Tag: WordPress (Page 102 of 220)

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

Improve Your WordPress Skills with Hookr.io

April 8, 2016 / Tom / 0 Comments

One of the most important things you can do to improve your WordPress skills is to learn all about WordPress hooks. If you’ve spent any time looking through code, trying to write a plugin, or referencing the Codex then you likely know:

Hooks are provided by WordPress to allow your plugin to ‘hook into’ the rest of WordPress; that is, to call functions in your plugin at specific times, and thereby set your plugin in motion.

Yes, I think it’s important to understand the event-driven design pattern. And it’s one thing to have a comprehensive list of everything that’s available regardless of if it’s an action or a filter but it’s another thing to actually see it action.

Given that we all have different learning styles, sometimes I think having a reference is only one way to go about learning how to leverage the system. Another way would be to use a plugin like Hookr.

How to Work with WordPress Metadata

April 6, 2016 / Tom

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.

Setting up PHP and Composer in MAMP

April 5, 2016 / Tom / 0 Comments

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.

WordPress Autocomplete for Atom

April 1, 2016 / Tom / 0 Comments

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

March 30, 2016 / Tom

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.