Category: Resources (Page 9 of 60)

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

Design Patterns and WordPress (And Resources!)

November 11, 2016 / Tom / 0 Comments

For whatever reason, it doesn’t seem common that we talk much about design patterns and WordPress. And that’s odd to me.

Maybe I’m not talking to the right people, maybe I’ve got my head in the sand, maybe it’s just not something about which people share much information, or maybe people who work with WordPress don’t care that much about design patterns at all.

The architecture of WordPress is not the same as using design patterns iin WordPress.

But if you’re using WordPress and you’re building more than a theme or a simple plugin, the odds of you building something more advanced and not taking advantage of design patterns seems highly unlikely.

Whatever the case, if you’re someone who’s working on advanced solutions – perhaps web applications, perhaps having your components talk to third-party components, or whatever the case – then it wouldn’t hurt to have a reference of popular design patterns and antipatterns would it?

Learn “WordPress JavaScript” (And What That Means)

October 28, 2016 / Tom

Now and then, I’ll stumble across a blog post, question, or comment that talks about WordPress JavaScript as if it’s a different type of or variant of JavaScript that exists solely within the WordPress application.

For those who have been working in web development for a long time, this seems like a silly statement, but if you’re brand new to web development (regardless of your age), then this is something that might be a bit confusing.

After all, it’s not like the JavaScript standard is cut and dry right now, right? But I digress.

Furthermore, WordPress includes jQuery, jQuery UI, Backbone, and so on. So when someone wants to work with JavaScript within the context of WordPress, what are they actually talking about?

And the answer is, unfortunately, “it depends.” But it does: It depends on the type of work you’re doing and where you’re focusing your efforts.

But this brings us back to the original problem: How do you learn “WordPress JavaScript” if you’ve never even touched JavaScript?

WordPress REST API Example (One of Many)

October 24, 2016 / Tom / 0 Comments

With the second-half of the REST API merge confirmation coming to WordPress 4.7, it’s safe to say that there are going to be there clearly be more than one WordPress REST API example made available in the next few months.

Then again, there are examples that already exist because it’s possible to include the REST API in your project as a plugin, but I digress.

One of the neater, smaller examples that I’ve recently come across is by Brian Krogsgard.

WordPress REST API Example: By Brian Krogsgard

Not only does it show a WordPress REST API example, it shows how to use it in the context of a Rect applications.

Custom Admin Pages in WordPress

October 7, 2016 / Tom

Custom admin pages in WordPress are one of those things that aren’t often needed if you’re using something like the Settings API, the add_menu_page function, or a similar API function.

And in many, if not most, cases all of the above suffice; however, there are times where you need more control over what’s displayed to the user, how the input is handled once it’s submitted, and then what’s returned to the user after the data has been saved to the database.

In those cases, it’s helpful to know how to write custom admin pages in WordPress and all that comes with it – from sanitization, custom error messages, validation, and page redirection.

Improving WordPress Resource Requests

September 30, 2016 / Tom / 0 Comments

A couple of weeks ago, I talked about WordPress resource requests and how there’s a level of performance with which we have to comfortable when we’re building solutions on top of the application.

In the post, I shared a comment by a friend (who no longer works within WordPress, but did for several years):

And the fact that it doesn’t min / cat files instead of [25] network requests is just plain dumb. And when a person has 23 plugins, that’s 26 files not even including the theme and core.

And now, just as I did then, I don’t disagree with him. But after sharing the post, several different utilities were shared with me each of which aiming to improve this problem.

JJJ‘s WP Enqueue Masher – a fork of an Automattic project – does exactly this.