Category: Resources (Page 39 of 60)

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

Writing PHP The Right Way

October 15, 2012 / Tom / 0 Comments

PHP The Right Way

Last week, I wrote two articles discussing code quality when working on WordPress-specific projects:

Both of the articles lead to good comments, links, and thoughts from you guys. Though many of us are familiar with the WordPress Coding Standards, they don’t cover everything.

Rachel Baker shared a link to PHP The Right Way – a solid resource for writing PHP-based code when the coding standards leave something to be desired.

Giveaway: jQuery Cookbook First Edition

October 13, 2012 / Tom

The comments on this post are now closed.

A few years ago, when I was really getting into JavaScript and jQuery, there were a number of books I read that really helped level-up my skillset. Some of the books, I’ll hold on to as I constantly reference them; others, I’ve shared with local developers.

Last weekend, I stumbled across my copy of jQuery Cookbook. When I read this a couple of years ago, it really helped to introduce some of the more professional-level ideas and capabilities of jQuery rather than just how to use it.

But I’m done with it. It’s still in great condition, but I’d like to give it away to one of you guys.

Two Tools I Use For Testing Mobile and Responsive WordPress Projects

October 12, 2012 / Tom / 0 Comments

For developers, the terms “mobile” and “responsive” are already a bit cliche. It doesn’t really matter though, right? They’re here to stay which means that part of our job is to test mobile WordPress projects as best as we can.

Because mobile devices render content different, there are two aspects to the problem:

Some have browsers that are powerful enough to render sites just as they would on a desktop, and thus will need responsive layouts.
Users who don’t have responsive-sites use plugins such as WPTouch to give their site mobile capability which is essentially an entire other site.

This means that we, as developers, are responsible for testing:

Responsive-ready projects
Sites on which users have installed some of our work – like a plugin – that may not be compatible with, say, WPTouch.

On top of that, we do development on localhost rather than a publicly accessible environment so it can be cumbersome to have to deploy a project and get an environment setup just to go through the process of testing a site or a project only to rinse and repeat until we get it fixed.

Thankfully, it really isn’t that complicated. Here are two tools that I use to test mobile WordPress projects:

Simple Country, State, and City CSV’s for Download

October 9, 2012 / Tom / 0 Comments

If you're only interested in the files and without implementation details, then you can grab them.

Every now and then, I end up working on a project that requires a form that includes county, city, and state information. More often than not, the client doesn’t about the rich data associated with any of the above – that is, they’re not particularly interested in latitude, longitude, population, or even zip code.

Simply put, they want the user to be able to select their country, select their city, and then select their state from a predefined list of options.

For the past couple of projects, I’ve been using three, very simple CSV’s for this and thought I’d share them here should anyone else want to use them. Additionally, I thought I’d share a simple implementation of how they can be used in WordPress projects.

October 6, 2012 / Tom / 0 Comments

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=taQOIbG875g&feature=youtu.be

I usually don’t share videos, links, or other things like that unless I find them extremely useful or very funny. Earlier this week, @dewde shared this video with me – it’s a talk by Gary Bernhardt entitled “Wat.”

For those of you who have done any programming with dynamic languages, especially Ruby or JavaScript (and PHP developers will likely have hit similar snags), you’ll likely find yourself laughing out loud.