Software Engineering in WordPress, PHP, and Backend Development

Category: Notes (Page 19 of 49)

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

Searching with Substrings in WordPress

Let’s say you’re in the process of building some type of search mechanism using WP_Query and you want your users to be able to run the search using part of a string.

That is, let’s say that you’re searching Companies (which is a custom post type) and some of the company’s names is “Awesome Code.” The user doesn’t know this because you’ve built a huge database and have been wildly successful with your app.

So let’s say the user opts to try to run a search using the fragment of ‘awe’ or ‘some’ or ‘code’ or some fragment variation thereof – how are we supposed to be able to pull back results like that?

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How To Check if a WordPress Term Has a Child

If you’re in the process of working with hierarchical terms, then there’s a chance that you’re eventually going to need to know if a given term is the parent to another term.

For example, let’s say that in one of your templates, you’re responsible for displaying a list of all of the terms that do not have children for one reason or another (or maybe you’re responsible for display only terms with one children or another).

Whatever the case, this is a relatively straightforward operation to do assuming that you have the term’s taxonomy readily available.

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My Productivity and Entertainment in 2015

Every year we end up trying out new services, solutions, communities, chat rooms, groups, apps, and other forms of technology that, by the year’s end, may be contributing more noise than signal to our day-to-day.

Perhaps I’m about idealistic, but I think that the majority of us are concerned with making sure that we have the tools that we need to get our work done and nothing more, nothing less (with the occasional game or book for entertainment and/or educational purposes, of course :).

But you get the idea of what I mean: We start off with the best of intentions in getting only what we need in order to get our work done and end up with a plethora of extraneous things that we don’t necessarily need distributed across our various devices.

Then again, maybe I’m the only one who’s suffered from this. But not likely. Here’s a run down of the things that I’m looking to employ day-to-day for both productivity and entertainment.

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What Are You Doing Inside of WordPress?

I know – the title of this post is kinda weird, but I figured it made sense given yesterday’s topic (that is, what are you guys and girls focusing on outside of WordPress in the coming year?).

After all, just because we’re looking to focus on things outside of WordPress, that doesn’t mean that we’re going to be moving on or moving away from WordPress.

And since WordPress is comprised of so much – that is, core developers, plugin developers, theme developers, documenters, teachers, educators, event organizers, and so on – I’m interested in seeing what you’re planning to do in the coming year, as well.

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What Are You Doing Outside of WordPress?

The end of the year usually breeds one of two types of posts (or, in some cases, both!):

  1. A look back over the year summarizing everything that you accomplished (or discussing what you didn’t get accomplished),
  2. Your plans for what you hope to get done in the New Year

And I’m no exception.

Granted, I’m not one that’s big on resolutions – I tend to think that the best time to start something new is whenever you decide to start something new, but I know that bringing in a new year brings with it that feeling of starting over or a clean slate and with that comes ideas for what you hope to get done.

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