Tag: WordPress (Page 197 of 220)

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

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?

Software Craftsmanship: Why This Matters For WordPress

January 30, 2013 / Tom / 0 Comments

Earlier this week, I had a fun discussion with Dave Donaldson of Max Foundry about software craftsmanship.

I think it’s worth reading the quick Twitter discussion, but I want to be clear that I mention Dave because the respect him as a developer, and he was being a bit facetious in his comments.

Bottom line, Twitter’s not the point of this post – it’s simply setting the stage.

I’ve written before about WordPress Craftsmanship which generally covers my thoughts on the entire process, but I don’t think I’ve ever mentioned my thoughts on software craftsmanship as a whole and why I think it matters in WordPress.

As such, I thought this may be a good opportunity to do so.

Do One Thing and Do It Well – But How?

January 28, 2013 / Tom / 0 Comments

One of the things that we – that is, developers and designers – hear more often than not is that plugins should “do one thing and do it well.”

But what does that mean?

I think that it sounds good in theory but I’m not convinced that if you were to ask each developer and/or designer separately what that means, then you’d get a variety of answers.

I think that there’s a reason that we feel this way, but I’m not really sure that we know what it even means.