Category: Notes (Page 35 of 50)

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

How To Programmatically Populate a WordPress Template

May 2, 2013 / Tom / 0 Comments

The title of this post is somewhat misleading as I’m not actually sharing how to programmatically populate a WordPress template – instead, I’m walking through the process of populating a page that also has a page template applied to it.

Anyway, creating WordPress templates is easy business:

Create the template file in the theme directory
Give the template file the proper header comments
Fill out the template with the proper markup

Back in March, I shared a proof-of-concept plugin for including a template file in a plugin. If you browse through the comments, note that there’s a lot of discussion on how to do it, why one way is better than the others, and so on.

But as I’ve continued to work on a project in which I include templates in plugins, I’ve also been working on populating template-based pages with content from HTML files.

Here’s how I’ve been working to programmatically populate a WordPress template.

How To Enable SSL in MAMP

April 30, 2013 / Tom / 0 Comments

In my developer toolbox post, I’ve covered that I prefer to use to MAMP for local development. For the most part, the default settings (or some variation thereof) work just fine; however, if you end up needing to do some work on a secure site, then you’ll need enable SSL in MAMP.

On production-level servers, you’ll need to have purchased an SSL certificate; however, MAMP makes it trivially easy to setup a certificate in your development environment.

Adding a Custom Post Type To An Existing Menu

April 25, 2013 / Tom / 0 Comments

Up until this point, I’ve never worked on a project or done any type of work that required a custom post type to be added to an existing menu in the WordPress dashboard.

For the most part, I’m generally of the mindset that custom post types should:

Exist as top level menus
Should be added at the bottom of the WordPress dashboard menu

This mentality is primarily motivated by the fact that I see the core WordPress menu options as first-class citizens in the dashboard, custom post types as being second-class citizens.

That’s just a rule of thumb, though. There are always exceptions.

But there are also times where custom post types could be treated as, say, third-class citizens where they should be integrated with an existing menu be it a core menu or another custom post type menu.

Luckily, it’s trivially easy to add a custom post type as a menu item to an existing menu.

Displaying a Plugin Activation Message in WordPress

April 18, 2013 / Tom / 0 Comments

There have been times through out several projects where I’ve wanted to display a plugin activation message (or deactivation message).

WordPress makes it relatively easy to do this using two functions:

But here’s the the thing: These two functions may not work as you expect if you’re writing your plugins using object-oriented practices.

So I thought I’d share how I go about displaying a plugin activation message in hopes that it not only helps you in your future projects, but in hopes that you guys could offer up your own code review as well.

Strip Hidden ASCII Characters

April 2, 2013 / Tom / 0 Comments

Late last week, I was working on a project that was responsible for reading the contents of a CSV, parsing the information, and then inserting it into the WordPress database.

But I hit a snag (as we so often do, right?): The first few rows of the CSV were working fine, but a number of the rows were failing to import.

The thing is, there appeared to be no rhyme or reason. I made sure the CSV was a raw text file and even saved a new version of the file using a raw editor twice to make sure any, um, ‘stray’ characters were being removed.

Unfortunately, it didn’t work so rather than spend time trying to reformat the entire file, I ended up writing a small regex to strip hidden ASCII characters form the incoming information.