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David November 16, 2017

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WordPress has released its 12th update for 2017, and it's also the second minor version pushed out this year. WordPress 4.9 includes a lot for users. "Tipton" introduces changesets for theme customizations, previewing, and scheduling of theme customizer updates and code editing syntax highlighting, autocompletion, and error checking using CodeMirror. Finally, there's a new Gallery widget and an "Add Media" button for the venerable text widget.

As usual with each new release, I look for improvements and additions for developers. Although there isn't quite as much for developers in this specific version, there are a few key inclusions that I wanted to highlight.

David August 3, 2017

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Craft CMS is still the relatively new kid on the block when it comes content management systems, but I am doing more work with it these days. Compared to the 500-pound gorilla in the room, WordPress, there are a lot of differences. Of course, both have their advantages and disadvantages. As time goes on, however, Craft seems to be taking full advantage of hard learned lessons by other platforms, including WordPress.

Mainly, Craft is still new, and, as such, has a lot of catching up to do in terms of extensibility. That comes as more users and use cases are presented. For example, there is huge disparity in "hooks", or places for developers to alter core outputs, when comparing Craft to WordPress.

With that said, I do want to talk about a feature of Craft that I feel it handles much better than its counterparts: automated background tasks.

David June 10, 2017

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I've been doing some work recently with Craft CMS, and its ecommerce plugin Craft Commerce. Although Craft is still up-and-coming, it's doing quite well. The community is great, and I love working with it. Craft itself is quite extensible, and Commerce is progressing in that aspect. A recent project called for a lot of customization of Commerce, and I ended up creating quite a few plugins to handle third-party integrations.

One such instance was to integrate Amazon Pay as a new payment method in Commerce. This had not been done by anyone else to this point, and more than a few clients/developers had asked if someone knew of an existing solution. After a lot of work, I completed the plugin, and I am making it available for purchase here.

David April 2, 2017

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Most of the time, writing code can be very repetitive. There are only so many ways to handle something. However, a few times per project, I'm tasked to come up with a new solution to a challenge. After accepting and conquering the challenge, I sometimes come up with code that I'm very proud to share because of its elegance, simplicity, and/or novelty.

This particular challenge involved a report that produced a list of dates as parts of its results. When I ran a few sample reports, I noticed that I could potentially get a nigh unreadable list of numerous, consecutive dates. I decided to try and turn that horrible list into something beautiful by condensing three or more consecutive dates into a range.

David February 21, 2017

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I've neglected going to a WordCamp for far too long, and I'm going to change that by attending the one in Atlanta March 17-19, 2017! I usually reserve my weekends for anything other than work, but I feel the return on investment for attending a WordCamp is too great to ignore. So, I've booked a nice hotel in downtown, blocked off my schedule, and started planning my travel.

David January 22, 2017

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As a WordPress developer, I create a lot of custom data to give clients the functionality they want. I've used every way possible, like posts for a custom post type, post meta, taxonomies, options, custom tables, etc. However, for ease of use and client convenience, I mostly use either WordPress native custom fields or the Advanced Custom Fields PRO plugin. With ACF, the interface is great, and, having used it so much, I can quickly setup any field type very quickly. The most time consuming part of using custom data is when it comes time to integrate into the theme.