Category: Articles (Page 98 of 258)

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

WordPress Metadata Associations: How To Do It

February 6, 2017 / Tom

When using the CMS, we’re used to relating data through WordPress metadata associations. Sometimes it’s well-used; other times, it’s abused.

If you’ve worked with web development in any other application, there are probably strategies you’ve used to associate data with different types of entities. That is, you’ve likely created tables specifically for the two types of information and then related them in a variety of ways.

It’s completely possible to do this in WordPress, but I think we often jump to either/or conclusions. That is we either think we can use the metadata table for everything or we have to create custom tables.

And, as with many things related to programming, I think it depends on our implementation.

Querying Event Post Types with WP Query and The Event Calendar

February 2, 2017 / Tom

If you’ve done any work with The Event Calendar from Modern Tribe, then there’s a chance you’re familiar with some different ways to go about doing certain tasks.

Querying Event Post Types with The Events Calendar

The Events Calendar Homepage

That is, programmatically creating events, altering events, setting up repeating events (if it’s the pro version), and so on.

What if, though, you need to go about querying event post types – some or all, doesn’t matter – and you find that your query isn’t working? And no, I’m not talking about using a raw SQL query or even a parameterized version with the $wpdb class.

I’m talking about WP_Query.

How Good is Good Enough? (Manage The Tension and Ship It)

February 1, 2017 / Tom / 0 Comments

I was having lunch with some friends and other business owners and developers yesterday, and one of the topics that came up during our discussion was the idea of how good is good enough?

Specifically, whenever you’re working on a software project, when is it Good Enough™ to ship to the customer?

How Good is Good Enough with Coding Standards?

The implication being, of course, that if it’s good enough then it satisfies the requirements, but there’s likely some underlying tension that, given more time, money, or some other resource, we would go back and improve certain aspects of a project.

If you’re a developer or a designer, perhaps you’ve felt this tension. I have. For what it’s worth, I feel it with nearly every single project I on which I work.

And sure, we can debate all day long what it means to be good enough. But I think that the definition changes the further we get into the industry.

Why Keep Using WordPress If You’re Not a Fan?

January 30, 2017 / Tom / 0 Comments

If you work with any set of technologies for a long enough period, you’re going to develop a sense of what you love, what you like, what you dislike, and what you hate about it, right?

Honestly, I think this applies to just about anything we do, or we use regardless of if it’s related to our jobs or hobbies or what have you.

At this point, I’ve worked with WordPress long enough to develop a sense of all of that (and it’s not limited to the core application either).

And, to go ahead and be clear, this post is not about the problems that I see with WordPress or with anything tangentially related to it. Nor is it about the things that I think it does well.

Instead, it’s about asking why would anyone – you, me, or anyone else – keep using WordPress if they aren’t a fan of the platform for development?

Sharing Our Programming Problems (Is It Lipstick on a Pig?)

January 26, 2017 / Tom / 0 Comments

I was recently reading another programmer’s blog post on Coding skills you won’t learn in school in which he was specifically talking about Object Ownership. The topic of the blog post is good in and of itself, and if you’re into lower-level programming, such as C, and data structures, like trees, then it’s worth a read.

Programming Problems: Object Ownership

But just as I was closing the tab, I came across the following paragraph at the bottom of his post:

Broken software, bad job offers: I”m sharing my mistakes so you can avoid them.

In short, it’s an invitation to join his mailing list (which is fine), but what really caught my eye was his call to action:

I’m sharing my mistakes.

For anyone who writes on the web – myself included – I think a lot of us do share our mistakes, but I couldn’t help but think about the way we go about doing it.

And it now has me re-thinking the approach to some of the posts that I’ve written and that I’ve yet to write.