Category: Notes (Page 25 of 50)

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

Writing JavaScript Helpers for the WordPress Theme Customizer

July 10, 2014 / Tom / 0 Comments

I’ve talked before about how I think the addition of the WordPress Theme Customizer (well, soon to be called the Customizer) is one of the nicest additions to the core application in a long time. I’ve also talked about how I fear the direction that some developers will take it.

Regardless, if you’ve worked with the Customizer long enough – especially when it comes to the JavaScript aspect of it – then you’ve likely noticed that you can end up writing relatively repetitive code especially when you’re working with something such as a list of items or something similar.

When you end up reaching this particular point, having too much of the same code with the only variations being a few strings ends up being a bit of a code smell.

In order to prevent this, it’s often better to write helper functions that abstracts the repetitive functionality into a single, ahem, function that you can call with the strings that are unique to your use case.

Here’s what I mean.

Easily Install phpDocumentor Alongside MAMP Pro

June 21, 2014 / Tom / 0 Comments

In previous posts, I’ve talked about the WordPress Coding Standards, and the importance of documenting your code, but I’ve not actually spent a lot of time discussing how easy it is to actually generate documentation for your themes.

And by documentation, I mean an actual site that provides your DocBlocks such in a clean and organized fashion – you know, sites that are generated by tools like phpDocumentor.

An example of a site generated by phpDocumentor.

In other posts, I’ve mentioned that I use MAMP Pro for part of my development stack, so if you’re looking for steps to install phpDocumentor, it’s actually really easy to do.

Including a Template in a WordPress Plugin (Well, a Template Part)

June 18, 2014 / Tom / 0 Comments

Late last year, I wrote a post that provided a way on how to include a page template in a WordPress plugin. There’s an accompanying project on GitHub that’s been maintained and relatively-well updated since.

Although this post is similar in nature, it doesn’t exactly deal with templates, but parts of code that may be considered partials (or template parts, in WordPress).

Let’s say that you’ve got a single post and you want to append a template to the end of the content. The content can be a little more complicated that markup because that’s easy enough to do inline, isn’t it?

So, for all intents and purposes, let’s say that we have a partial that includes a form that can be used to submit some type of information.

Simplifying Code in WordPress: Option Arrays

June 3, 2014 / Tom / 0 Comments

Let’s say that you’re working on a plugin that has its own plugin settings page, and on that page there are options to determine what type of posts will support part of the functionality of the plugin.

For example, let’s say this plugin will be introducing a meta box for each post type that extends the type of information that the user can add to a post. The settings page allows you to control which post types will offer this information.

To give a concrete example, take a look at the following screenshot:

Simplifying Code: Options Arrays

Granted, it’s a small example but it makes the point: We have a plugin settings page that displays all of the post types that are in the current theme installation. If selected, we’ll save the values to an options array.

When it comes time to read the values, there are a couple of ways to go about doing it, but one that’s arguably simpler than all of the rest.

Adding Tabbed Navigation in WordPress for Custom Menus

May 13, 2014 / Tom / 0 Comments

One of the nicest features of the latter versions of WordPress includes the custom menu system. Although people can always introduce too many areas in which custom menus can be introduced, the core feature and customization options make it possible to do some really cool stuff with custom menus.

Case in point: With many of the popular front end frameworks that are now available, such as Foundation and Bootstrap, it’s really easy to add tabbed navigation in WordPress in templates, widgets, and so on.

Though there are a number ways of to do this, one flexible way that I’ve used multiple times requires two things:

A function for retrieving the post IDs for the post types contained in a custom menu
An instance of `WP_Query`

At that point, all you need is the name of the menu for which you want to retrieve the post IDs.