you’re working with WordPress, though, the chance that you’re going to need to work with dates is quite high. Nearly everything that we publish has at least one date associated with it.
This includes post, pages, custom post types, revisions, drafts, and so on.
Furthermore, there’s a chance that custom work that you need to develop with require that you find the difference in two dates using PHP. And though there are multiple ways of doing this, there’s a process that I’ve been following for something.
Kinsta offers premium managed WordPress hosting for everyone, small or large. Powered by Google Platform and strengthened by Cloudflare, they take performance to the next level. All hosting plans include 24/7/365 support from their team of WordPress engineers. Get started with a free migration today.
© 2026 Tom McFarlin
Theme by Anders Noren — Up ↑