Tag: WordPress (Page 36 of 219)

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

Aim to Break Programs into Smaller Components

September 5, 2018 / Tom

One of the things that programmers often talk about is the desire to break programs into smaller components, or functions, so that it makes them easier to trace, easier to read, and easier to debug.

But it’s not all that uncommon to see monolithic functions with a lot of code comments to help explain what’s going on in the program.

Breaking Things Into Smaller Components: Monoliths

A monolith ala 2001: A Space Odyssey.

I’m not knocking this, really, because I don’t know the constraints under which a programmer was working. That is:

What was the budget s/he had when building the program?
How much time was given to complete the project?
Were there many people working on the project?
Was the programmer given time to write the code so they could unit test it, refactor it, or merely make it easier to read?

In short, there’s a lot of reason – I believe – that we can read “bad code,” and it doesn’t always have to be the fault of the programmer (that’s just the most natural thing we have to throw out when we read something we dislike).

Does this mean, though, that we shouldn’t strive to refactor or write code in such a way that makes it easier to understand? Of course not. Assuming we have the time to do so, how might we do it?

Writing Messages to the WordPress Debug Log

September 4, 2018 / Tom

Whenever I’m working on a project, I often have WordPress set in debug mode, and I like to write messages to the error log that I can easily view, trace, and follow whenever I’m working on a project.

WordPress Debug Log: Monolog

When I do this, there are two ways (and it just depends on the project):

I’ll use a library such as Monolog,
I’ll use my own, simple log function.

In this post, I’m going to cover the latter. That is, I’m going to share how I write messages to the WordPress debug log and then some of the things you may need to pay attention to whenever you’re doing the same.

A Stub for Working with Database Queries in WordPress

August 30, 2018 / Tom

As much as I am a fan of certain WordPress APIs for querying the database such as:

WP_Query,
WP_User_Query,
WP_Meta_Query,
and so on

I’m also a fan of querying directly against the database when needed.

As you’ll notice, there’s a consistent way that I go about doing this and since there are times where I’ve been doing this more frequently, as of late, here is a basic format for working with database queries in WordPress.

If I do this, though, there are generally do things that I keep in mind:

always make sure the query is parameterized (especially in the case of user input),
return in the information in the form of an associative array.

The first case is for security; the second is more or less for convenience to make iterating through the data simpler via PHP array functions.

Tools For WordPress Projects: Some of What I Use Daily

August 28, 2018 / Tom

Developers are often interested in the way other developers configure their setups. And I get it.

That is, I assume it’s based on the idea of seeing what tools others are using to determine if you’re missing out on something, if you could improve what you’re currently doing, or if you’re comfortable with what you have.

Whatever the case, I’ll occasionally get emails, tweets, or ICQ messages (wait, what?) that ask what suite of tools for WordPress projects I typically use for each of my projects.

So I thought I’d share a rundown of each application that I typically use and a short description as to how I use each one of them in my day-to-day work.

Triggering Angular Events with jQuery (As Weird As That May Sound)

August 23, 2018 / Tom

One of the things that I enjoy about working with WordPress is the ability to bring in third-party libraries and tools with which to work.

This doesn’t mean they don’t come without their learning curve (they all do, right?), but it’s often fun – albeit frustrating, at times – to incorporate and then manipulate what you’re doing.

As far as third-party technologies go, I’ve seen people bring things in such as the Laravel Illuminate package with WordPress.

Triggering Angular Events with jQuery: Illuminate

And I know, especially in recent years, many have brought in components such as React and Vue.

Triggering Angular Events with jQuery: React

In one such instance, I’ve been doing some work with Angular. And if you’re used to ES6, vanilla JavaScript, or using jQuery, then triggering Angular events with jQuery can seem a bit weird at first.

Triggering Angular Events with jQuery: Angular

But once you understand the markup and how Angular handles its events, it’s not so bad.