WordPress Tutorials

With our in-depth WordPress Tutorials, you'll get more out of WordPress. We love sharing knowledge and our tutorials are no exception to that rule.

WordPress and DTAP

11 April 2013 by Floris Lof 10 Comments

Many companies I know use DTAP in their website development process. DTAP is an acronym for “Development, Testing, Acceptance and Production” and is used as a release management cycle in software development. If you are building complex websites – or rebuilding them – the use of a so called “DTAP street” is very useful. Over the past few years I’ve been working a lot with DTAP and WordPress, of course. Here’s my experiences and the choices I made.

A DTAP street

Using a DTAP street is all about managing the development and release of entirely new software or just for a newer release of the software already in production. When using a DTAP street in web development you are in fact using at least four environments and versions/copies of your website:

[Read more…]

Using PHP Closures in WordPress

14 November 2012 by Joe Hoyle 19 Comments

There has been little discussion on the use of PHP Closures with WordPress code, hopefully we will be able to spark some here! Before getting into the nitty-gritty, to make sure everyone is on the same page a quick explanation of a PHP Closure.

Anonymous functions, also known as closures, allow the creation of functions which have no specified name. They are most useful as the value of callback parameters, but they have many other uses.

php.net

Why Use Closures?

The ability to create single-use callback functions can be very useful when developing in WordPress land, as it’s very often one needs to run code via hooks and filters. At its simplest consider the following code: [Read more…] about Using PHP Closures in WordPress

Yes, You Can: Plugin Auto-Updates From Github

17 October 2012 by Nuno Morgadinho 10 Comments

One of the things I love about WordPress is the plugin architecture, as it allows users to contribute and extend WordPress without compromising the sanity and clarity of its core.

Whenever I write a plugin I tend to submit it to the official plugin repo, where it can quickly be downloaded and used by thousands of savvy users. I also often host my plugins on GitHub too; either because I’m still developing them and I’m not quite ready to release them to the world or simply because it might be a client-specific or commercial plugin. In those cases I always feel shorthanded when I see other plugins receive new update notifications and the ones on GitHub have to be updated manually. [Read more…] about Yes, You Can: Plugin Auto-Updates From Github