Tag: WordPress (Page 185 of 220)

Articles, tips, and resources for WordPress-based development.

Properly Setting Up WordPress Cron Jobs

July 18, 2013 / Tom / 0 Comments

As it relates to scheduling events in WordPress, there’s a lot of articles that already exist on setting up a WordPress cron job, but – and for what I believe to be a number of reasons – there’s a surprising lack of clarity around the topic.

Of course, I could be wrong – maybe I’ve just been looking in all of the wrong places.

Whatever the case may be, this is something that I’ve been dealing with in a couple of projects, and I thought I’d capture my notes here if, for no other reason, than to reference in the future.

Your WordPress Plugin Idea – What’s The Point?

July 11, 2013 / Tom / 0 Comments

When it comes to coming up with WordPress plugin ideas (or themes or general applications on any platform, for that matter), we all have different ways of going about doing it.

Some of us do it by scratching our own itch, some of us do it by modifying or adjusting an existing project to meet our needs, some of us dream up a random idea, and some of us do all of the above.

But coming up with an idea for a project is only half of it – you’ve also got to determine if your project serves a particular purpose, solves a particular problem, or has a particular use case.

I mean, very few things in this world are created “just because,” right?

Adding PDFs To WordPress Comments with PDF Comments

July 9, 2013 / Tom

This plugin is no longer maintained or available and comments on the post have been closed.

When I first got into WordPress development several years ago, I began experimenting with selling two premium plugins for approximately one year. During that time I learned a lot about what makes or breaks a successful plugin (and what kind of things can seriously drain you from a support perspective).

In fact, I eventually killed both of those projects off because I no longer had the desire to work on them, maintaining the support required more time than I currently had, and I had not really selected the best business model for selling them.

Since then, I’ve spent a lot of time working on client projects, free projects, writing, speaking, and working to build other WordPress-based products.

For those who have been following this blog for some time, you know that I’ve been doing research on WordPress support systems, I’ve been working to rebrand my LLC, and I have been refocusing all of my efforts specifically on WordPress (and dropping support for other platforms, frameworks, etc.).

Today, I’m happy to announce that I’ve recently partnered with the guys at FooPlugins to release my first premium plugin in the past couple of years which makes adding PDFs to WordPress comments a breeze.

How To Programmatically Send Email in WordPress

July 8, 2013 / Tom / 0 Comments

Late last year, I shared a post in which I provided some steps on how to change the email sender in WordPress. Specifically, the post provides the steps necessary to change the name and the address from which the email is sent.

You can read the post in its entirety here – and it’s a quick read – but the short if it is that it uses the following filters:

`wp_mail_from`
`wp_mail_from_name`

The thing is, I never actually shared how to programmatically send email in WordPress. Though there’s a specific function for doing this, it can get a little more complicated if you’re writing an advanced feature of a theme, plugin, or an application.

How To Have WordPress Check if a User Exists

July 2, 2013 / Tom / 0 Comments

When it comes to building web applications, I’m a fan of letting a user use their email as their primary login – in fact, I’d go as far as to say that I wish our email was our primary identity: They are unique, it’s a single thing to remember, and we all must have them in order to get online these days.

To that end, whenever I’m working on an application that requires a username and password, I always default to using the email address for the user’s identification. Everything else can be managed in a profile setting, right?

If you’re building an application in WordPress where you’re building custom registration mechanisms through your own views, validation, and so on, you may find yourself needing to check to see if a user already exists.

And if you – like me – often use email as the user name, there’s a really easy way to perform this check.