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This extended category features quality articles about developing clean, smart and fast websites with WordPress. The articles are intermediate level, with an emphasis on practical, hands-on discussions related to WordPress. Curated by Daniel Pataki. Subscribe to the RSS-Feed.
If you've worked with WordPress for a while, you may have tried your hand at writing a plugin. Many developers will start creating plugins to enhance a custom theme or to modularize their code. Eventually, though, you may want to distribute your plugin to a wider audience.
While you always have the option to use the WordPress Subversion repository, there may be instances where you prefer to host a plugin yourself. Perhaps you are offering your users a premium plugin. Maybe you need a way to keep your client's code in sync across multiple sites. It could simply be that you want to use a Git workflow instead of Subversion. Whatever the reason, this tutorial will show you how to set up a GitHub repository to push updates to your plugin, wherever it resides.
Read more...Prototyping is one of the best things that can happen within a project, yet it is extremely underutilized. Prototyping makes a project better suited to users, elevates user experience, increases the quality of your final code, and keeps clients happy.
The problem is that developers often see prototyping as a waste of time, since high-quality prototypes take considerable effort to make. I want to show you that by using WordPress, highly interactive prototypes with great visuals are not at all that difficult to make.
Read more...I like to think of WordPress as the gateway drug of web development. Many people who get started using the platform are initially merely looking for a comfortable (and free) way to create a simple website. Some Googling and consultation of the WordPress Codex later, it's done and that should be it. Kind of like "I'm just going to try it once."
However, a good chunk of users don't stop there. Instead, they get hooked. Come up with more ideas. Experiment. Try out new plugins. Discover Firebug. Boom. Soon there is no turning back. Does that sound like your story? As a WordPress user it is only natural to want more and more control over your website. To crave custom design, custom functionality, custom everything.
Read more...Building and maintaining a WordPress plugin can be a daunting task. The bigger the codebase, the harder it is to keep track of all the working parts and their relationship to one another. And you can add to that the limitations imposed by working in an antiquated version of PHP, 5.2.
In this article we will explore an alternative way of developing WordPress plugins, using the lessons learned from the greater PHP community, the world outside WordPress. We will walk through the steps of creating a plugin and investigate the use of autoloading and a plugin container.
Read more...A lot of tools enable us to distribute a website’s content, but when we need to promptly reach a target group, an email notification system might be the best option. If your website is not frequently updated, you could notify all subscribers each time a post is published. However, if it’s updated frequently or it covers several topics, you could filter subscribers before mailing them.
If you opt for the latter, you could set up a user meta field that stores a bit of information to identify the subscribers to be notified. The same bit of information would label the posts you’re publishing. Depending on the website’s architecture, you could store the metadata in a category, a tag, a custom taxonomy or a custom field. In this article we’ll show you how to let your website’s subscribers decide when they want notifications, and linked to a particular location.
Read more...WordPress does some pretty amazing things out of the box. It handles content management as well as any other open-source solution out there — and better than many commercial solutions. One of the best attributes of WordPress is its ease of use. It’s easy because there’s not a significant amount of bloat with endless bells and whistles that steepen the learning curve.
On the flip side, some might find WordPress a little… well, light. It does a lot, but not quite enough. If you find yourself hacking WordPress to do the things you wish it would do, then the chances are high that this article is for you. WordPress can be easily extended to fit the requirements of a custom data architecture. We’re going to explore the process of registering new data types in a fully compliant manner.
Read more...If I were to ask you what the least used default page type in WordPress is, chances are you’d say the archive template. Or, more likely, you’d probably not even think of the archive template at all — that’s how unpopular it is. The reason is simple. As great as WordPress is, the standard way in which it approaches the archive is far from user-friendly.
Let’s fix that today! Let’s build an archive page for WordPress that’s actually useful. The best part is that you will be able to use it with any modern WordPress theme installed on your website at the moment.
Read more...I recently teamed up with Mat Marquis of the Responsive Images Community Group to help integrate responsive images into the WordPress platform. We decided to refactor a plugin that I had built several months ago, hoping that it would lead to a more useable and performant solution.
After months of pull requests, conversations on Slack and help from WordPress’ core team, we’re finally ready to share what we’ve been working on. You can download and install RICG Responsive Images from WordPress’ plugin directory, while keeping track of our development progress on GitHub.
Read more...Countless algorithms for encrypting data exist in computer science. One of the lesser known and less common encryptions is ROT13, a derivative of the Caesar cypher encryption technique.
In this tutorial, we’ll learn about ROT13 encryption and how it works. We’ll see how text (or strings) can be programmatically encoded in ROT13 using PHP. Finally, we’ll code a WordPress plugin that scans a post for blacklisted words and replaces any in ROT13 encryption.
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