Tag: WordPress (Page 188 of 219)

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

Learn WordPress Development with Curtis McHale

May 24, 2013 / Tom / 0 Comments

On this blog, I spend a significant amount of time talking about WordPress plugin development. It’s not that I dislike theme development, obviously, but I just don’t spend as much time working on them as I do plugins.

Regardless, I often receive questions that are generally “where do I learn WordPress development?” And that’s always a hard question to answer because we all have different learning styles.

To oversimplify it and distill it down into two methods, I’d say that:

Some learn best by doing
Some learn best by reading

Personally, I learn best by doing. This isn’t to say that I don’t actually read books, articles, sites, etc., but I have to put into practice what I’ve read, bang my head against the keyboard in order to decipher error messages (a common strategy, of course), and then move on to the next topic.

Not everyone is like that.

But still, the question remains: where can someone learn WordPress Development?

A Better WordPress Planet Plugin

May 24, 2013 / Tom / 0 Comments

Whenever you first install WordPress, one of the widgets that’s first displayed on the main page of the dashboard is the Other WordPress News widget (which actually used to be referred to as WordPress Planet). This widget has been present for as long as I can remember and is basically an aggregator of a number of different WordPress blogs.

Kinda cool, right?

If you’re someone who spends the majority of their time working in the WordPress dashboard, it’s a solid option for making sure that you don’t miss a beat of news when working with WordPress.

The thing, some have found that the feeds that populate the feed doesn’t do justice to the blogging ecosystem that exists within the WordPress blogging community. It’s not that the provided posts are bad, it’s just that they lack some of the new comers.

Enter A Better Planet.

Should a WordPress Plugin Change Post Content?

May 23, 2013 / Tom / 0 Comments

Yesterday, I released Markdown Code For WordPress – an extremely simple plugin that makes it easy to replace Markdown backticks (`) with inline code comments. As mentioned in the post, it scratches an itch of my own that I’ve opted to share just in case anyone else shares the same, y’know, itch.

In the comments, Konstantin left a great question that I felt was worth discussing further:

Why not carry out the search and replace once before the post is saved and not every time it is displayed?

I left a response in the comments:

I didn’t want to do prior to saving the post just in case people use it, opt to disable the plugin, and then want to go with some other markdown editor or some other plugin. This keeps the original tokens in take so they can do a search and replace for it.

In short, I’ve had less than stellar experiences (read: back feedback) when it comes to mucking with data prior to saving it with the database especially when users want to abandon the plugin.

But I thought this was a great question that warranted a deeper discuss and wanted to bring it up here to get the rest of opinions from fellow developers.

Defining a Custom WordPress Menu Hook

May 21, 2013 / Tom / 0 Comments

When it comes to defining custom option pages, theme pages, menu pages, and submenu pages, the provided API makes this trivially easy; however, one of the less used aspects of these functions is the ability to define a custom WordPress menu hook.

For example, in a recent project I needed to do exactly that when adding a submenu to the WordPress Tools menu so I thought I’d share my process for doing exactly this.

Note that if you’re looking to add a submenu to a different WordPress menu, then there are a couple of options that are available. First and foremost, the most common option is to use add_submenu_page and then use tools.php as the parent slug as specified in the Codex.

But if you happen to be working with the Tools menu, then the add_management_page function is your best bet because it’s designed for exactly that.

So for this article, that’s what I’ll be using.

Three of My Favorite Coda Plugins For WordPress

May 15, 2013 / Tom / 0 Comments

As I’ve previously mentioned, I use Coda as my IDE for WordPress development. Honestly, it lacks a lot features that I miss about IDE’s like Visual Studio, but I’m a fan of the user interface and have found a number of Coda Plugins for WordPress that make it more a pleasant experience.

To that end, there are a number of plugins that I’ve added to Coda that enhance the overall development experience for WordPress and that I’ve found make it much easier to resolve some of the common problems that arise when writing WordPress-based code while trying to stay true to the coding standards.