More than anything else, programming is built on top of the idea of enclosed and reusable functionality. While it is possible to write a working program without the ability to enclose and reuse functionality, it would be a painful process. Programming can seem like a complex and esoteric activity, but most parts of it are […]
Somewhat jokingly, when I shared last week’s post about using Markdown to our Facebook page I threw in a line about how Markdown should destroy Microsoft Word. While I don’t really hate Word, or any other tool in Microsoft’s Office suite, I think they’re almost never the best tool for a given job. And it […]
As I professed my fervent love for Markdown last week, I’ll spare you — go read why Markdown’s great if you haven’t — but to say that Markdown is a quick way to easily create all the niceties of HTML without having to deal with all the annoying traits of actually typing out HTML. The […]
Markdown is great. If you’ve found yourself composing a lot of HTML-based documents, you know how frustrating it can be to make sure you match all your tags and type all those less-than and greater-than signs that compose the tags. Markdown is awesome because it dispenses with all that. I Mostly Love HTML HTML is […]
It’s become almost cliche: the modern web designer or front-end developer sitting there all day, dragging the side of their browser window back and forth, back and forth. They’ve got to make sure your website doesn’t break if it’s truly going to be as responsive as it should be. If you want it to look […]
We didn’t have time to share this last week, but we are pretty excited that we bought a little WordPress-focused site called WPShout. We did manage to get a post out over there about the transition of that site, but we thought it also made good sense to go into a little detail about what […]
One of the more complicated “easy” things in software is providing a useful bug report. Literally anyone can encounter a “bug,” “flaw” “defect,” or even “desired-feature” while using a product and anyone can give a good explanation to the maker of the software of that problem, but people rarely do. Sometimes they feel they’re not […]
Security is a big and complex area. Everything from the quality of your encryption algorithms, the privileges of your file access policy, and the nature of your cryptographic signature are part of security. But even without understanding what I meant by any of those things, you can still have a big impact on the security. […]
Shortcodes are, as I said in my last post about them, a bit like magic. They’re a way that you can, with very little code or concern about complexity, include large collections of markup or even custom functionality into a post. And many many plugins already exist that use shortcodes in WordPress and make it […]
WordPress shortcodes are a simple way to add styling or other customizations inside of the content of a post, page, or custom post type. They make it very easy to do so, are the way that WordPress does galleries by default, are a great way to execute buttons (I’ve added one we use all over […]
Arrays are a pretty important concept in programming, but they’re something I went an embarrassingly long time not fully understanding when I first started learning. I recall spending far too much time in my earlier days trying to solve complex problems in convoluted and stupid ways. Most of these solutions could have just made use […]
We’ve talked about WordPress hooks before on this blog. And if you’re looking to modify the behavior of WordPress, a plugin, or theme, they’re your best option. They’re robust, they don’t break in the kind of conditions that “pluggable functions” might, and they’re the core way that WordPress plans to make itself easy to change moving […]
