Software Engineering in WordPress, PHP, and Backend Development

Tag: WordPress (Page 102 of 219)

Articles, tips, and resources for WordPress-based development.

How to Work with WordPress Metadata

One of the nicest APIs that the application offers is the WordPress Metadata API. It’s through this API that we’re able to take ideas such as posts, users, comments, terms, and more and store richer information that just the standard set of information.

Sure, there’s a lot to consider when taking advantages of these additional columns or fields as it relates to these concepts. But if you’re a beginner or someone who’s just starting to get deeper into the WordPress API, then I can’t recommend learning these APIs enough.

In two recent series for Envato, I cover these concepts in-depth.

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Setting up PHP and Composer in MAMP

Lately, I’ve been trying to write shorter, more focused on articles on particular topics, but there are times in which a longer article is warranted: Case in point: Using PHP and Composer in MAMP.

Before you get started reading this article, I’m assuming you have a couple of things:

  • MAMP installed on your machine (it’s compatible with Windows now!)
  • Time to read all that’s below
  • Willingness to use the Terminal
  • Coffee (or another drink, but seriously coffee) to read through all that’s below

It’s not that any of this is intimidating. I mean, if you’re completely inexperienced, there may be a bit of a learning curve, but I’m going to do what I can to break this down for you regardless of the level of experience you have.

Ultimately, the goal is to make it easier for you to write more modular code using third-party dependencies and with keeping things well-organized on your system and in your projects.

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WordPress Autocomplete for Atom

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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Getting Started with Learning WordPress

Learning WordPress is one of those things that many of us are doing almost every single day. However, once we reach a certain point, I think we stop thinking of it as “learning WordPress” and we start thinking of it as “how to do [any given task] with WordPress.”

When it comes to helping other people with WordPress, it’s easy to forget what it’s like to be at the beginning stages and getting acquainted with all of the nuances required to get things set up on our computer and how it relates to releasing projects on the web.

To that end, I just wrapped up a series for Envato geared specifically towards beginners who want to get started with WordPress but aren’t sure where to start.

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From GitHub to WordPress.org

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.

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