Tag: WordPress (Page 69 of 219)

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

WordPress Metadata Associations: How To Do It

February 6, 2017 / Tom

When using the CMS, we’re used to relating data through WordPress metadata associations. Sometimes it’s well-used; other times, it’s abused.

If you’ve worked with web development in any other application, there are probably strategies you’ve used to associate data with different types of entities. That is, you’ve likely created tables specifically for the two types of information and then related them in a variety of ways.

It’s completely possible to do this in WordPress, but I think we often jump to either/or conclusions. That is we either think we can use the metadata table for everything or we have to create custom tables.

And, as with many things related to programming, I think it depends on our implementation.

Querying Event Post Types with WP Query and The Event Calendar

February 2, 2017 / Tom

If you’ve done any work with The Event Calendar from Modern Tribe, then there’s a chance you’re familiar with some different ways to go about doing certain tasks.

Querying Event Post Types with The Events Calendar

The Events Calendar Homepage

That is, programmatically creating events, altering events, setting up repeating events (if it’s the pro version), and so on.

What if, though, you need to go about querying event post types – some or all, doesn’t matter – and you find that your query isn’t working? And no, I’m not talking about using a raw SQL query or even a parameterized version with the $wpdb class.

I’m talking about WP_Query.

Why Keep Using WordPress If You’re Not a Fan?

January 30, 2017 / Tom / 0 Comments

If you work with any set of technologies for a long enough period, you’re going to develop a sense of what you love, what you like, what you dislike, and what you hate about it, right?

Honestly, I think this applies to just about anything we do, or we use regardless of if it’s related to our jobs or hobbies or what have you.

At this point, I’ve worked with WordPress long enough to develop a sense of all of that (and it’s not limited to the core application either).

And, to go ahead and be clear, this post is not about the problems that I see with WordPress or with anything tangentially related to it. Nor is it about the things that I think it does well.

Instead, it’s about asking why would anyone – you, me, or anyone else – keep using WordPress if they aren’t a fan of the platform for development?

You Should Come to WordCamp Atlanta 2017

January 27, 2017 / Tom

Last year, I had the opportunity to attend WordCamp San Diego, WordCamp Atlanta, WordCamp US, and several local meetup groups and enjoyed my time at all of them. This year, I’m trying to spend less time attending conferences and speaking for a number of reasons (all of which really have to do with wanting to focus on work-related stuff).

WordCamp Atlanta 2017

Since I live just outside the city, though, I’ll be at WordCamp Atlanta 2017. Further, I’m looking forward to speaking on the developer track.

Temporary Options in WordPress: Our Best Option?

January 24, 2017 / Tom / 0 Comments

When it comes to programming, the idea of temporary values or temporary variables or any way of storing data temporarily in memory isn’t anything new.

But when working with WordPress – which is stateless – we don’t always have that luxury. That is, it’s not simply a matter of, say, throwing something into the current session, reading it, and then removing it when we’re done with it.

And that’s when I’ve been giving more and more thought to the idea of temporary options, for lack of a better term of course. That is, whenever I need to store a value from a single page load, or request, to read in another page load, or another request, I’ll temporarily throw the value into the options table.

Temporary Options: An Exercise and Representation via Rudimentary Sketching

Is that sloppy? Maybe. Do we have a lot of other choices? It depends on how much of modern browser technology we want to use. That’s not the point of this post, though.

The point is that because of the way WordPress works, I wonder if our current, best strategy for maintaining temporary values that is most widely supported across installations is to temporarily add a value into the options table, read it, and then delete it once it’s been retrieved?