Tag: WordPress (Page 33 of 219)

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

Organizing WordPress Settings Screens with Namespaces

November 13, 2018 / Tom

As many of us continue to move forward with PHP7+, we can continue to take advantage of a lot of new features that the language offers.

Organizing WordPress Settings Screens: PHP7

In the meantime, though, there are still features of PHP and related software that we can use t help streamline our development. The least of which (and that which I’ve written and spoken about a bit) is namespaces.

Namespaces and Autoloading in WordPress

Here’s the thing, though: I like to have my plugin’s files and directories structured so that they are organized to mirror that of the namespace conventions they follow. And this can be done for taxonomies, meta boxes, domain objects, database-related functionality and so on.

In this post, though, I want to talk about a way of organizing WordPress settings screens from both the logical – that is, their file system location – and the virtual – that is, their namespaces – organizational structures.

WordPress Widgets: An Object-Oriented Approach

November 7, 2018 / Tom

Years ago, I created the WordPress Widget Boilerplate aiming to be the following:

An organized, maintainable boilerplate for building widgets using WordPress best practices.

Since then, not much has changed regarding the Widgets API (which we’ll look at later in this post), but what I consider to be “best practices” has changed. Further, the degree to which I think this API is a solid example of introductory object-oriented programming in WordPress is high.

WordPress Widgets: The Widgets Boilerplate

It’s not because it uses a lot of object-oriented principles, it’s not because it uses modern standards (at least as far as modern PHP is concerned), but because it does use a few things that help us to recognize a few, say, signals regarding object-oriented programming in WordPress.

And this is something that shouldn’t be understated: If you’re looking for examples of object-oriented programming in WordPress, look for APIs that employ it.

Further, if you’re looking for ways to gauge you’re own level of evaluating a piece of code (let alone a code base) for the use of classes and some of the more advanced features of OOP, then why not have some sort of a litmus test to see how you’re doing?

WordPress Widgets: The Widgets API

And the Widgets API does just that.

What Content is Next for Site Members?

November 6, 2018 / Tom

When I set out to create a members-only section of my website, it was to do two things:

provide members with access to high-quality articles for how to approach object-oriented programming in WordPress,
grants discounts to other products and services that I found useful via friends, acquaintances and other services.

Periodically, I do get questions about the content that I’ve produced thus far. If you’re interested in reading the full, detailed list, you can see them here.

Content for Site Members: Members Only Content

But the gist of what I have so far is here:

The Business of Programming
Object-Oriented Programming in WordPress (An Introduction to Basic Principles)
A WordPress Development Environment
Using Visual Studio Code
Unit Testing
The Independent WordPress Developer

And that’s the content that I have for site members thus far. But that doesn’t answer the question of what’s next (nor does it answer the question as to why I’ve laid things out the way that I have), so I thought I’d take a post to do that.

A Look at We’ve Got Your Back by Freemius

October 31, 2018 / Tom

As someone who continues to participate in the WordPress economy, specifically in developing custom solutions for others, and as someone with many friends and acquaintances who are also developers, I know that one of the hardest things that we can do (aside from naming things) is branding and marketing a product or business.

I’ve written about Freemius a few times in the past (with the most visited post being All About Freemius for WordPress).

We've Got Your Back by Freemius

As such, I’m a fan of keeping up with what they are doing. Recently, they released a We Got Your Back program that aims to provide a solution to the problem marketing, branding, and so on of products those of us in WordPress build and strive to provide in WordPress.

A Strategy for Initializing Plugin Settings

October 30, 2018 / Tom

Whenever you’re working on a plugin that offers a page for its settings, there are several ways that you can save and retrieve the information.

Initializing Plugin Settings

You can:

use the Settings API,
use a custom page and calls that are a hybrid of the two,
use some type of hybrid between a submenu page (or a menu page) and other functionality.

The more I’ve worked with WordPress, the less and less I care to use the Settings API and opt to go with a bit of a hybrid approach.

Depending on the requirements of the project, the implementation will vary; however, I try to use a relatively consistent way to create the functionality.

And though this post won’t go into the various ways that I create my pages, related classes, and so on, it will offer one way that you can go about initializing plugin settings when working on your project or a project for someone else.