Tag: WordPress (Page 123 of 220)

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

Why Are These WordPress Hooks Firing Twice?

July 27, 2015 / Tom / 0 Comments

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.

Adding a TinyMCE Button to WordPress: The Button

July 22, 2015 / Tom / 0 Comments

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:

Stubbing out the plugin and adding the JavaScript
Including any dependent files that you may need in order to power your plugin
And how to bootstrap the plugin so that it is able to be activated from within WordPress

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.

Getting Started with Fixing WordPress Bugs

July 21, 2015 / Tom / 0 Comments

It’s one thing to have a local copy of the latest version of WordPress installed on your system – don’t get me wrong, it’s really cool to be able to see some of the new features – but it’s another thing to want to get involved in contributing to the codebase.

Sure, it’s completely possible to get started by trying to implement your own desired feature, but the likelihood that it’s going to be merged into core is very, very small. Those type of decisions have a process through which they undergo before being merged. Plus, that’s taking on a lot if you’re just getting started with contributing code to WordPress.

But what about trying to fix WordPress bugs? That is, what if you were to want to try to take your chances with fixing some of the existing problems with the software?

That’s a bit easier.

WordPress and Subversion: How To Check Out The Latest Code

July 20, 2015 / Tom / 0 Comments

There’s a lot going on as it relates to working with WordPress right now: People are discussing things ranging from dependency manage (via tools such as Composer) and talking about the up and coming REST API (which is really exciting).

I’ve also recently read that the object-oriented programming approach is just now making its way to WordPress development. Personally, I don’t fully agree with that, but I do think that there are some advanced topics that are making there way over such as inversion of control, dependency injection containers, and so on.

All of those are important things to be discussed, shared, and taught to others, for sure. But sometimes, I think that we forget that there are some basic things about WordPress that those who are just getting involved need to learn before getting into those topics.

These things include how to grab a copy of the latest version of WordPress from the trunk (let alone explaining what “trunk” – or source control – even is), how to get started with working on your first set of issues, and so on.

WordPress Trunk

This is something that I think those involved in WordPress development could do a better job of teaching. To be clear, I think some do a fantastic job. Some are also very quiet – and that’s fine, not everyone cares to blog and many people are heads down on important work.

But as much as we want people to be involved in open source, I think we should make sure people are educated as well as possible to get involved and have a clear understanding of what to do.

Opting not to share information doesn’t mean you’re greedy; however, as I’ve been thinking about the wide range of topics that exist for those who are trying to get involved in WordPress or who are looking to up their game as it relates to object-oriented programming, I thought it might be worth sharing some shorter articles on how to get started with some of these topics.

Adding TinyMCE Dependencies in WordPress

July 17, 2015 / Tom / 0 Comments

If you’ve been following along with previous articles you know that over the last few days I’ve been working through a series on adding a TinyMCE button to WordPress.

Though this post isn’t exactly part of that series, it’s tangentially related and I thought it was something worth covering in case someone else stumbles across their problem in their work or if the code that shows up later in said series shows what’s up but doesn’t do a great job explaining it.

In short, when you have a JavaScript file that is a dependency on the core plugin, there’s another way of adding the dependency that does not include wp_enqueue_script.