Tag: WordPress (Page 155 of 219)

Featured images (also referred to as “post thumbnails”) are nice features to include in WordPress themes, but there are times where I question their implementation.

I know, I know: talking about stuff like this can come off as frivolous, but I think that if you deeply care about what you’re working on, then evaluating the decisions – every one of them – that go into your product matters.

And since featured images are a decision that need to be made when working in theme development matter, then it’s worth evaluating their implementation.

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One of the things that I think many, many young (that is: inexperienced) theme developers do is ship a custom.css file in WordPress. Years ago, I made the mistake so I’m just as guilty as the next person.

Unfortunately, this is something that’s still happening today – we need to stop including custom CSS in WordPress and use the native facilities to take advantage of the same functionality we’re trying to achieve with this particular file.

Here’s the thing: Normally I wouldn’t bother talking about something like this because the Codex does such a good job of outlining the proper way to introduce customizations into themes, but I recently received a comment (that I’ll paraphrase) in which I was told that:

In the real world not everyone uses child themes.

Odds are, many of us have heard the old cliché that:

The difference between theory and practice is that in theory there is no difference.

And when you’re talking about something like a complex algorithm for traversing, say, the shortest path across a graph over a large network, or when we’re talking about something like properly handling memory in embedded systems, talking about theory and the real world makes sense.

That is, all of those cases are important and are worthy of optimization, but we’re talking about a single CSS file.

We’re not talking about a complex system.

And it concerns me that those who are contributing to the WordPress economy through products aren’t taking the built-in features of the application seriously. It’s seen as some bit of impracticality that they don’t want to pursue.

But this introduces it’s own set of challenges that negatively affect theme development from both a developer and a customer standpoint.

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I was recently having a conversation with a friend and fellow WordPress developer about the best ways to go about checking if a post exists given nothing but an ID.

For those who are experienced with the WordPress API, there are a number of ways to go about doing this. Functions and classes that exists for things like this are:

• `get_post`
• `WP_Query`
• Running a direct query with `$wpdb`
• …and so on

Each of these has its advantages and disadvantages, but of everything listed above, there are always two things I try to make sure that I do when working with simple functions (like checking on the existence of a post).

I try to make sure the function:

1. Is as lightweight as possible
2. Is as easy as possible to read within the context of the existing code

After all, months from now, you never know if you’ll recall why you wrote code a certain way nor will your team or your peers necessarily know why the code you selected is set in a certain way.

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