Tag: WordPress (Page 181 of 219)

One of the things that we often see in the “offline marketplace” – for lack of a better term – is the idea of planned obsolescence.

Simply defined:

a policy of producing consumer goods that rapidly become obsolete and so require replacing, achieved by frequent changes in design, termination of the supply of spare parts, and the use of nondurable materials.

This is something that we see in auto industry, in the electronics industry, and in the computer industry. Think of it this way: Remember the iPhone 3? Or remember the Chevrolet Monte Carlo?

These are but two examples of products that were widely used – some for decades – and then were replaced by another product either by one with a brand new version or by an entire new line.

This is one of those things we don’t necessarily consider or talk about in the context of software. But why? All other platforms and languages aside, would planned obsolescence in WordPress be so bad?

Continue reading

Earlier this week, I received an email from someone who was asking about the Settings API. Specifically, he was curious as to how the WordPress defaults array works.

For those of who may have worked with theme development, plugin development, or the Settings API in general, then you may be familiar with functions that look like this:

/**
 * Provides a default value for the theme layout setting.
 *
 * @since    1.0.0
 */
function get_theme_default_layout_options() {

	$defaults = array(
	    'layout'                         => 'right_sidebar_layout',
	    'display_featured_images'        => 'always'
	);

	return apply_filters ( 'theme_default_layout_options', $defaults );

}

But if you’re not familiar with the Settings API or with how to `apply_filters` call works, then this particular function can be confusing especially when it comes to understanding the serialization lifecycle of saving options to the database.

Continue reading