Tag: WordPress (Page 156 of 220)

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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For as much as I’m a fan of approaching WordPress theme and plugin development as one would any other type of software project, there’s one thing about releasing major updates to themes that I don’t think should be treated as some people treat software projects.

That is, when it comes time to do a major release of a theme – regardless of what the version number is (because that’s a discussion for an entirely different post) – I think that the presentation layer or the way the theme looks or its general styles shouldn’t deviate very much from the initial design.

Think about a number of the major applications that you use on a day-to-day basis. This can be desktop software, this can be mobile applications, this can be an operating system, this can be web applications, and this can even be other WordPress themes.

A tubular update to the UI of a dog collar.

Then, think about how often their interface changes. When it comes to major updates, there’s often times a major change in the interface or the introduction of a different way of doing something within the application. The change can be significant.

Although this introduces a learning curve which often leads to frustration on the user’s behalf, and although this is something that’s normal because of the advances in technology, I don’t think it necessarily applies to the look and feel of WordPress themes.

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One of the features of WordPress that used to be significantly more popular is that of trackbacks and pings (or more commonly referred to as pingbacks). In short, it’s a way for those who run a blog to know when someone else has linked to one of their articles.

It’s kind of a flattering thing, isn’t it? I mean, someone is writing a post and then linking their content to yours? Then again, sometimes they could just be responding to something you’ve said in a negative way. That’s not always the most flattering thing, I guess, but it fosters conversation nonetheless.

Pingbacks are the ping pong of blogging. Or something like thing.

Regardless, I’ve seen some people question the purpose of pingbacks, question whether or not they should be enabled or disabled, and question whether or not they actually help readers when skimming through the content.

Though I personally don’t have any kind of evidence from any kind of study to back up any of those points above, I have decided to turn pingbacks off on the public-facing aspect of my site in the coming days.

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It’s no secret that one of the things that I love most about the most recent versions of WordPress is the Theme Customizer (which is soon to be called the Customizer). I’ve talked about it in a number of different articles, some of which include:

• A Guide To The WordPress Theme Customizer
• Modular Procedural Programming The WordPress Theme Customizer
• Writing JavaScript Helpers for the WordPress Theme Customizer

Further, I’ve been clear in stating that I think that as much as I like the Customizer, we’re beginning to see the same problems, but in a different place.

Simply put, I think that we’re disrespecting our customers and damaging the WordPress customizer.

And over the past few weeks, I’ve seen this manifesting itself more and more through various themes I’ve seen, various screenshots I’ve seen, and various other discussions I’ve seen.

Granted, I’m not really one in a position to say what a person opts to do with their own projects, and I’m not particularly interested in getting up on a soapbox (but this is probably going to read like that, so there’s that, I guess) and telling everyone how or why to do something, but I do have strong opinions on the WordPress philosophy and how it directly contributes to developing themes.

As it stands now right now, I think that we’re doing a terrible job of respecting the WordPress philosophy, putting it to work for us, creating happy customers, and leveraging the WordPress customizer for the betterment of the WordPress economy.

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