Tag: WordPress (Page 162 of 220)

If you’re in the business of creating WordPress plugins for yourself or for others, then it’s likely that you’ve done work with custom post types.

On top of that, there’s a chance that you’ve needed to introduce some functionality into a custom post type based on what’s selected in the plugin settings (which I discussed all of that fun stuff in a previous post).

And I’ve seen a number of different ways in which this is done: Some of them involve complexity such as reading the select post types into an array, iterating through the list, comparing the current post type, setting a boolean, and so on.

But there is a cleaner way that this can be done. I’m not claiming it’s the best way (perhaps you could share some insight on your opinions on this in the comments), but it’s way that I’ve found useful and that I’ve been using a few times over throughout several projects.

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As I’ve been working through a number of different plugins both for myself and for client projects, one of the things that has started to become glaringly apparent over the last few projects is just how unintuitive WordPress plugin settings can be.

I know, isn’t a new idea, but bear with me because I’m not talking about your standard run-of-the-mill plugins that have a settings page or that may add some type of shortcode functionality to the editor (though that’s unintuitive unto itself).

Instead, I’m talking about plugins that include a little bit of both: settings pages, additions to custom post types, perhaps the additions of shortcodes or buttons to the editor, and so on.

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Right now, there’s a lot of talk about themes and their place within the WordPress community. Generally speaking, I think that this is a good thing as it’s finally forcing theme designers and developers to thing more strategically about the products that they’re creating, releasing, and to think more critically about their target audience, marketing efforts, and so on.

There are some who believe the market has been saturated, and though I follow that train of thought, I don’t agree with it. Just because there are more product options, more companies, and so on producing themes does not necessarily negatively detract from the industry.

I think it makes it more competitive which, in turn, can make it more innovative (though it can also create more products that should never be on the market, but that’s the nature of an economy and I’d rather keep the post optimistic).

With that said, I don’t think that there’s any reason to be discouraged from entering the theme development space, creating a new theme company, or anything like that.

In fact, I think on the contrary.

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Regardless of your level of experience with WordPress, everyone is familiar with seeing the messages that display whenever an action has completed within the dashboard:

• We have success messages for when something has completed, ahem, successfully,
• We have notification messages which are neutral pieces of information that give a heads up something has happened,
• And we have error messages that let us know that something has gone wrong.

For anyone that’s read past articles, you know that when it comes to introducing functionality into the WordPress dashboard, I firmly believe that the work we do should look as native as possible. That is to say that I am not a fan of custom styles, custom controls, or extraordinary styles to give your theme or plugin that “extra edge.”

And for those who are familiar with the Settings API and/or the Options API, then you’re likely familiar with introducing new sections, settings, controls, and options, but what about error messages?

Generally speaking, success messages and notification messages are reasonably easy to come by, but let’s say that you need to validate some piece of information that’s coming into the server and return an error if it fails.

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