Tag: WordPress (Page 133 of 219)

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

Maybe Unserialize That Data (Or Maybe Not)

April 8, 2015 / Tom / 0 Comments

Yesterday, I was chatting with a fellow WordPress developer and, as we were reviewing some code, we came across the use of maybe_unserialize. You can read more about it in the Codex, but the short of it is this:

Unserialize value only if it was serialized.

Seems a little odd, doesn’t it? I mean, shouldn’t we know if a value has been serialized?

How Others Find You (As a Developer)

April 2, 2015 / Tom / 0 Comments

If you’re working on starting a business – be it a side-income, freelance, agency, or whatever – and you want to build it on top of WordPress, one of the considerations that you have to make is how to actually attain clients.

To be clear, this is not a post on client acquisition, marketing, or anything like that. That’s not the type of stuff I discuss here (nor is it my forte). If you’re really interested in that, check out my friend Curtis McHale’s blog.

Helping you answer the hard questions about your business

Instead, this is more about how you help others find you if you’re not entering the product space.

WordPress Meta Data: Other Data (Not IDs)

April 1, 2015 / Tom / 0 Comments

Yesterday, I talked about some of the advantages of using IDs when working with various pieces of WordPress data and populating different input elements, saving it to the database, and more.

For certain types of data, this works well; however, this may not always be true especially as it relates to data types such as taxonomies. This is going to be most notable in WordPress 4.2.

Taxonomy term splitting coming in WordPress 4.2

If you’re an experienced developer, then I recommend reading the blog post linked above; otherwise, suffice it to say that using IDs may not always be the best option depending on if you’re doing a database migration (and how that migration might be done).

So what else are we left to do?

WordPress Meta Data: Use IDs (Not Titles)

March 31, 2015 / Tom / 0 Comments

One of the features that I’ve often found myself having to implement when building custom solutions for others is implementing some type of select box – be it multi-select or single select – or another similar input element that’s [naturally] populated with a list of option elements.

These options may consist of posts, pages, custom post types, categories, taxonomies, etc. It doesn’t really matter what type of information it includes, but it does matter how the information is populated.

Use Your WordPress Powers For Good

March 30, 2015 / Tom / 0 Comments

This past weekend, I had the opportunity to speak at WordCamp Atlanta about the Importance of Following The WordPress Coding Standards.

I had a blast talking with the audience, meeting new people, answering questions, and being exposed to some ideas and techniques that I’d not previously considered.

During the talk, a friend of mine happened to snap a picture of two young guys – between 11 – 13 years old or so – sitting on the front-row of the presentation.

Since I tend to be protective about sharing pictures of my own kids online, I’ve opted not to share the picture here, but it doesn’t matter – the important thing is that there were young kids present at this WordCamp soaking up every word that was being present and even asking questions.

This is something that I’ve yet to see at a WordCamp – at least in Atlanta – and it’s really got me excited for the future of computer science, of WordPress, and of programming in general.