Tag: WordPress (Page 196 of 219)

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

Should I Do This in a WordPress Theme or Plugin?

February 19, 2013 / Tom / 0 Comments

Last week, a fellow WordPress developer and I were having a conversation about a particular feature that he’s been contracted to implement for an existing site.

In short, he was trying to decide between introducing the new feature in the form of a child theme or in the form of a plugin.

It’s a question that I see raised more often than not, but I think there’s a series of questions that we can ask ourselves before jumping into writing any code.

Generally, it has to do with the true definition of a theme and the true definition of a plugin. Of course, there’s room for deliberation, but here’s how I normally see it.

The Ethics of WordPress Developer Responsibilities

February 8, 2013 / Tom / 0 Comments

Earlier this week, I shared a post on You Can’t Ask Users To Upgrade WordPress To Fix Their Problems. In the post, I shared a few reasons as to why it’s dangerous to expect and/or trust your customers to upgrade WordPress.

You can read the full article for my reasons why, but Mike brought up an interesting statement in the comment feed that got me thinking about the ethics of our responsibilities a developers for building projects for clients.

Though ethics are subjective and that you’ll rarely hear me talk about them on this particular blog, I think that there is room for discussion as to what constitutes the ethics of programmers in the case of building, releasing, and maintaing software for others, and, in this case, within the WordPress space.

You Can’t Ask Users To Upgrade WordPress To Fix Their Problems

February 6, 2013 / Tom / 0 Comments

I think one of the major characteristics of anyone who’s a digital native – that is, anyone who spends a vast amount of time on the Internet and that has a certain level of proficiency – has no problem upgrading their apps to the latest version and tinkering around with the new features and/or looking for new bugs.

I mean, we can always roll back, right?

And when it comes to WordPress – especially for those who build things for the platform – it’s not at all uncommon to see us urging our users and others to upgrade, as well.

I love updates as the next geek, but we can’t blame others for wanting to wait to upgrade WordPress immediately, nor can we expect everyone to upgrade WordPress as quickly as we do.

Save Custom Post Meta – Revisited, Refactored, Refined.

February 5, 2013 / Tom / 0 Comments

About a month ago, I shared a post that discussed the code that’s required to save custom post meta data. Generally speaking, this is a lot of boilerplate that’s required to make sure that the data being saved is permitted and that the author has permissions to do so.

Of course, depending on the nature of your project, the code will vary a little, but for the majority of the cases, it’s all the same.

But thanks to several commenters and contributors, the code has been completely refactored, and I’ve actually been using it in a recent project.

Finding Functions in WordPress (Those Not in The API)

February 1, 2013 / Tom / 0 Comments

As significant as the WordPress API is in building plugins, themes, and applications, there are often times where we may find ourselves needing to write custom functions to achieve something that we know WordPress already does.

Case in point: With Page Template Dashboard, I wanted to be able to show the name of the template rather than the filename. I knew WordPress was doing it, but I couldn’t find an actual API function for it.

So what’s the best thing to do in this particular situation?