Tag: WordPress (Page 209 of 220)

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

What Constitutes Clean Code in WordPress?

October 8, 2012 / Tom / 0 Comments

When it comes to writing code specifically for WordPress, I try my best to follow a combination of the WordPress coding standards, tips and advice from various books I’ve read (which I hope to cover in a future post), tips from others in the community, and certain habits that I’ve developed along way the way.

The thing that I’ve always struggled with determining is what constitutes clean code. There is code that follows standards, then there’s clean code, and I think that the definition is almost somewhat subjective.

With the open source nature of WordPress, the desire to improve education around the platform, the desire to improve the plugins repository, and the existence of things such as Theme Review team, Theme Unit Test, and tools specifically for helping us write code, there’s an innate desire for programmers to write clean code – I just think that we could do a better job defining it.

To be clear, I don’t believe that clean code is synonymous with quality code, nor do I believe that clean code is synonymous with good code. They’re absolutely all related, but they aren’t the same thing.

With said, what does constitute clean code specifically in the context of WordPress development?

Programmatically Resize Images in WordPress

October 4, 2012 / Tom / 0 Comments

If you're experienced with programmatically uploading files, you may wish to skip down to the code.

I’m finishing up an application that’s built on WordPress that has required that I programmatically resize images. When it comes to building themes or plugins, it’s relatively easy to specify add_image_size and then let the user interface and core application do it’s thing.

But in my case, the end user will have no idea that the actual application is built on WordPress and the image resizing function needed to be a little more tailored for specific templates (or views)

So rather than use the typical WordPress facilities for uploading and resizing images, here’s how to programmatically resize images in WordPress.

How To Use WP_User_Query For WordPress User Queries

September 28, 2012 / Tom / 0 Comments

Earlier this week, I published a post on how to find users in WordPress by using meta data. In short, I have a collection of users each of which have unique meta data and I needed to locate a user based on said meta data.

In the comments, Curtis of @WPThemeTut recommended I check out WP_User_Query as opposed to way that I was doing it (which I’ll cover momentarily).

Because the WordPress API has a tendency to introduce new functions for querying specific data in later releases, and because I try to be a proponent of using the newer methods, I wanted to cover WP_User_Query in a bit more detail.

Getting Started with WordPress Admin Pointers

September 27, 2012 / Tom

I've closed comments on this post as I'd like to keep the discussion on the source post.

Stephen Harris is a fellow contributor to the Envato network who has contributed a number of solid articles the most recent of which covers WordPress Admin Pointers.

How To Find a User By Meta Data in WordPress

September 26, 2012 / Tom / 0 Comments

Thanks to Curtis for giving a heads up to WP_User_Query - it's a nicer alternative to the original post.

One of my favorite things about the WordPress API is the ability to store custom meta data with objects such as pages and users. I’ve been working on an application where this scenario has presented itself:

The end user is able to create a company
Each company can have an administrator based on users in the system

To do this, I’m creating a relationship between the company and user by associating the company’s ID as part of the user’s meta data.

Later in the application, I need to retrieve each administrator for each company which has required the use of a helper function to get a user by meta data.

The details of how I’m doing this are aren’t exactly interesting for this post, but I figured that this was a common enough issue and easy enough to generalize that I’d share how to programmatically get a user by meta data in WordPress: