Category: Notes (Page 34 of 50)

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

The WordPress Register Activation Hook

May 28, 2013 / Tom / 0 Comments

For those of you who have been following development of the WordPress Plugin Boilerplate, you’ll recall that I previously included the `register_activation_hook` and `register_deactivation_hook` calls within the the class itself.

In the latest version of the Boilerplate, they’ve been removed outside of the context of the class and into a separate file. Last week, I received a great comment asking why this decision was made:

I have this one question – why plugin activation/deactivation hooks are registered outside the constructor (as they were in v1.0) ?

I thought it would be better to discuss the decision in a blog post rather than in a lengthy comment.

Defining a Custom WordPress Menu Hook

May 21, 2013 / Tom / 0 Comments

When it comes to defining custom option pages, theme pages, menu pages, and submenu pages, the provided API makes this trivially easy; however, one of the less used aspects of these functions is the ability to define a custom WordPress menu hook.

For example, in a recent project I needed to do exactly that when adding a submenu to the WordPress Tools menu so I thought I’d share my process for doing exactly this.

Note that if you’re looking to add a submenu to a different WordPress menu, then there are a couple of options that are available. First and foremost, the most common option is to use add_submenu_page and then use tools.php as the parent slug as specified in the Codex.

But if you happen to be working with the Tools menu, then the add_management_page function is your best bet because it’s designed for exactly that.

So for this article, that’s what I’ll be using.

My Thoughts on Finding The Next Steve Jobs

May 20, 2013 / Tom / 0 Comments

Throughout the year, 8BIT tries to read through several books in order to find the things that can help make us a better team. This past past weekend, I read through Finding The Next Steve Jobs as it was the book that was next in our line-up.

At the end of this post, I’ll share all of the parts that I highlighted while reading the book, but I first want to share my personal takeaways from the material in the book.

Generally speaking, I enjoyed it. It reminded me a lot of Rework in which the book is primarily made up of a number of very small chapters each of which has a single point that it attempts to make. Of course, they’re different books with different tones and it’s not really fair to compare them.

So with that said, I thought I’d go ahead and share some of my personal take aways from the book.

How To Internationalize WordPress Plugins

May 10, 2013 / Tom / 0 Comments

During my time on working on the WordPress Plugin Boilerplate, I’ve had some really good discussions with Gary Jones about some of the practices and conventions used throughout the code.

Up until this point, I’ve traditionally included a plugin.po file with each of my plugins to make it easy for translators; however, Gary’s been kind enough to point out the a .pot file should actually be included.

From a discussion on GitHub:

If you read the Codex page you linked to, you’ll see that it explains that .pot is the correct extension to use for the original translation file, since it is the template from which .po and .mo files are generated.

I’m not above admitting when there’s something I’ve not been doing correctly – after all, most developers should constantly be improving right?

At least I hope that’s the case.

Luckily, there are tools that make generating this catalog trivially easy so I thought I’d provide the steps necessarily to internationalize WordPress plugins specifically how I did so for the latest release of the Boilerplate.

Making Remote Requests with wp_remote_get

May 7, 2013 / Tom / 0 Comments

When it comes to working with remote requests on the server side, there are usually two solutions that I end up seeing.

In fact, there are two solutions that I’ve typically ended up using:

file_get_contents
cURL

Both of these functions generally work well; however, in our experience with Standard, we’ve had less than stellar experience especially when it comes to budget hosts.

This is where wp_remote_get comes into play. In short, wp_remote_get is a simple WordPress API function that’s used to retrieve data from a specified URL using the HTTP GET method.