Software Engineering in WordPress, PHP, and Backend Development
Articles, tips, and resources for WordPress-based development.
Out-of-the-box, the meta boxes that WordPress displays on the dashboard aren’t exactly overkill. I mean, if you’re a blogger, then I think the chances are strong that you’ll need:
But if you’re building a solution for someone else where that information is irrelevant, wouldn’t it be worth removing the WordPress meta boxes to make the dashboard a little bit cleaner with less irrelevant options?
One of the things that I’ve begun to think about as I move through my career in development is what it means to be truly pragmatic about the work that I do.
But first (and no, this is not an affiliate promotion), I think it’s worth noting that The Pragmatic Programmer is a book that I think every person who is a developer of some sort should reading (maybe several times, even). It’s an easy read and brings up a lot of good points as it relates to being the best programmer that you can be as it relates to best practices (whatever that may look like for your slice of the industry).
Anyway, I’ve talked about the tension of having to stay on top of every new technology that’s released as well as the importance of going deep rather than wide as it relates to the work that we’re doing on a day-to-day basis.
If you’ve been following along with this series so far, then you know I’ve been working through a series of posts that aims to show how to integrate your own button into the WordPress post editor.
My very own copy TinyMCE Editor. So spectacular.
When doing this, we’re specifically working with both TinyMCE and WordPress. That is, we’re writing a TinyMCE plugin that is then wrapped in a WordPress plugin that will then allow the user to click on the button and add their own content (whatever that content may be).
In the next couple of articles, we’re going to take a look at how to do exactly that. First, we’ll start with simply connecting the result of clicking on the TinyMCE button with WordPress and then we’ll look at how to do some more advanced work.
The hook system that’s built into WordPress is great and really powerful once you fully understand now only how the default actions and filters work, but how you can leverage them in your own themes and plugins to have others work for you.
But there’s a problem that comes with this: Other developers can often abuse them. Perhaps they will name a hook like one that already exists, or perhaps they’ll trigger a hook outside of the normal WordPress lifecycle.
When you’re working on building a plugin that’s adhering to the best practices of using a predefined hook and another plugin ends up breaking the usual flow of control, it can be extremely frustrating.
You – or at least I – can literally spend hours trying to isolate and trace down the source of the problem.
Frustrating, right?
Anyway, I’m not in the business of “calling other people out” or identifying problematic plugins on this site (though I don’t mind to discussing one on one), so this post is not about a plugin that’s doing things in a way that I don’t recommend.
Instead, it’s about finding ways to find a solution when you’re faced with a similar problem.
Throughout this series, I’ve been talking through the process of how go about adding a TinyMCE button to WordPress – specifically, adding a custom button to the post editor.
Up to this point, I’ve covered a number of different things. Namely:
The thing is, we haven’t actually made anything happen in the editor let alone even introduce a button into the actual editor yet.
In this post, we’ll do exactly that.
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