Category: Notes (Page 31 of 50)

With the WordPress 3.8 development cycle underway, I thought it might be worth sharing how you can go about setting up Grunt for WordPress development on your local machine.

The reason for this is because WordPress is now using Grunt, JSHint, and a number of other utilities to help automate tasks, and if you’re looking to contribute to certain parts (not all, mind you) core, then these are the tools that you’re going to need – especially if you’re working on any tickets under the Build Tools component.

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At some point, anyone building a theme, plugin, or even just working with WordPress has seen the Fatal Error: Memory Exhausted message. It typically reads something like this:

Fatal error: Allowed memory size is 268435456 bytes exhausted (tried to allocated 29596635 bytes) in …/wp-includes/wp-db.php on line 885.

Yes, your message may be a little different, but the point is the same: You see a fatal error, it has something to do with the amount of memory allowed, how much was attempted to be allocated, and what file threw the error.

In my opinion, one of the big problems with errors like this is that it’s far too easy to Google for a quick solution to fix the problem rather than truly understand the problem.

Sure, I understand we’ve got stuff to do and work to get done, but understanding what the problem may be is important to helping us become better developers, and, who knows, we may uncover a bug in a piece of open source software.

In this case, it’s not the latter, but here’s a good way to go about understanding the above error.

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Yesterday evening, I had to take some time to migrate my site to a new server because I had outgrown the service on which I started.

While doing so, I realized I’ve never bothered to share my WordPress site migration process.

Honestly, there’s nothing particularly unique about it. Furthermore, when it comes to deploying things to staging, I’ll often use tools that interface with my GitHub account to push out the differentials.

Migrations. Not quite what we had in mind.

But when it comes to move a single site installation from one server to another, I typically follow the same process.

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Since the release of the WordPress Theme Customizer, my team and I have been more and more interested in using it as a way for users to make changes to the appearance of their theme without the use of the dashboard.

As powerful as the dashboard is, the “Appearance” section creates a disconnect between what the user toggles (or selects, or inputs, etc), and what they see on the front end.

The Theme Customizer mitigates that issue.

The thing is, there are a few nuances that come with implementing it in your theme. Though I’m not trying to cover everything here, the point of this post is show how you can introduce a new setting into an existing section.

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