New WordPress Plugin: Suspend Transients
Recently while working on a project in WordPress, I found myself adding and remove code to bypass cached transients. Needless to say, this was not a great solution. It caused…
Should we trust WordPress Core translations?
A while ago I was working on a patch to refresh the code for the default widgets that are included with WordPress Core. One of the changes made was to replace the i18n methods currently in-place with their counterparts that escape and translate the output. This is a pretty common practice as translation files can be a potential attack vector for hackers. WordPress.com VIP will usually request that this is added to any strings being translated and it is part of the 10up best practices. (more…)
Setting up Unit Testing for WordPress Core
Recently I was running into issues with VVV running some units tests for AJAX. I was not able to remedy the issue so I decided to create a testing environment…
First WordPress core props!
It was a very simple patch, just removing some code that is no longer needed, but now that ticket #31485 has been committed, I will have contributor props for WordPress…
Resetting $post in WordPress admin
I have run into a bug a few times in the past little while that had me stumped. When creating meta boxes on the admin side of WordPress that contained custom loops, I couldn’t reset $post using wp_reset_postdata() – it just didn’t work.
Originally, I thought maybe I was doing it wrong because I was using get_posts, so I tried WP_Query with the same results. So, thinking I had a legitimate bug, I went to report it and found that there was already a ticket and a patch for it ( gotta love the WordPress community ). The patch is a nice, elegant fix that worked well when I tested it – but until it’s accepted into core it’s not really an option to use because hacking core is bad. So I rolled my own in the meantime. (more…)
WordPress Plugins and debug mode
Sometimes when we’re developing a plug-in, it’s easy to forget that we’re not building something that is meant to be standalone. What we’re building is going to exist as part of the WordPress ecosystem and as such it should respect it’s configuration. Simply put, if WordPress is in debug mode, than your plugin should be to. (more…)
Change the WordPress post updated messages
Sometimes it is necessary to modify or remove the default WordPress post updated messages that are displayed when making changes to a Post in WordPress.
One example is when you are creating a custom post type that does not have a permalink. When you save a draft, publish or update a published post, you are presented with messaging that includes a link to the post – which in that case will take the user to a 404 page. (more…)
Custom post types with no permalinks
When I was at WordCamp Ottawa this year, I was asked a question about how to create custom post types without generating permalinks. This is actually something I do a lot of as I am creating internal content types that are not meant to be viewed individually at their own url.
The snippet below will register the post type and you’ll notice that there is no Permalink line below the title. (more…)
Debug Bar Tracer Plugin
I have just released a new plugin called Debug Bar Tracer. It is meant to work with the Debug Bar plugin that should be a staple of any WordPress developer's…
Creating a skinnable WordPress widget
Building custom widgets is fun, rebuilding them because we need to change the way it looks is not. With that in mind, lets build a skinnable WordPress widget that separates how it looks from what it does. For the purposes of this tutorial, I am assuming that you are comfortable creating a Widget and working with the API. Please refer to the Widget API as needed. (more…)