Tag: WordPress (Page 190 of 219)

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

How To Programmatically Populate a WordPress Template

May 2, 2013 / Tom / 0 Comments

The title of this post is somewhat misleading as I’m not actually sharing how to programmatically populate a WordPress template – instead, I’m walking through the process of populating a page that also has a page template applied to it.

Anyway, creating WordPress templates is easy business:

Create the template file in the theme directory
Give the template file the proper header comments
Fill out the template with the proper markup

Back in March, I shared a proof-of-concept plugin for including a template file in a plugin. If you browse through the comments, note that there’s a lot of discussion on how to do it, why one way is better than the others, and so on.

But as I’ve continued to work on a project in which I include templates in plugins, I’ve also been working on populating template-based pages with content from HTML files.

Here’s how I’ve been working to programmatically populate a WordPress template.

WordPress For Rapid Application Development

April 29, 2013 / Tom / 0 Comments

Last week, I talked about using WordPress as an application platform – once again, even – but Ted Waller brought up an interesting comment that I’ve not heard (at least here on this blog) that I wanted to discuss a bit more.

Specifically, Ted said:

Whether or not it’s wise to use it as the final application framework, I do think it’s very good for rapid prototypes of web apps.

And what really caught my attention about this particular comment was that I’ve not often heard of WordPress as being a tool for rapid application development (or RAD).

The thing is, RAD – for whatever reason – has often been used whenever someone is talking about prototyping an application or doing some type of development, but nothing that’s seriously ready for prime time, for the enterprise, or for whatever term you’d opt to use.

But the more I thought about it, the more I wondered:

Is rapid application development misunderstood?
Is WordPress truly good for RAD or is it the best of both worlds?

Adding a Custom Post Type To An Existing Menu

April 25, 2013 / Tom / 0 Comments

Up until this point, I’ve never worked on a project or done any type of work that required a custom post type to be added to an existing menu in the WordPress dashboard.

For the most part, I’m generally of the mindset that custom post types should:

Exist as top level menus
Should be added at the bottom of the WordPress dashboard menu

This mentality is primarily motivated by the fact that I see the core WordPress menu options as first-class citizens in the dashboard, custom post types as being second-class citizens.

That’s just a rule of thumb, though. There are always exceptions.

But there are also times where custom post types could be treated as, say, third-class citizens where they should be integrated with an existing menu be it a core menu or another custom post type menu.

Luckily, it’s trivially easy to add a custom post type as a menu item to an existing menu.

But Seriously, WordPress as an Application Platform?

April 24, 2013 / Tom / 0 Comments

I’ve spent more than enough time talking about my position on using WordPress as a platform for writing web applications, but there’s one aspect of doing so that I don’t think that I’ve actually bothered discussing very much.

Namely, if WordPress is suitable as a platform for application development, then does it make sense to use it when another framework, set of libraries, or core tools may also fit the bill?

The Technical Qualities of WordPress (Or Lack Thereof)

April 22, 2013 / Tom / 0 Comments

Last week, I asked if those of us who are involved in the WordPress community if we are really open source pragmatists. This came from a quote that’s been posted, shared, discussed, and so on for the last couple of weeks or so.

There’s one sentence included in the quote that people don’t seem to be discussing and that is are odds with the reputation WordPress has.

The quote (emphasis mine):

The pragmatist values having good tools and toys more than he dislikes commercialism, and may use high-quality commercial software without ideological discomfort. At the same time, his open-source experience has taught him standards of technical quality that very little closed software can meet.

But few can argue that the application has a reputation having a less-than-stellar codebase which can easily call into question the technical qualities of WordPress.

In fact, some believe that it’s “developed wholly by monkeys randomly hitting keys on the keyboard,” and there are discussions that crop up on various communities – like Hacker News – about the poor quality of the codebase.

The purpose of this post is not to belittle the codebase of WordPress. For what it’s worth, I think that it has its good parts and that it has its bad parts, and – like all software – can be compared to a living organism where it’s always changing, and, ideally, the bad parts will mature over time.

But what I’m more concerned with right now is has WordPress taught us standards of technical quality that “very little closed software can meet?”