Category: Tips (Page 6 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.

Properly Calculating Page Offset in Custom WordPress Queries

October 25, 2012 / Tom / 0 Comments

Whenever it comes to writing custom queries in WordPress, pagination always seems to give developers problems (myself included!).

I think this can be chalked up to the next / previous pagination links (so does next mean older, or newer?), paginating single posts as well as archive posts, and then occasionally having to write custom queries that include pagination.

One of the areas that I see most confusing – again for myself as well – is properly calculating page offsets especially when working with the WP_Query offset parameter.

The thing is, I think it can be much more simplified (or, perhaps, demystified?) when visualizing the data that you’re working with, and knowing how to use some of the existing API links.

So here’s what you need to know in order to get pagination working when working with the WP_Query offset, page, and number parameters.

How To Setup Custom Queries For WP_Query Pagination

October 23, 2012 / Tom / 0 Comments

One of the nicest things about using WP_Query is that it allows you to completely customize the data that you’re bringing back to the front end.

For those of you who are completely unfamiliar with this API, it’s a powerful class that allows you to custom tailor a query against the WordPress database for retrieving information about posts, pages, custom post types, and so on.

If you’re using one of the more common features of WordPress, such as those mentioned above, then it’s relatively easy to get started; however, if you’re doing more complicated work, such as including multiple custom queries in a single view, then there are some challenges that you may discover.

Personally, I’ve been working on a project where I have two custom queries running in a template and I needed to paginate the results. The problem is that using the usual functions for doing this, that is:

Were not working as expected.

Ultimately, it required me passing a little bit more information to the query’s arguments array and to the pagination link functions. Here’s how you can setup WP_Query Pagination to work properly in custom queries.

Programmatically Resize Images in WordPress

October 4, 2012 / Tom / 0 Comments

If you're experienced with programmatically uploading files, you may wish to skip down to the code.

I’m finishing up an application that’s built on WordPress that has required that I programmatically resize images. When it comes to building themes or plugins, it’s relatively easy to specify add_image_size and then let the user interface and core application do it’s thing.

But in my case, the end user will have no idea that the actual application is built on WordPress and the image resizing function needed to be a little more tailored for specific templates (or views)

So rather than use the typical WordPress facilities for uploading and resizing images, here’s how to programmatically resize images in WordPress.

How To Use WP_User_Query For WordPress User Queries

September 28, 2012 / Tom / 0 Comments

Earlier this week, I published a post on how to find users in WordPress by using meta data. In short, I have a collection of users each of which have unique meta data and I needed to locate a user based on said meta data.

In the comments, Curtis of @WPThemeTut recommended I check out WP_User_Query as opposed to way that I was doing it (which I’ll cover momentarily).

Because the WordPress API has a tendency to introduce new functions for querying specific data in later releases, and because I try to be a proponent of using the newer methods, I wanted to cover WP_User_Query in a bit more detail.

How To Find a User By Meta Data in WordPress

September 26, 2012 / Tom / 0 Comments

Thanks to Curtis for giving a heads up to WP_User_Query - it's a nicer alternative to the original post.

One of my favorite things about the WordPress API is the ability to store custom meta data with objects such as pages and users. I’ve been working on an application where this scenario has presented itself:

The end user is able to create a company
Each company can have an administrator based on users in the system

To do this, I’m creating a relationship between the company and user by associating the company’s ID as part of the user’s meta data.

Later in the application, I need to retrieve each administrator for each company which has required the use of a helper function to get a user by meta data.

The details of how I’m doing this are aren’t exactly interesting for this post, but I figured that this was a common enough issue and easy enough to generalize that I’d share how to programmatically get a user by meta data in WordPress: