Imagine someone creates an open-source, JavaScript admin interface for their WordPress site and names it after a greek demigod. You’re probably thinking wow, that’s so cool, I wonder if I can make it work on my site. But then you start thinking about all of the custom metaboxes and other types of custom forms that plugins add to the post, term, and user edit screens. There is no standard for metaboxes or for declaring what fields a plugin has to use. Making something that “just works” with everything is increasingly more complicated. Custom API-driven interfaces remain the territory of those who […]

WordPress 4.4 introduced several new features for developers. The infrastructure for the WordPress REST API got the most attention by far, but there are some other notable new features that are worth a closer look. One in particular is taxonomy term metadata. In this article, I will discuss what term meta is and how to use it. The need for term meta is made apparent by the wide number of solutions that existed in the past to approximate this feature via various means. For example, Pods has supported custom fields for taxonomy terms for a long time. Previously, those custom […]

Earlier this month, I wrote an introduction on validation and sanitization in WordPress, which emphasized the importance of making sure that data coming into your site via HTTP requests or into PHP functions is authorized, properly formed, and not malicious. That article was all about inputs. This one is all about outputs. We are going to discuss the precautions to take when retrieving data out of the database to display or input in other classes or functions. I hope by this point you are learning to trust no one and nothing. The same goes for the database. Repeat after me,”the database […]

One of the biggest differences between code written by novice developers and more advanced developers is that experienced developers tend to pay a lot more attention towards sanitizing and validating inputs, and late escaping outputs. Novice developers, on the other hand, tend to overlook these practices. I know I did. I didn’t even know what sanitization, validation, or escaping were. And, while these steps may not seem exciting, they are essential for preventing errors and security exploits on the sites that are running your code. In this article, I will discuss the basics of sanitizing and validating inputs in the context of […]

PHP executes code in series, which means one thing is done after another. This can be problematic when you need to do a lot of processing in one session or if you are relying on calls to external APIs. In this article, I’m going to show you how to use asynchronous PHP in WordPress to address this issue. It isn’t uncommon for a server to be configured with a 30-second timeout limit for each request, which puts a hard cap on the amount of time each session has to do its work. Of course, if that processing is required in […]

Like many WordPress developers, I started learning JavaScript before I really even knew what JavaScript was.  By “learning JavaScript,” I mean that I Googled how to make dynamic changes to the CSS on my page, discovered that jQuery was the option, and later found out that jQuery was a JavaScript library, and so on. WordPress is a safe space from which we can explore the different technologies surrounding it to improve our sites and create more dynamic experiences for our users. This includes JavaScript. In Matt Mullenweg’s State of the Word this year, which I was lucky enough to attend, […]

I recently had the privilege to attend a Q&A session with Techstars founder David Cohen at the Florida State University School of Social Entrepreneurship. Techstars is a startup network, accelerator, and venture capital firm, dedicated to helping startups succeed and proving that you don’t have to be in Silicon Valley to create a successful tech startup. With a portfolio that includes Uber, Twilio, and DigitalOcean, Techstars model has experienced overwhelming success. Techstars is based in Boulder, Colorado and has expanded into cities all over the world. Techstars operates on a “give first” ethos, which means they help others whenever possible, create […]