Category: Tips (Page 4 of 10)

Various articles covering anything from how to programmatically achieve a certain task to useful ways that I’ve found to manage my time.

WordPress Source Control: Commit Messages

January 16, 2013 / Tom / 0 Comments

Although Automattic uses Subversion for source control both for its themes and plugins, I keep a number of my plugins in Git repositories during development.

Additionally, 8BIT uses GitHub to keep track of all of our source code, issues, milestones, and so on. When it’s time to make a commit, we usually sync the Git repository with its Subversion equivalent.

I’ve used a number of different source control systems during my career – some distributed, some not – and I’ve never been someone who fights a so-called religious war over which is better. Each source control system has its advantages, disadvantages, and each one fits differently within the context of how a person or a team operates.

Currently, I really like Git but a lot of that has to do with how GitHub, the site, fits into my workflow. Sure, there are things about Git that I like, but it’s GitHub’s organization that fits how I do work.

Anyway, overtime I figured I’d discuss my thoughts on WordPress source control. In this post: commit messages.

How To Get The Post ID By Post Meta Value

January 3, 2013 / Tom / 0 Comments

One of the nicest and most flexible aspects of the WordPress API is the ability to associate meta data with certain models – for lack of a better term – in the database.

That is, we can assign meta value to Users, Posts, Authors, and so on.

Retrieving the data is typically trivially easy. Simply supply the ID of the model in question and then pass the key value for said post meta.

But what if you need to get the post ID or post meta key by the meta value instead?

How To File and Manage a WordPress Plugin Bug Report

December 31, 2012 / Tom / 0 Comments

When it comes to WordPress development, there typically tends to be two camps (with a third that’s on the rise):

There are theme developers
There are plugin developers
Then there is the growing field of application developers

Personally, I’m a fan of building plugins. Obviously, it’s not because I have anything against building themes, but I’m a programmer – not a designer – by nature, so I add to the WordPress experience through functionality rather than functionality and design.

In fact, I think if I had to design, it’d probably take away from the experience :).

But plugins are software and there are problems that have existed as long as software has existed. In fact, entire markets have been created around said problem: filing bug reports.

I’m not here to provide the ultimate solution for how to provide a WordPress plugin bug report – if that existed, it would have been solved long before today; however, I do want to share a couple of things that I’ve noticed.

Quick Tip: Handle When save_post Is Called Twice

December 27, 2012 / Tom / 0 Comments

If you're an experienced developer, you may wish to skip to the code.

If you’ve ever done any work with building a plugin or building a feature of a theme that includes a custom meta box or that includes functionality that is fired on the save_post action, then you’ve likely seen WordPress save_post called twice.

The thing is, this is expected behavior, but because of how it’s used, you may not always want your code to execute until the user actually clicks on the save button.

So here’s a quick tip on how to properly manage the case when save_post is called twice.

How To Find The Permalink By Slug in WordPress

December 26, 2012 / Tom / 0 Comments

If you're an advanced developer, then you may want to skip directly to the code.

As soon as you begin working on an advanced plugin or an application in which you try to maintain some form of solid cohesion (or even an API), then you end finding that there’s a function you need that isn’t available in the Codex.

This isn’t unique to WordPress. Any programming language that has a rich API ultimately has a set of solid features that allow you to build upon them to write more power functions.

For me, I try to publish most of my helper functions here on the site. It makes things searchable, available, and even available for code review for the more critical readers :).

Case in point: In a recent project, I needed to find the permalink by slug in WordPress and there wasn’t a function available to do exactly that, so here’s what I ended up doing.