Software Engineering in WordPress, PHP, and Backend Development

Category: Notes (Page 17 of 49)

Notes on programming-related problems that I’ve encountered while working on various projects.

Internet Culture (Grievances and Gotchas)

Yesterday, when I was sharing some thoughts on the nature of WordPress Menus and The Customizer I ended up on a tangential series of thoughts on my opinion and perspective on the nature of the social Internet.

Then I cut it if for no other reason that it was off topic.

Anyway, the original content included my thoughts on how I view reactions that we so often see on sites such as Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Hacker News, Reddit, Imgur, and basically any website that accepts any comments of any type.

To be clear, not all sites are the same and the communities that are around these sites are a little different than others. It’d be wrong of me to generalize all of them into a single category and, honestly, some of them are incredibly welcoming despite many of the ideological and cultural differences that we have.

However (because there’s always a ‘however’, right?).

Online Communities

Though there are some commonalities that exist to some degree, it appears that all online communities seem to exhibit some type of behavior like this:

We’re really good at airing our grievances, and we’re really good at doing so in short, biting ways at the expense of someone else.

And I know that for some people, this doesn’t matter. After all, there’s a case to be made that this is the nature of the human race, but is that a reason that we shouldn’t strive for something better?

I mean, at least on some level?

Anyway, so here’s the short bit of content that I ended up cutting from yesterday’s post. Maybe it’ll resonate with someone else; maybe it’ll sound like a lot of nonsense.

Whatever the case, it’s something that’s slightly out of touch with what I normally write, but something I felt like publishing anyway.

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A One Week Break From Twitter

I rarely, if ever, make any kind of posts like this because they’ve always struck me as somewhat meta and I think that they can sometimes represent oneself as if they are more important than they really are.

So here’s a big shot of my profile to disprove that :).

My Twitter Profile

But seriously, maybe that’s what will happen from my doing that, but that isn’t my intent.

The short of it is that from the week of June 14 to June 21, I’ll be offline from Twitter and will be active again on June 22nd.

Other than the usual automated tweets of blog posts from this site and Dev Practices, this will be it. So why is this type of post any different from when anyone else offers to to share this kind of stuff?

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How To Stop Saving Empty Values with the Settings API

Occasionally, I’ll get questions via Twitter or email from those who are working with the Settings API and aren’t sure why certain values are saving when they shouldn’t actually be saving.

For example, say you have an input field that’s asking for, say, a company’s name. You obviously want to sanitize the data to make sure that it doesn’t have any malicious characters and you want to make sure it’s empty, but what if you’re code is structured in a way that is stores an empty string in the value of the array if it’s not set?

I mean, an empty string is not nothing, right?

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WordPress Meta Data: Other Data (Not IDs)

Yesterday, I talked about some of the advantages of using IDs when working with various pieces of WordPress data and populating different input elements, saving it to the database, and more.

For certain types of data, this works well; however, this may not always be true especially as it relates to data types such as taxonomies. This is going to be most notable in WordPress 4.2.

Taxonomy Term Splitting

Taxonomy term splitting coming in WordPress 4.2

If you’re an experienced developer, then I recommend reading the blog post linked above; otherwise, suffice it to say that using IDs may not always be the best option depending on if you’re doing a database migration (and how that migration might be done).

So what else are we left to do?

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