Category: Notes (Page 28 of 50)

The WordPress Heartbeat API is not exactly a new feature. That is, it was first released in WordPress 3.6. Maybe I’ve just done a poor job of keeping up with what others are doing with the API, or maybe I’ve just not paid attention to some of the stuff that people are doing with the API, but I haven’t seen that many examples other than how to get started with it.

On top of that, the Heartbeat API codex is lacking in documentation (though this is an open source project, so if anyone’s to blame, it’s all of us), so perhaps that’s a reason that few people have begun to implement it into their projects.

Whatever the reason, I thought it may be worth showing a practical example of how I recently implemented it within a theme I’m working on, and how I’m using it within conjunction with the Theme Customizer so that when an administrator makes a change to the theme using the Theme Customizer, the visitor will automatically (or is it automagically?) see the changes.

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As easy as it is to translate content within WordPress, there are  times in which some of the content in the database may be different than the original locale of the site.

Say, for example, you’re running a site that includes a list of names in a flavor German when your server (or even perhaps your site) is based on an English locale. The goal is to read the names into a collection – rather, an array – and then sort them alphabetically.

Obviously, different locales have different alphabets so what works in, say, the United States won’t necessarily work in Germany.

There are a couple of ways to go about handling this, but the easiest way that I’ve found is to use PHP’s Collator class.

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I’d argue that, at this point in time, working with WordPress taxonomies has never been easier.

Sure, creating, tagging or categorized, and adding custom taxonomies to posts and custom post types has always been relatively easy, but when it comes to implementing a solution that utilizes custom post types and/or custom taxonomies, then constructing queries can sometimes be a bit of a pain.

But now, we have more API functions and features than ever before:

• `tax_query` in WP_Query
• `get_term` and `get_terms`
• `get_term_children`
• …and many more

Of course, there are still cases in which retrieving and organizing data still leaves something to be desired. 

I don’t fault WordPress for this, though. It’s more of a function of how data is ordered within databases, applications, and in computers in general.

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When it comes to building a theme (or any WordPress project that’s going to feature custom menus), there are several options from which we can choose on how to set a default menu.

We can…

• use whatever WordPress provides,
• remove the default custom menu,
• or programmatically set a default menu

The first two are relatively easy to do (as is the third), but I’ve found that in the majority of my work, clients usually want to have a default menu of options relevant to the project at hand if the user doesn’t set one by default.

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