WordPress development tutorials

Screen ID checks with WordPress Submenu Pages

Chances are if you’ve read our series on adding plugin settings to WooCommerce, you’re using an existing WooCommerce settings page or new settings tab to add any required configuration options for your plugin. If you have a more complex plugin who’s data will be accessed very often (such as Memberships or Subscriptions), you may even be adding a new submenu with a custom settings or usage page for your plugin. However, we’ve run into any…

Read More

WordPress development tutorials

How to Generate a Post Excerpt Outside the Loop

When you work with WordPress, you become pretty familiar with using the WP_Post object or objects for custom post types. For example, while working with WooCommerce, products use the WC_Product post object (or the object for a class that inherits this, such as WC_Product_Variation). If you’re in the loop while working with posts or custom post types, get_the_excerpt() is a beautiful function, as it returns the excerpt if it’s set by the user, and automatically…

Read More

Timezones

Down the Rabbit Hole: WordPress and Timezones

“Why, sometimes I’ve believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast.” ― Lewis Carroll, Alice in Wonderland A few months ago, we were working on the WooCommerce Pre-Orders extension and had to think about how we wanted to store the release date & time. Like most concepts that look simple and easy at first, this turned out to be somewhat complex. Throughout development, I ended up learning quite a bit about working with timezones…

Read More

WordPress development tutorials

Translating a WordPress Plugin on the Command Line Step by Step

The purpose of this article is to provide a quick and easy to follow step-by-step guide to extracting text strings from a WordPress plugin for translation from the command line. Although this is documented in the codex: I18N for WordPress Developers and Translating WordPress, those articles are somewhat lengthy and the first time I was asked to internationalize a plugin it took me some time to find the actual steps to generate my POT file….

Read More

WordPress development tutorials

WordPress Get DB Table Column Names

To get the column names for a MySQL database table in WordPress, use the following: global $wpdb; $table_name = $wpdb->prefix . ‘posts’; foreach ( $wpdb->get_col( “DESC ” . $table_name, 0 ) as $column_name ) { error_log( $column_name ); } Which will result in something like the following being printed to your debug.log: ID post_author post_date post_date_gmt post_content … You get the idea 🙂

Read More

WordPress development tutorials

Don’t Share Terms Between WordPress Taxonomies

By default WordPress will reuse terms with the same name and slug between different taxonomies (at least for now). For instance, if you add the term ‘red’ as a tag, and then add the category ‘red’, the same wp_terms record will be shared between them. This is also true for any custom taxonomies you define (remember that despite their seeming differences, WordPress tags and categories are both implemented as taxonomies). Now, in general this is…

Read More

WP Development

Extending the WordPress XML-RPC API

The purpose of this article is to describe the WordPress XML-RPC API, explain how to use it, and demonstrate how to extend it to create custom API methods for interacting programmatically with WordPress. I assume a relative unfamiliarity with XML-RPC in general, WordPress XML-RPC, and spend time first covering the basics, if you want to skip straight to the section on extending the WordPress XML-RPC API, feel free to. What is XML-RPC? As defined by…

Read More

WP Development

Writing a Plugin That Can Be Localized by WPML

Writing a custom plugin that can be translated by WPML (WordPress Multilingual) using .mo files is actually quite simple once you figure out how to generate the .mo file. My first attempt to internationalize my plugin with WPML however was less than successful, WPML would not localize my plugins text strings. I knew my .mo file was correct, and could be loaded by WordPress because when I set WPLANG to my target locale in wp-config.php,…

Read More

WordPress development tutorials

How to Create a Custom WordPress Post Type With Image Uploads

This article details one method of creating a custom WordPress post type with the ability to upload and attach images using the built-in WordPress Media browser. This piece does not cover all the details and nuances of creating a custom post type, as this is covered well elsewhere. In addition to highlighting the most important methods and code required, I have attached a fully functional demo plugin which you may feel free to download and…

Read More