Tag: WordPress (Page 68 of 220)

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

Open-Source WordPress Libraries (Why I Should Share Them)

February 16, 2017 / Tom / 0 Comments

The other day, I was talking with a friend, Toby, about the lack of inactivity I have on GitHub. Specifically, I have a lot of private repositories, and I have a lot of secret gists. There’s a method to all of this that I follow, though:

private repositories are typically dedicated to client projects or projects that I don’t think are ready for others to use yet (for the sake of the overhead in managing it),
gists are strictly for sharing code snippets on this blog, and that’s it,
open-source WordPress libraries are occasionally there but have become quite dated,

But during the conversation, I came to the realization that I have a lot of small classes, plugins, utilities, functions, helpers, etc. related to WordPress development or JavaScript that I’ve never really put on GitHub.

Open-Source WordPress Libraries: Where Are They?

Much of what I currently have is out-of-date.

That is, I don’t really open-source my WordPress libraries. I have reasons for this all, but the bottom-line is that I want to change that.

Sharing Databases in Dropbox (For MAMP Pro)

February 14, 2017 / Tom

Sharing databases is something that’s convenient to do within your local development environment especially if you’re working with multiple machines.

If for whatever reason you’re looking to do this with a staging environment or production environment, then this is not the way to do it. There are strategies like database replication and the like that are meant for that, and that are far beyond the scope of this post.

Instead, this is primarily intended for systems that you have, likely on the same network, and that you swap between during the day.

WordPress Batch Processing with Locomotive

February 10, 2017 / Tom

WordPress batch processing doesn’t exactly sound like the most exciting aspect of programming (regardless of the platform, really). And working with large sets of data in WordPress usually comes down to one of two solutions:

using WP-CLI,
performing migrations with WP Migrate DB Pro.

Both of these solutions are great, and they do their job well; however, there are times when you’re working with large sets of data within the WordPress administration area that could be manipulated with a simple batch process.

This isn’t to say that using the command-line is bad, but sometimes toggling a few options to work with posts, comments, or other data types would be nice.

And that’s what Locomotive from Reaktiv Studios allow us to do.

WordPress Metadata Association: Relating Entities

February 9, 2017 / Tom / 0 Comments

At this point, we’ve covered how to create the entities within the plugin (which, as we’ve said, is just a fancy word for another concrete idea). Namely, we’ve got a user and a custom post type, or a book. And here’s where we start to take the two separate entities and combine and work with what we’ll call WordPress metadata association.

But before doing so, it’s important to understand the two types of metadata with which we’ll be working and the two ways (or three ways, depending on how you look at it) in how we can associate the metadata.

As with the rest of the posts in the series, this isn’t meant to be a deep-dive into understanding each of the tables or a deep-dive into each of API functions. Instead, we’re going to survey what’s available, put them to use, and leave finer details for future posts (or perhaps discussions in the comments).

WordPress Post Types: An Abstraction For Entities

February 8, 2017 / Tom / 0 Comments

When programmers talk about entities, they are usually talking about a concept or something that has an existence within a system. Sometimes it’s a class, sometimes it’s a library or dependency, or it may be something like WordPress post types.

If WordPress is to be thought of as an application foundation (versus a framework), it’s important to think about certain features in ways that can be treated as entities. In the example above, a post type is just that.

When custom post types were introduced, it gave us a way to introduce something other than pages and posts into the application. Now we can implement any concept – like an event – and treat it as its own entity within the system.

But when all is said and done, it’s all saved in the posts table. And that’s fine because software development is all about abstraction. As we implement WordPress post types, we’re implementing an abstraction on top of the idea of posts.