Software Engineering in Web Development, Backend Services, and More
Posts introducing, updating, and covering various projects to which I’ve contributed or that I maintain.
A little less than two months ago, Pippin Williamson, Andrew Norcross, and I decided that we were going to collaborate on a WordPress comment reply plugin.
Specifically, we were going to work on a plugin that was going to make it easy for publishers to identify comments to which they’ve not responded. We also set the arbitrary deadline of having it completed by the end of WordCamp Miami.
We met the deadline, soft launched the plugin yesterday, and are officially launching it today.
Last week, I release a relatively major update to Category Sticky Post. For those of you who have been reading this blog for some time, you know that I released the first version back in August of last year.
Since then, there are been several minor updates most of which were primary bug fixes or hot fixes.
Though this update is still a relatively minor update, it introduces a few things both behind-the-scenes and functionality-wise that should improve how it works especially with posts having multiple categories
One of the neat things about attending conferences like WordCamp Atlanta is that you get the opportunity to get some facetime with other people that you may typically only interact with via Twitter.
Case in point: This past WordCamp Atlanta, I had the pleasure of hanging out with Dougal Campbell, Brian Krogsgard, Dave Donaldson, Mike Schinkel, Jonathan Davis, James Dalman, and others.
But one of the neater things that happened was, over lunch, Dave happened to demo something that he had baked into a number of his Max Foundry products. Specifically, it was a WordPress system info tool specifically for helping him diagnose errors while handling support requests.
During a brief conversation, he mentioned that he was considering releasing it as its own plugin and placing it on GitHub.
I dug the idea.
In a few recent client projects, I’ve had the need to display WordPress tags without links. Sure, this is relatively easy to do with a `foreach` loop, but I got tired of writing the same code.
So I decided to write a simple plugin that makes it way to display the tags without links.
Note that this plugin is just a working proof-of-concept. Do not use this in a production environment.
One of the challenges of working with templates within the context of WordPress plugin development is that there’s no easy way to bundle templates with your plugin and register them with WordPress.
Template are usually relegated to theme development. And rightly so, correct?
After all, page templates are used to provide layout and presentation which is precisely what themes are meant to provide.
But if you’re working on a larger, more complex plugin that introduces custom post types, page templates, and other advanced functionality then there may be a use case in which bundling templates with your plugin is necessary.
I’ve hit up against this exact issue in a recent project, so I thought I’d share the basics of how I solved the problem, and then provide an example plugin to make the process of registering page templates with WordPress themes a bit easier.
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