Software Engineering in Web Development, Backend Services, and More

Category: Notes (Page 24 of 50)

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

Single Page Tabbed Navigation in WordPress

In a couple of recent projects, I’ve been tasked with adding tabbed navigation to various WordPress templates. The thing is, these tabs work in such a way that all of the information is loaded on the page so when the user clicks on the tab, the contents of the page appear without having to do a page refresh.

Tabbed Navigation

 

In some cases, it may be best to load pages via Ajax, in some cases, it’s better to load things up all in the first page load. This particular post is about the best strategies for that (that’s a debate for another post).

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Why You Should Write Meaningful WordPress Meta Keys

If you’re someone who’s building solutions with WordPress regardless of if they are themes, plugins, or applications, then odds are you’ve had to deal with saving some type of information to the database.

Granted, anytime you create a post, a page, or anything that stores data, you’re entering information into the database.

But that’s not what I’m talking about.

Instead, I’m talking about times when you’re having to work with the Options API, the Theme Customizer API, or one of the meta APIs (like the Post Meta API). In this case, you’re working with the core application to save and retrieve information from the database.

When doing this – especially in development and possibly in staging – it’s likely that you’re having to write the code, run a test (automated or not), and then take a look at the way the record is stored in the database to make sure it saved as expected.

In my experience, there are a handful of things that can be done to make this process a little bit easier and make your code a little bit cleaner and one of these has to do with writing meaningful WordPress Meta Keys

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Adding More Fields to the WordPress Media Uploader

Last week, I shared a short post on how to include your own instance of the WordPress Media Uploader in your theme or your plugin.

Though it walks you through everything that you need, on aspect of using the instance that I described is that it’s limited. This is fine for certain situations, but there are other times where you may want to grab more information from the user.

Case in point, the post received the following comment:

Now, how do you activate (turn on) the Insert Image via URL feature of the Media Uploader?

Which I thought was a good question especially given that most of us are used to seeing more options in the media uploader than what the previous post described.

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Tagging Untagged Posts in WordPress

This weekend, I shared how to setup a query to find all untagged posts in WordPress that aren’t tagged with a specific tag. In my example, I opted to use IDs (for no particular reason), but Ross also showed how you can use slugs, as well.

Anyway, there are a number of things that you can do with untagged posts – perhaps you want to remove them, perhaps you want to categorize them, or perhaps you want to apply a tag to them so that they’re stamped with a tag (like one that was not

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Find Untagged Posts in WordPress

It’s common for people to categorize or tag their posts when using WordPress. This is true for the average blogger and for those who are using WordPress for its content management features.

For example, let’s say that you’re responsible for working on a site that has an RSVP custom post type and the post types can be tagged for certain types of events.

Tags may include:

  • Formal
  • Informal
  • Wedding
  • Birthday
  • Family
  • Friends
  • …and so on

Overtime, the database is going to increase in size and if RSVPs aren’t manually entered (that is, they are imported or maybe the database is even inherited and mismanaged), there’s a chance that some of the posts will not be tagged.

If you’re a developer, the odds are strong that you’re going to need to at least locate the untagged posts (and perhaps update them, as well).
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