Tag: WordPress (Page 208 of 220)

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

My Strategy For Using LESS in WordPress

October 16, 2012 / Tom / 0 Comments

Last week, I shared my thoughts on Going Above and Beyond The WordPress Coding Standards. In one of the comments, K. Adam White asked how I manage my LESS files and my JavaScript files.

Though I manage them similarly, I think that each type of file is deserving of its own post, so I wanted to start by sharing how I’ve been using LESS in WordPress.

Writing PHP The Right Way

October 15, 2012 / Tom / 0 Comments

PHP The Right Way

Last week, I wrote two articles discussing code quality when working on WordPress-specific projects:

Both of the articles lead to good comments, links, and thoughts from you guys. Though many of us are familiar with the WordPress Coding Standards, they don’t cover everything.

Rachel Baker shared a link to PHP The Right Way – a solid resource for writing PHP-based code when the coding standards leave something to be desired.

Two Tools I Use For Testing Mobile and Responsive WordPress Projects

October 12, 2012 / Tom / 0 Comments

For developers, the terms “mobile” and “responsive” are already a bit cliche. It doesn’t really matter though, right? They’re here to stay which means that part of our job is to test mobile WordPress projects as best as we can.

Because mobile devices render content different, there are two aspects to the problem:

Some have browsers that are powerful enough to render sites just as they would on a desktop, and thus will need responsive layouts.
Users who don’t have responsive-sites use plugins such as WPTouch to give their site mobile capability which is essentially an entire other site.

This means that we, as developers, are responsible for testing:

Responsive-ready projects
Sites on which users have installed some of our work – like a plugin – that may not be compatible with, say, WPTouch.

On top of that, we do development on localhost rather than a publicly accessible environment so it can be cumbersome to have to deploy a project and get an environment setup just to go through the process of testing a site or a project only to rinse and repeat until we get it fixed.

Thankfully, it really isn’t that complicated. Here are two tools that I use to test mobile WordPress projects:

Going Above and Beyond The WordPress Coding Standards

October 11, 2012 / Tom / 0 Comments

@tommcfarlin Likewise : ) Very nice post. I’d love to see some examples re: your response in a later article of where you go above/beyond

— Brian Krogsgard (@Krogsgard) September 24, 2012

Recently, fellow tweep @Krogsgard asked about some of the things that I do to go above and beyond the basic set of WordPress Coding Standards.

To be clear, I think that the Coding Standards are the foundation on which you need to be building your coding style. They’re the foundation of writing professional-grade code for WordPress, so start with that and build on top of it.

Everything else is just bonus.

So, with that said, here’s what I try to do to go above and beyond the WordPress Coding Standards.

Simple Country, State, and City CSV’s for Download

October 9, 2012 / Tom / 0 Comments

If you're only interested in the files and without implementation details, then you can grab them.

Every now and then, I end up working on a project that requires a form that includes county, city, and state information. More often than not, the client doesn’t about the rich data associated with any of the above – that is, they’re not particularly interested in latitude, longitude, population, or even zip code.

Simply put, they want the user to be able to select their country, select their city, and then select their state from a predefined list of options.

For the past couple of projects, I’ve been using three, very simple CSV’s for this and thought I’d share them here should anyone else want to use them. Additionally, I thought I’d share a simple implementation of how they can be used in WordPress projects.