Software Engineering in Web Development, Backend Services, and More
Articles, tips, and resources for WordPress-based development.
I’m a big fan of Site5
Earlier this week, I had a couple of people shoot me an email asking who I preferred in a WordPress host. The truth is, when it comes to preferred WordPress hosting, both developers and designers have their vendors of choice.
I’m no different.
As you can tell from the screenshot above, I’m personally a big fan of Site5. This is not a sponsored post – simply a reason as to why I prefer these guys.
Much has been said on the subject of properly registering and enqueueing scripts in WordPress, so I hate to write yet another “including jQuery in WordPress the right way” post, so I’ll attempt to cover it from a different angle.
Because jQuery ships with WordPress, it’s really just a simple matter of making sure you call:
wp_enqueue_script( 'jquery' );
In your functions.php file.
But that’s really only half of it. After that, you have a matter of actually setting up your JavaScript source.
Recently, I was having a conversation with a fellow developer via email about maintaining a separation of concerns in custom WordPress queries and WordPress templates.
The gist of the conversation boiled down to this:
Is it a good idea to keep custom queries in the template files?
A couple of years ago, I would’ve said yes but as I’ve begun to work on more complex projects, I’ve changed my mind: I’m actually a fan of keeping custom queries in functions.php.
I think that this keeps code more maintainable, cleaner, and easier to read, though I’m not sure if this is the most common practice.
If you're an advanced developer or just want the TL;DR version of this, skip to the code.
The majority of the time that I’m working on a contract project, there’s a need to programmatically create several parts of the website that occur during theme setup. Often times, this includes creating posts, users, and/or setting templates.
Ultimately, the goal is to make the user’s experience as nice as possible: They install the theme and the site, to a degree, has bootstrapped itself.
As with the aforementioned parts of a site, it’s also common to need to create a category, or categories, during theme setup. WordPress provides two ways of doing so, one of which often results in a PHP fatal error.
Here’s how to programmatically create categories in WordPress and do so without generating any errors.
In light of yesterday’s post and some of the discussion in both comments and offering support for various WordPress projects, I’m curious as to what you guys consider to be etiquette when it comes to asking for WordPress donations.
As I mentioned yesterday, I personally think that we have a personal obligation to provide a level of support for free software that we released; however, at one point is it socially acceptable to ask for a donation.
On top of that, where do you even draw the line?
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