Software Engineering in WordPress, PHP, and Backend Development
Articles, tips, and resources for WordPress-based development.
When it comes to WordPress themes, one of the things that I used to think should be more common was the idea of style guides.
You know what I’m talking about: The documents that are either included with or ship with a theme that guide you on the typography, image sizes, video sizes, and other collateral to make sure that you use the theme exactly as it’s been designed to be used.
In other words, it prevents you from making the theme look ugly.
But are they really needed?
Importing CSV files (or something similar) is something that’s nothing new to web development.
If you’re writing a server-side code that’s responsible for importing a file in the context of WordPress, then you can be doing anything from programmatically creating posts to creating more complex relationships among post types, taxonomies, and so on.
In this case, it’s nice to have an abstract function that can help to do a lot of the repetitive work for you. After all, aren’t functions specifically for that?
Some time ago, I began removing the HTML comment label from beneath the standard WordPress comment form (no, not the Jetpack-enabled form – the one that ships with a default WordPress theme).
Most of you are familiar with the form as it generally looks something like this:
HTML in Comments
Generally speaking I find that that block that usually sits between the textarea and the submit input to introduce complexity and likely cause more confusion than anything else.
Almost everyone who has worked with WordPress has dealt with wp-config.php. I know – there are a lot of managed hosts out there that take care of a lot of this for you – but even though a person may not have directly edited the file, they have definitely interacted with it.
For those who are unfamiliar:
This file is located in the root of your WordPress file directory and contains your website’s base configuration details, such as database connection information.
Anyway, for sometime now, I’ve been working on a relatively large plugin for a client and have recently taken to introducing a similar type of configuration files. So this raised that question, do what you think of plugin config files?
One of the common things that I’ve seen – and personally done – is mismanaging $_POST data as it comes into the server-side from a form or some type of input element from the front-end. This may be in the case of sending data via Ajax or by doing a standard page refresh.
Chill Out, Veruca. We’re getting there.
Whatever the case, whenever you’re dealing with $_POST data in WordPress and you’re looking to save information into the database, there may be times where you’re interested in saving empty values, and there maybe times where you’re interested in savings values only if they are not empty.
If you’re going after the latter, there are a couple of safe guards you should introduce in your code to make sure that rows are only being written when there’s data to actually be written.
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