Category: Articles (Page 96 of 258)

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

Programmatically Create Recurring Events with Event Calendar

February 28, 2017 / Tom

Modern Tribe’s Event Calendar is likely the most popular calendar plugin available for WordPress. I’ve talked about querying events using WP_Query in a previous post but that’s applicable to both the free and premium versions.

The premium version offers a lot of great features, but if you’re looking to programmatically manipulate the calendar, it’s a little more difficult to work with it.

there isn’t clear documentation on how to take advantage of certain features from a developer’s perspective
the places where people have asked how to do so occasionally leave something to be desired.

Case in point: When we need to programmatically create recurring events.

Blog Overhaul: One of My Tasks for 2017

February 24, 2017 / Tom / 0 Comments

Earlier this year, I shared a few of the goals I had for 2017. Some of those include the changes I want to make is to do a whole blog overhaul (versus the other one).

But I’ve yet to talk about some of the changes I want to make, so I thought rather than just drop a bunch of changes at once, I’d talk a bit about some of the changes I’m looking to make and the rationale behind each of them.

Domain Rules (Or What Are We Codifying, Again?)

February 23, 2017 / Tom

When it comes to building software for other people – regardless of if it’s a WordPress plugin, a mobile app, a desktop app, or something else – one of the most important things we can do is to test the project.

And I know: Talking about testing is boring. It seems to be disconnected from the act of implementing a solution and being able to say “Hey, look what I did!”

Testing, on the other hand, is sitting there making sure our code works. But, please, our code definitely works because we can see it happening, right? The truth is, we know this isn’t the case.

And so we’ve got all of these various tools to help us write unit tests, acceptance tests, behavioral tests, we grab groups of people and have them perform usability testing, and all of that’s important.

But before doing any of that, I think it’s important that we actually understand the rules of the problem that we’re aiming to solve. Sometimes we see this referred to as domain rules; sometimes, we don’t see it mentioned at all.

Multiple Objects Writing Data: How to Avoid This

February 22, 2017 / Tom / 0 Comments

You know those times when you’re working on a program, and there are some places in your code that, depending on the requirements or a bug that manifests itself in some way, is directly related to the fact that you have multiple objects writing data to the same data store? That’s not a good thing.

That’s a terrible way to start a post. Let me try that again.

Open-Source WordPress Libraries (Why I Should Share Them)

February 16, 2017 / Tom / 0 Comments

The other day, I was talking with a friend, Toby, about the lack of inactivity I have on GitHub. Specifically, I have a lot of private repositories, and I have a lot of secret gists. There’s a method to all of this that I follow, though:

private repositories are typically dedicated to client projects or projects that I don’t think are ready for others to use yet (for the sake of the overhead in managing it),
gists are strictly for sharing code snippets on this blog, and that’s it,
open-source WordPress libraries are occasionally there but have become quite dated,

But during the conversation, I came to the realization that I have a lot of small classes, plugins, utilities, functions, helpers, etc. related to WordPress development or JavaScript that I’ve never really put on GitHub.

Open-Source WordPress Libraries: Where Are They?

Much of what I currently have is out-of-date.

That is, I don’t really open-source my WordPress libraries. I have reasons for this all, but the bottom-line is that I want to change that.