Development

How to customize the WordPress theme customizer defaults

Brian Krogsgard

January 28, 2014

The theme customizer feature was introduced in WordPress 3.4, released June 2012. Since then, it's been a great tool that's allowed theme developers to move away from complex options managers to a simpler, more logical interface where many settings can…

Rethinking Blogs at the New York Times

Brian Krogsgard

January 16, 2014

Development

Scott Taylor works at the New York Times. He's also a major core contributor to WordPress. In this post, he describes how the Blogs division of the New York Times rebuilt their setup to fit into the Times' overall redesign…

A self hosted alternative to Jetpack’s Photon service

Brian Krogsgard

January 14, 2014

Development

While Jetpack and its Photon service are useful, it is not a solution fit for everyone, and may users and developers have reservations about integrating with the WordPress.com infrastructure. Will Norris takes the open source approach and has rolled his…

Share sidebars in WordPress Multisite with transients

Brian Krogsgard

December 17, 2013

Development

Corey Collins goes in depth on the WebDevStudios blog to offer a solution to a problem experienced by many Multisite users: for sharing sidebars across a Multisite instance. The solution uses transients to store everything and a small AJAX function…

Techniques for running code on installation, activation, deactivation, and uninstall

Brian Krogsgard

December 10, 2013

Development

Mike Jolley is the lead developer of WooCommerce, amongst other awesome plugins. He's very smart, and has a ton of experience with mature WordPress plugins. His blog is kicking butt this month, as he's taking part in WooThemes Blogging for…

Advanced PHP developer? WordPress is a better starting point for your project than you think.

Brian Krogsgard

December 2, 2013

Development

Gabriel Koen describes ten reasons why he believes WordPress is a better starting point for projects than many advanced PHP developers would think. Some of the points are even known pain-points in WordPress, but as he notes, "even a half-assed…

Understanding _n_noop()

Brian Krogsgard

December 2, 2013

Development

How a function that doesn't do anything can save your life. Well, not really, but close. _n_noop() can be very interesting, especially for APIs in larger plugins.

Understand how to prevent SQL injection vulnerabilities in WordPress

Brian Krogsgard

November 22, 2013

Development

Samuel "Otto" Wood describes the prepare() function, and why it matters. For anyone playing with SQL in their work, you should make sure you understand these basics that Otto quite clearly explains.

Turn WordPress into a Twelve-Factor App

Brian Krogsgard

November 13, 2013

Development

If you’re going to be creating complex websites with WordPress, then you need to get serious about it. This series of posts is based on the Twelve-Factor App methodology, adapted for large scale WordPress projects.

You’re using transients wrong

Brian Krogsgard

October 24, 2013

Development

Ryan McCue has written an insightful post about caching data in WordPress with the Transients API. Most interesting to me is how he describes expiration in transients as a "maximum age" versus a "guaranteed expiration". He also makes a worthwhile…

Rewrite rules made easy

Brian Krogsgard

October 16, 2013

Development

Getting rewrite rules and Regex right is an often painful task in WordPress. Conflict solving, commenting the expressions, et cetera is something most people want to avoid. To be honest, every modern PHP or JS framework nowadays has a very…

Parent to child post relationships

Brian Krogsgard

October 11, 2013

Development

Justin Tadlock has another nice tutorial out where he guides you in the relatively simple function that adds a metabox to a post screen to be able to assign a post parent from another post type. This is highly useful…

Create a WordPress VIP simulated dev environment, quickly

Brian Krogsgard

October 9, 2013

DevelopmentHosting

If you want to create a development environment to mimic the WordPress VIP hosting platform, the VIP team has you covered. VIP Quickstart is a new tool, available on Github, that helps you set up everything easily. According to the…

Build better template files for your plugins

Curtis McHale

October 8, 2013

Development

Pippin Williamson walks us through the right and wrong ways to build template files for plugins.

Retroactive Composer support for WordPress with ComposerPress

Brian Krogsgard

October 3, 2013

Development

Tom Nowell has created a project called ComposerPress which analyses an existing WordPress install and creates a Composer .json file in your root directory. If you've already gotten to know the value of Composer, but need something to help bring…