Software Engineering in WordPress, PHP, and Backend Development
Articles, tips, and resources for WordPress-based development.
One of the nicest and most flexible aspects of the WordPress API is the ability to associate meta data with certain models – for lack of a better term – in the database.
That is, we can assign meta value to Users, Posts, Authors, and so on.
Retrieving the data is typically trivially easy. Simply supply the ID of the model in question and then pass the key value for said post meta.
But what if you need to get the post ID or post meta key by the meta value instead?
When it comes to sharing resources, I try to do a good job of publishing that stuff that I’ve found useful or that I don’t think is necessarily getting the attention that it deserves.
The majority of my friends who are developers or designers maintain their own blogs and publish their own stuff, so I rarely see the need to cross-post any content.
But there are times I make exceptions and such is the case with Less – a free minimal WordPress theme.
When it comes to WordPress development, there typically tends to be two camps (with a third that’s on the rise):
Personally, I’m a fan of building plugins. Obviously, it’s not because I have anything against building themes, but I’m a programmer – not a designer – by nature, so I add to the WordPress experience through functionality rather than functionality and design.
In fact, I think if I had to design, it’d probably take away from the experience :).
But plugins are software and there are problems that have existed as long as software has existed. In fact, entire markets have been created around said problem: filing bug reports.
I’m not here to provide the ultimate solution for how to provide a WordPress plugin bug report – if that existed, it would have been solved long before today; however, I do want to share a couple of things that I’ve noticed.
A couple of weeks ago, my team and I published the first episode of Hello Dolly largely as an experiment to see if we had anything worthwhile to contribute to the podcast-space regarding WordPress.
In fact, the episode was such an experiment that we named it Episode 0.
But based on the feedback via comments, tweets, and emails, it was clear that you guys were interested in the podcast, and so we wanted to publish the first official podcast before the end of the year.
Today, we’ve done just that.
If you're an experienced developer, you may wish to skip to the code.
If you’ve ever done any work with building a plugin or building a feature of a theme that includes a custom meta box or that includes functionality that is fired on the save_post action, then you’ve likely seen WordPress save_post called twice.
The thing is, this is expected behavior, but because of how it’s used, you may not always want your code to execute until the user actually clicks on the save button.
So here’s a quick tip on how to properly manage the case when save_post is called twice.
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