Category: Resources (Page 14 of 60)

A summary of useful links, applications, and tools that I find around the Internet.

Image Optimization With ImageOptim

April 15, 2016 / Tom / 0 Comments

Image optimization is one of those things that anyone involved in web development should be thinking about if they aren’t doing so already. Personally, I think if you’re involved in the field, you eventually bump up against the need for it when working on a project for yourself or someone else.

And in WordPress, there are a lot of plugins and other options that we have for optimizing our images (and other assets. But what if you’re looking to do so while working with files on your local machine there are some different ways of doing so.

I’m actually in the process of migrating some different sites to different hosts right now (speaking of which, this may be interesting reading for those of you who manage sites on shared or budget hosting).

In the process of doing so, I’m taking the opportunity to optimize all of the images that are being migrated and optimizing them. Bt I’m not using a plugin or other web-based tool to do it.

Instead, I’m using ImageOptim.

Improve Your WordPress Skills with Hookr.io

April 8, 2016 / Tom / 0 Comments

One of the most important things you can do to improve your WordPress skills is to learn all about WordPress hooks. If you’ve spent any time looking through code, trying to write a plugin, or referencing the Codex then you likely know:

Hooks are provided by WordPress to allow your plugin to ‘hook into’ the rest of WordPress; that is, to call functions in your plugin at specific times, and thereby set your plugin in motion.

Yes, I think it’s important to understand the event-driven design pattern. And it’s one thing to have a comprehensive list of everything that’s available regardless of if it’s an action or a filter but it’s another thing to actually see it action.

Given that we all have different learning styles, sometimes I think having a reference is only one way to go about learning how to leverage the system. Another way would be to use a plugin like Hookr.

WordPress Autocomplete for Atom

April 1, 2016 / Tom / 0 Comments

One piece of functionality that’s useful that isn’t natively built-in to Atom: WordPress autocomplete.

To clarify, earlier this month I talked about how I’d made the switch to Atom as my IDE of choice. I’d also shared a package and a few steps necessary to get PHP CodeSniffer working with Atom. And though that’s nice, there’s something to be said for having other features available (more of which I’ll share in the future).

This isn’t to say that I think we should be using autocomplete as any crutch but if it comes down to having the various hooks and functions appear while typing versus opening up a Codex reference, I’d much prefer the former.
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From GitHub to WordPress.org

March 25, 2016 / Tom / 0 Comments

There’s a portion of the WordPress development community who want to be able to manage their source code outside of Subversion but still send their code from GitHub to WordPress.org.

Granted, some great strides have been made in this area. Just this week, WP Tavern reported that we can now submit pull requests from GitHub to WordPress Core.

But what if you’re a theme developer or a plugin developer (or both), and you’re looking for a way to manage your code on GitHub but still take advantage of the resources offered in the WordPress.org repositories?

You’re stuck between choosing Subversion, choosing GitHub, managing two repositories, or figuring out a way to sync them. And in the latter case, that’s exactly what the following script does.

CLI: A Cheatsheet For The Command-Line

March 11, 2016 / Tom / 0 Comments

The CLI is one of those tools that I think every developer should know how to use even if they don’t use it consistently. After all, we have plenty of applications for taking care of tasks, right?

The thing is, from time-to-time, it’s useful. During the process of working on projects, you may be hopping back and forth between an IDE, an SSH session, S/FTP, a task runner, debugging, and so on.

Sometimes, particularly in the beginning, it’s hard to juggle all of the commands in your head.

Though I love using applications to help take care of certain tasks, I’ve never fully let the command-line go. Sometimes, it’s just faster to type out a string of commands and let them do their work rather than poke around a number of different applications.

Maybe that’s stubborn. I don’t know. But what if you’ve not used the CLI? How do you maintain a quick reference to the available commands?