All Articles

Development

Blades and Bytes: Embracing the Craft and Purpose of Our Tools

For many of us, swords are special even today, and there’s no doubt that they were special throughout much of human history. Amid all that romanticism, one might be forgiven for forgetting that a sword is simply a tool, made for use in battle. It’s easy to forget sometimes that we developers are making tools that people use to get things done.

Read More »
Development

How to Handle Plugin Dependency in WordPress

Have you ever written plugin code in WordPress that was dependent on another plugin to run? If your code tries to execute before the plugin you require has loaded, obviously, it won’t work. There’s a very simple way to make sure that your plugin doesn’t run until it’s ready.

Read More »
Development

Balancing Ends (Front/Back-end Development)

Development tools like Angular.js, React.js, and Vue.js have transformed front-end website/web application development. It’s actually possible to write whole applications in JavaScript now in a cohesive, management manner. The real question is: should you? The answer is, of course: it depends.

Read More »
Development

Choosing the Right Stack for the Job

As a developer, you’ve no doubt been asked “can you do [insert user request here]” more times than you can count. The answer is pretty much always “yes.” The tougher question these days is “how” … there are hundreds of ways to get things done these days. In this post, I’d like to share some of the things that shape my decisions about the “how.”

Read More »
Development

WordPress Plugin Boilerplate, Part Two

In a previous post, I introduced Wordpress Plugin Boilerplate (hereafter referred to as WPBB for brevity), an attempt at standardization for the way Wordpress plugins are developed.

Read More »
Development

Getting WP Post and Postmeta in Single Rows

WordPress uses wp_posts to store post, page, and Custom Post Type (CPT) data the wp_postmeta table for Custom Metabox data. To retrieve this data you have to read for the post plus multiple linked postmeta rows. In this post, we conquer postmeta with subqueries.

Read More »
Development

WordPress Plugin Boilerplate, Part One

With over 50K packages in the WordPress.org plugin repository – all open source – the code within these plugins is all over the place. Into this picture enter the WordPress Plugin Boilerplate. In their own words, the Boilerplate is “a standardized, organized, object-oriented foundation for building high-quality WordPress Plugins.”

Read More »