Tag: WordPress (Page 134 of 219)

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

The Importance of Following The WordPress Coding Standards

March 28, 2015 / Tom

Today, I’m attending WordCamp Atlanta. I’ll be speaking on the topic of The Importance of Following The WordPress Coding Standards.

The WordPress Coding Standards

It’s been a couple of years since I was able to attend a WordCamp (primarily because my wife and I were growing our family and welcoming additional humans to Planet Earth :).

Anyway, I’m excited to be back.

Avoid Loops With save_post in WordPress

March 26, 2015 / Tom / 0 Comments

When working on WordPress projects, there may be times during which you have to do some sort of processing on the content or attributes of the post before saving it to the database.

There are a number of ways to do this, but one of the most straightforward ways to go about it is to setup a custom function hooked to the save_post action and then handle the attributes of the post in that function.

If you opt to go this route, there are a few considerations that you need to make (mainly that help you avoid some type of infinite loop) in order to properly adjust the content to your liking.

Debugging with Query String Parameters

March 25, 2015 / Tom / 0 Comments

There are a number of ways that we debug our WordPress-based projects.

Some people end up going through the code and setting up `print_r` statements or `var_dump` statements
Some end up working through the code and changing variables or function names until they find where something breaks (or changes)
Some use debugging software (or the debugging features in their IDE)
Some use a combination of plugins and other techniques
And some likely use some strategy that isn’t listed here

Personally, I’m partial to using some of the developer tools that are provided by WordPress through the use of setting constants and using plugins that are available to us, but I’m also a fan of using Codebug App (which is the content for another point).

Codebug App

But, for the purposes of this post, that’s beside the point.

The Basics of How WordPress Works

March 23, 2015 / Tom

If you’re getting started in WordPress development, odds are it won’t be long until you bump up against the concept of hooks. That is, points during the WordPress life cycle that allow us to add our own functionality to customize how WordPress behaves.

Of course, this is how both themes and plugins are made to do some of the neat (or not so neat, depending on the project) things that they do. And though I obviously recommend reading up on them in the Codex, I think it’s also important to understand how the WordPress application loads itself.

More specifically, I think it’s important to understand how WordPress works. There are a lot of resources out there available to read and review; however, John Blackbourn has been working on a no-frills version of this very idea that I believe to be worth starring and referencing.

On WordPress Theme-Specific Plugins and Theme Lock-In

March 20, 2015 / Tom / 0 Comments

When it comes to working with WordPress themes and plugins, there’s a general rule of thumb that most experienced designers and developers follow:

Themes are for presentation, plugins are for functionality.

Sure, there’s a little bit of blurring of lines, but this is the goal for which we strive when working through our code. And yes, there’s a lot that can be said (and has been said) about themes that include a ton of features, options, bundled plugins, and so on, but that’s not where this is going.

Instead, I’ve been thinking about how this relates to general theme development, niche theme development, and using WordPress as a platform for application development.