In the second part of the “The Birth of a Plugin”-series, I go into the core of the foundations of a plugin: its code structure. What approach should I use for this plugin, and how do I make sure it’s highly extensible?
Continue Reading...I find myself in a state of shock every single time I look at my WordPress.org profile. At the point of writing, I’ve released just 6 plugins to the public, and I would classify none of them as plugins offering a solution to anything more than a niche of “problems”.
In the past few years I’ve worked on a vast amount of projects, ranging from projects for individuals to projects for big corporates — and even a few projects of my own. During this time, I’ve also managed to release a few plugins to the WordPress repository. Many plugins I develop as part of client projects would actually be suited for release to the WordPress plugin repository, but they don’t make it in 95% of all cases just because I can’t find (or don’t want to make) the time for adjusting them for public release.
That will be different this time.
In my new plugin project, which I estimate will have its first release somewhere in july, I will be developing a solid, highly extensible plugin catering to the need of a great amount of WordPress users. I’ll be developing a plugin of addressing needs any real estate, car dealership or other custom content-based website will have.
During the process of developing this plugin, I will blog about many steps in actually developing the plugin, and thereby helping other plugin developers work through each and every step of developing a plugin — hopefully. I’ll call it the “The Birth of a Plugin”-series… Stay tuned for more!
At some point in your WordPress developing career, you may get at a point where you feel that you’re not learning enough anymore. Before, reading tutorials and articles or just programming would be enough to learn tons of new things every day, but now you’re just putting into practice what you’ve already learnt before.
Something I recently found out was that for me, one of the best ways of actually learning more about a subject, is just thinking about it. No doing, no writing, no reading, just thinking.
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Recurring content is present in just about all WordPress themes, and handling it properly is important to keep themes lean, extensible and scalable. So what’s the right approach for handling recurring content in different situations?
When displaying a list of properties for a custom post type post on its single page, should I use a template part or function for that? Let’s consider the different approaches and their proper usages.
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Reading the blog of WordPress developer Tom McFarlin, I came across a rather interesting post about the proper way of instantiating WordPress plugins. Though interesting, the article itself is quite short and covers only one or two methods of instantiating a plugin — it’s there comments section where things get really interesting.
So, i decided to write about my view on plugin instantation — a term that doesn’t fully cover the scope of this article, by the way.
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The WordPress template hierarchy is a popular subject on WordPress blogs and in tutorials, and for a good reason: there’s quite a lot to say about the subject! However, little has been written about proper file naming, which is an important aspect to properly developing a theme.
This partly the reason of many themes causing problems with ambiguity, especially with regards to page templates.
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A recent project for a client required a complex user role and capability system with many different relations between users and many per-object permissions. One of them was that users from certain roles should be able to create new users — but only in a specific role. Now, this is easily achievable via the editable_roles filter, but WordPress does not allow for a filter such as deletable_roles or viewable_roles.
This is a problem that I’ve tackled with the User Hierarchy plugin.
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Introducing BulkPress: the easiest way to add and reorganize content in bulk in WordPress! We’ve just released the first version of this amazing free plugin that allows you to add both non-hierarchical and hierarchical posts (and pages, and custom post type posts) and terms (categories, tags, custom taxonomy tags, you name it!).
So what are you waiting for? Come check it out!
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