Category: Notes (Page 21 of 50)

Depending on the level of customization or the level of formatting your customer wants or you want to give your users as it relates to the WordPress post editor, you may need to remove TinyMCE buttons from the WordPress editor.

Although it’s relatively easy to remove all of the buttons and, say, focus only on the HTML view, it’s also possible to remove individual buttons from the post editor so that the user only has a subset of the options that are typically available.

TinyMCE Buttons

Say, for example, you want to remove everything from the second row exception the formatting drop-down that let’s you select the heading size, paragraph, or pre elements. It’s easy to do this using one of the hooks that WordPress provides.

Continue reading

When working with themes or public-facing views for a website, WordPress components can generally be thought of in three distinct areas:

1. Templates are used for rendering the view (that is, the markup and the styles) of data.
2. Partials are reusable fragments of templates.
3. Helper Functions are used to help process, format, and generally work with data.

As far as templates and partials are concerned, these are relatively common with themes or working with anything on the front-end, but we don’t see it as much as we do when talking about the context of the Dashboard.

But when it comes to working with the back-end, all of these things are still applicable. Sometimes you’ll see them in isolation – like with helper functions – other times, all three things can work together such as in the case of meta boxes.

That is, you have a function for defining the meta box, a function for rendering the meta box (which can include a template), and then the template may have multiple parts – or partials – such as the contents for various tabs.

Continue reading

One of the things that’s nice bout working with post types – custom or standard – in WordPress is that it’s really easy to hook into the serialization process in order to handle the data. This means that we have the ability to sanitize, format, read, access, modify, verify, etc. all of the data with the post type and with the post type’s meta data before it’s written to the database.

WordPress has a pretty consistent way of displaying error messages throughout the application. Really, it’s pretty consistent in how it displays all types of messages – success, updates, and errors – throughout the  system.

Let’s say that you’re working with a WordPress meta box, several of its fields are required, and you want to:

• verify the input has been specified
• either display an error message if it’s not specified
• or write the data to the database if it checks out

The serialization process is pretty standard stuff, but if you’re looking to make sure required fields aren’t empty and that a error message is displayed whenever they’re not entered, then you’ll need to do some additional work.

Continue reading