Tag: WordPress (Page 137 of 219)

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

The Constraints of an API Are a Good Thing

February 24, 2015 / Tom / 0 Comments

Because WordPress is built using a number of languages none of which are compiled, it makes it completely possible to make things happen within your theme, plugin, or extension by circumventing the native APIs.

This means that if you wanted to, say, introduce some type of element on one of the dashboard screens or you wanted to introduce functionality into one of your templates that didn’t previously exist, there’s a strong chance that you’d be able to do so simply by “brute force.”

And by that, I mean that you’d be able to make something happen – and probably work correctly – without using the native set of APIs that are available.

But when you’re faced with that situation, I highly recommend taking a step back and determining if you’re approaching the problem in the best way possible given your set of constraints.

Ask Me Anything at WP Chat

February 20, 2015 / Tom

Comments are closed on this post. Please hold them until the AMA session begins on Monday :).

Last month, WP Chat held an “Ask Me Anything” or and AMA with Justin Tadlock. Justin, obviously a very popular, prolific, and respectable person in the WordPress economy, provided a great time even for those of us who were simply reading along (or for those who want to read along).

WP Chat is going to be making this a monthly event and I’m humbled to say that I’ll be participating in the next AMA session at WPChat on Monday night.

Unsolicited Advice in WordPress (But Is It Really?)

February 17, 2015 / Tom / 0 Comments

Obviously, I can only speak for as much of the culture that I’ve experienced both online and offline so I don’t mean this to be an overly general statement, but I think it’s fair we live in a highly polarized culture – if not offline, and if not in the west, then certainly online.

That is, we have no problem telling one another if their policy, their ideas, their implementations, or whatever sucks, or if it’s terrific. Unfortunately, it seems to be much more of the former than the latter.

I tend to be more on the pessimistic side – I know, probably not the most flattering personality trait, but I try to fight it :) – so I don’t know if it’s getting better, but I can definitively say that over the past few days, I’ve personally experienced some criticism – all constructive – that’s respectful and that has generated a lot of food for thought.

Am I Giving To WordPress?

February 12, 2015 / Tom / 0 Comments

Yesterday, I stumbled across tweet from a fellow developer for whom I greatly respect. He said:

https://twitter.com/johnpbloch/status/565399105544126464

Which naturally got me a little bit introspective wondering ifI have been giving to WordPress as much as I should.

Searching with Substrings in WordPress

February 9, 2015 / Tom / 0 Comments

Let’s say you’re in the process of building some type of search mechanism using WP_Query and you want your users to be able to run the search using part of a string.

That is, let’s say that you’re searching Companies (which is a custom post type) and some of the company’s names is “Awesome Code.” The user doesn’t know this because you’ve built a huge database and have been wildly successful with your app.

So let’s say the user opts to try to run a search using the fragment of ‘awe’ or ‘some’ or ‘code’ or some fragment variation thereof – how are we supposed to be able to pull back results like that?