Category Archives: WordPress

Reusing P2’s ajaxUrl Short-Circuits Other AJAX Requests

I just spent awhile tracking down some odd AJAX behavior that was puzzling me, so I thought I’d share the solution. I was working on a plugin to extend P2 and my AJAX requests were always responding with -1. After a lot of digging and some trial-and-error, I figured out that it was happening because I was […]

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WordPress’ Insularity and Architectural Shortcomings

Even though a huge fan of WordPress and have chosen to develop for it exclusively, there are still some big areas where the underlying architecture is out of step with modern development practices. Mike Toppa just wrote a great response to that “Dire State of WordPress” article that’s been going around, where he defends WordPress […]

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How WordPress Saves Lives: Freedom, Hope and Custom Post Types

Paul Clark’s presentation at WordCamp Phoenix 2013 is a must-watch for any developer who’s interested in using technology to advance human rights and social justice. He describes how his team used open-source technologies to help a human-rights organization in Burma manage their information in ways that have a direct impact on their mission and the lives […]

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The Social Dynamics of Open-Source Contributions

Diaries of a Core Maintainer #6: A Tale of Two Developers makes some insightful points about different approaches towards contributing to open source projects, and how collaboration and social dynamics can play a big role in whether or not the contributions are accepted. It’s written by a Drupal dev, but I’ve seen the same things […]

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Notices are Errors

One of my big pet peeves with WP plugins and themes is that so many of them trigger PHP notices and warnings by failing to check if array indices exist before referencing them, or checking if a file exists before including it, etc. It may seem trivial, but even if you don’t care about the […]

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Using Singletons in WordPress Plugins

Eric Mann and Mika Toppa have been creating a interesting conversation about the use of the Singleton pattern within WordPress plugins. Eric started it with his article in defense of the pattern, and then Mike wrote a thoughtful response. Both make compelling cases for their position, and both avoid the teenage dickery that often accompanies […]

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Creating Object-Oriented WordPress Plugins That Implement MVC

I’ll be giving a presentation at the Seattle WordPress Developers Meetup tomorrow about how to write WordPress plugins that are both object-oriented, and implement the Model-View-Controller pattern.

If you plan on attending, you can follow along with the slides and download the lab files.

Grandchild Themes in WordPress

It’s not possible to create grandchild themes in the same way that you create child themes, but you can use a plugin to dequeue/enqueue stylesheets and scripts, and also override the locations of the main query templates.

It’s obviously not the ideal solution, but there are cases where it may be the least-bad one.

Preventing a Plugin from Automatically Updating

In an ideal world you’d never have to fork a plugin, because developers would always make their plugins extensible with hooks, just like WordPress itself does. But unfortunately that’s not usually the case, and it’s sometimes necessary to directly modify a plugin to make it do what you need. In those cases, you want to […]

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XML-RPC Enabled by Default in WordPress 3.5

XML-RPC will be enabled by default in WordPress 3.5, but I personally think that’s a bad idea from a security perspective. A fellow Seattle WP developer, Ben Lobaugh, explains why on the Trac ticket.. Luckily, it’s easy to disable it. Just add this to a plugin: add_filter( 'xmlrpc_enabled', '__return_false' ); I’ve added that to my […]

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Designing Object-Oriented Plugins for a Procedural Application

Note: This was originally a post to the Seattle PHP Meetup mailing list, but I’m reproducing it here to generate a discussion about the topic with people outside the meetup. * * * * I write a lot plugins for WordPress, and I like to make them object-oriented, even though WordPress itself is mostly procedural. […]

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Don’t Move wp-config.php Outside the Document Root

Most WordPress security guides recommend moving wp-config.php outside of the Apache document root in order to prevent the database password being exposed if the PHP engine fails to parse the file, or from being readable to infected scripts running in the domain. Despite the conventional wisdom, though, this technique doesn’t solve those problems, and can actually […]

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WordPress Bug Causes Error in XML-RPC Clients

I’ve been having a hard time figuring out an error that a client’s been getting in the Android and iOS apps for WordPress, but finally found the reason. The problem was that, when adding new posts with images, the post would be saved and the image would be uploaded and attached to the post, but […]

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