Tag: WordPress (Page 29 of 219)

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

WordPress Widgets: Refactoring, Part 7

January 23, 2019 / Tom

In the last few posts, we’ve done a lot of work to bring the code up to the point of refactoring that’s going to be covered in this article.

Specifically, we’ve covered:

hooks,
a Registry,
and Subscribers.

All of these are going to play a role in what we’re going to do today.

What Are Source Maps (And Are They Needed)?

January 22, 2019 / Tom

If you work on the front-end of a site in any capacity – be it for a plugin, a theme, or even something outside of WordPress – you’re likely working with minification tools.

The benefits are obvious, right?

it lessens the payload,
it allows us to focus on development on our local environments

But one of the features that come with working with these technologies and that’s the ability to generate source maps.

And this raises a question (or maybe two): What are source maps? And are they even needed?

You can claim it’s late to the game to talk about this, but there are always people entering the industry that may not know this material.

So why not cover it?

WordPress Widgets: Refactoring, Part 6

January 17, 2019 / Tom

You should be well-versed in the refactoring we’re doing regarding the WordPress Widget Boilerplate. If not, I recommend catching up on the series thus far by:

reading the previous post,
or reading the entire series up to this point,
and looking at the development branch of the project on GitHub.

As far as the code base goes, we’re in a good place right now. We’ve begun to refactor much of the code into smaller, more focused classes. And we’ve just set up a Registry so that we can begin working with instances of objects throughout the plugin without the need for too much coupling.

But there’s still a problem we’re facing and it deals with namespaces and autoloading. I’ve talked a bit about this a couple of years ago but not as it relates to Composer.

And that’s what we’re going to look at in this post.

WordPress Widgets: Refactoring, Part 5

January 9, 2019 / Tom

In the previous post, we created a Registry that is going to be used to store all of the various classes responsible for giving our widget its functionality.

To do this, there’s going to be a variety of other classes introduced, but before going there, we need to add the Registry to the plugin’s bootstrap (let alone create a bootstrap for the plugin).

Specifically, here’s where we left off:

As mentioned earlier in the post, we need to add this to the bootstrap of the plugin. To do this, though, we need to define our own filter so that we can easily pass the registry around the rest of the plugin (when the time comes to do that).

So in this post, we’re going to focus on doing exactly that.

Adding a Plugin Settings Link

January 8, 2019 / Tom

Whenever you’re building a plugin that introduces a submenu, and you’re using the proper APIs, you’re going to be creating an administration page (whether or not it has settings).

When doing this, though, you can also introduce a plugin settings link. These are the links that appear under the name of the plugin from in the plugin dashboard.

Plugin Settings Link

If your plugin introduces its submenu item, then it likely introduces its own settings page. And if you’re looking to associate this page with your plugin settings link, it’s really easy to do.