Tag: WordPress (Page 38 of 220)

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

A Simple Guide for Organizing WordPress-centric Classes

August 9, 2018 / Tom

One of the things that I’ve been making a much more concerted effort, likely more so than I’ve ever done before, is managing separation of concerns between the classes responsible for interfacing with WordPress and those responsible for working with the problem domain.

For instance, let’s say that you’re working on a plugin and it’s going to communicate with a third-party API. Additionally, this plugin will also offer menus, post types, taxonomies, and so on within the WordPress administration area.

There are two areas of responsibility here:

the area responsible for generally solving the problem,
the area responsible for interfacing with WordPress.

You can make the case that it’s important to unit test areas that communicate with WordPress, but I also know these are tried and true APIs that have their own set of tests.

Instead, we should be focusing on unit testing and separating our business logic away from WordPress.

But that’s not the point of this post. Instead, it’s more about a way to potentially lay out a project when a portion of it will be interfacing with WordPress.

The Basics of Action Hooks in WordPress

July 31, 2018 / Tom

Anytime sometime starts to get into more advanced programming – be it in WordPress or any other framework, library, foundation, or programming language – there are times in which new concepts can often be more difficult to understand than others.

I generally have found this to be true whenever a person has learned the basics of, say, object-oriented programming but hasn’t been exposed to the nuances of certain things such as design patterns.

Case in point: I’ve written about the event-driven design pattern (or the publish-subscribe or Pub/Sub as some like to refer to it) in other posts.

Yes, there are some differences to each, but the general idea is that something happens and an event is raised and anything listening for that event, or subscribed to that event, will respond.

Photo by Claus Grünstäudl on Unsplash

This is the primary pattern that WordPress employs that allows us to quite literally hook into certain points of execution. We can generally conceptualize these as action hooks in WordPress.

Anyway, the application makes certain points available for us to add our own functionality. Once that functionality is registered, WordPress will leave its codebase, so to speak, hop into ours, then return back to ours.

It’s easy enough to understand, but what if you want to expose areas in your code that allow others to hook into your code?

A Quick Note on Unit Testing Code in WordPress Projects

July 3, 2018 / Tom

The more work I do in WordPress, the more I try to make unit testing as much a part of my development as building out the actual feature set. (It’s what all the professionals say we need to do, anyway.)

But seriously, it does improve the quality because, if for no other reason, something breaks, you’re able to see which test fails or even if you’ve missed coverage in some area.

I’m not of the mindset of some that you have to have 100% code coverage (and there are reasons for why I think this), but I do think it’s important to have as much code coverage as possible of code that is not directly to WordPress.

Resizing Images Programmatically in WordPress

June 28, 2018 / Tom

If you’ve ever had to work with resizing images programmatically in WordPress, then you may have come across the image_resize function.

Resizing Images Programmatically: Deprecated Functions

Further, you may know it’s been deprecated (given that this appears at the top of the screen):

This function has been deprecated. Use wp_get_image_editor() instead.

And with its deprecation, as is true of all those who do a good job deprecating functionality, it’s not without its replacement.

In this case, we’re talking about the WP Image Editor. This is a class in WordPress that we can use to perform the same operations to go about resizing images programmatically that we once could with the original function.

The Demand for Gutenberg Is Not There. Yet.

June 21, 2018 / Tom

I’ve been asked, on a few occasions, why I’ve not released anything that’s compatible with Gutenberg or why certain plugins aren’t compatible with the current version of the Gutenberg plugin.

Demand for Gutenberg Is Not There

In the WordPress economy, I’ve seen few things as divisive as this shift in WordPress (though it seems to be finally have chilled a bit). And I’m not interested in entertaining a position on it on this blog.

But when others ask why I’ve not bothered to write anything about it or make certain plugins compatible with it, I find that it’s worth talking about it at least to a certain degree.