We finally launched our website – Colormelon.
For too long we’ve been the shoemakers with no shoes. It was very difficult to find the time to design our own site – it seems that there are always better things to do!
Even right now, there is a huge pile of things we’d rather create than our website, but after years of making web designs for others, we decided that it was finally time we got a website too, or at least start the process of building our site. More
It turns out, that from now on, it’s a best practice to escape with esc_html__() instead of simply doing __() in your plugins and themes.
Replacing everything with esc_html() is a solution, but what about the __() in your code that already contain some minor code ( like a few wrapping spans here and there ) ? More
A simple way to download a complete page
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wget -NmkEpnp -e robots=off [URL] |
Very much inspired by Guy Rutenberg,
I only modified the snippet slightly with -N, which validates timestamps and doesn’t download duplicated ( but does overwrite local files with the new changes ) and robots=off, so I wouldn’t download the robots.txt
There really needs to be an easier way to manage JavaScript dependencies for small project than using Bower. More
A simple one-liner to convert all JavaScript in a folder to CoffeeScript
First, make sure you have installed “js2coffee” ( and js2coffee.org is real cool for single files too ):
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npm install js2coffee |
And then just paste this:
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for f in *.js; do js2coffee -it $f > ${f%%.*}.coffee; rm $f; done; |
-it options modifies the spaces to tabs, remove it if you prefer spaces.
Enjoy!
Underscore.js has a lot of great stuff packed in it. One of the functions I love is pick, which lets you input some keys and get a new array from an Array.
So today I wanted to find an alternative to Underscore’s _.pick for PHP, and I didn’t. It’s not a function that would be difficult to write, but that’s where WordPress comes in.
People at WordPress thought that it would be a nice helper for them too, so in WordPress 3.1 they added wp_array_slice_assoc.
The naming is a bit long, but the function is awesome anyway and the naming explains the purpose alright. Slice an array associativley ( that’s a big word ).
Here is how it works.
Imagine we have a some array like this one.
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<?php $myray = array( 'john' => 'a name', 'jane' => 'also a name', 'doe' => 'a fake last name', 'duck' => 'an animal', 'goose' => 'an animal', ); ?> |
In this case the array is a mess, your array should never be a mess, but it might happen. In this case, I know I want only John and Jane in my array, so I can do this:
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$persons = wp_array_slice_assoc( $myray, array('john', 'jane') ); |
Tara. Now I have a new array “$persons” which has only john and jane.
Well, there are times where you would write something like this:
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$john = $myray['john']; $jane = $myray['jane']; $duck = $myray['duck']; $goose = $myray['goose']; |
Which I think of an overkill, especially if you need like 10 variables. Of course you could extract from all of them
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extract($myray) |
But what if the array has like 20 items. What happens when they clash? What if someone else modifies your code? I just don’t feel that blindly using extract is the best development pattern.
Along comes wp_array_slice_assoc()
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$keys_to_extract = wp_array_slice_assoc( $myray, array( 'john', 'jane', 'duck', 'goose' ) ); extract( $keys_to_extract ); |
Or a slightly more readable (based on preference) variant
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$keys_to_extract = array( 'john', 'jane', 'duck', 'goose' ); extract( wp_array_slice_assoc( $myray, $keys_to_extract ) ); |
That’s it.
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echo $john; // Echoes: "a name" |
Please, please be careful extracting variables. And when you do, please document them, even if the documentation comes in the form of $keys_to_extract. Recently I had a very difficult time figuring out what is what because the author of a plugin pulled some weird variables out of nowhere and I had to run around var_dump’ing all over the place until I figured out what is what.
Before it was approved.
In fact, we’ve had 2 themes rejected on Themeforest for various reasons and only now will I admit that I was angry. I was mad! Mad at the reviewers, counting clicks they’ve made reviewing my themes. Mad at myself for developing something that isn’t approved. Mad at the universe for putting me in this position ( I could just have found a case full of money instead of all this… ). How much did that help? Zero. It only led to
Self pity. Anger. Frustration. Fear.
I experienced it all, and it seems that the more I felt any of these emotions, the more I got similar ones. I thought I am never going to get out of it.
I quit my job in January with very limited funds in my pocket. Having done that, I had a motivator that basically says “either you’ll learn how to swim or you’ll sink” was pretty motivating, until I had to face rejection. Once it was introduced, it was like having someone at the shore shouting: “Give up! You can’t swim, just let go and drown already”. Not motivating at all. Which caused the (what seemed to be the) endless misery.
I have no idea what did it for me. It may be that I was already expecting that. I wanted to say prepared, but you just can’t be prepared for that sort of thing, and you’re not even going to get what you we’re expecting as well.
So after all the rejection, and having our Acid theme also rejected, I just decided that nothing is going to stop me. I will work on the Acid theme until it is approved.
As it turns out. It’s all that was necessary. I could write a book where I could describe all the advice I’ve accumulated from all the literature I’ve read on the subject, but it all really boils down to the decision not to fail.
By that I mean – If you think you fail, you failed. If you decide not to fail at all, you won’t. Or as Thomas Edison puts it:
I haven’t failed. I’ve just discovered 10’000 ways that won’t work.
It’s a really simple lesson. At least it sounds simple. But there is no way you’ll learn it but through experience.
Here is another really quick snippet.
If you have a page where you’re using Query Posts you’re going to have trouble with Pagination.
Wordpress for some reason likes to use page and paged randomly.
If you assign your page as the “front page”, you’re going to have to get_query_var(‘page’), and if you’re going to assign it elsewhere, it’s going to be paged. This is all fine and dandy, at least when you’re in control, but as soon as someone else starts using your theme, you need something more trustworthy, and that’s what this is.
More
Right now I’m working on a redesign for TexturePlanet.
Up until now I was using Detube theme on TexturePlanet, and it was really more like in an experiment stage to test if people are still looking for textures, and they are.
More
Thanks to WP-SBVTLE I’ve got a nice theme for myself. I will probably make a couple of edits now and then, but finally I feel like writing.
The default WordPress Twenty Twelve (or thirteen) aren’t bad themes, but I just wanted something more like… well – like this.
I’m still in the process of moving, but I’m finally moving from Rackspace to WPEngine. I’ll post about that later on, but so far my experience with WPEngine has been truly amazing! They are awesome!
Well. Previously I didn’t have one, so theoretically it’s not new, but I’ll count it as new. I took the Elephant from The Noun Project, designed by Ted Mitchner.
Yes. This was a short post. I hope to keep writing nice little short posts to get into the habit of writing.