Mike In Monospace

Web Development Tools & Terminology – Back End

Updated March 5, 2020August 28, 2019

In this post series we’ll be talking about the nuts and bolts that make web development easier, but there’s a catch…

The catch is that, at first, you will be overwhelmed by the myriad of tools out there that you can use for different purposes.

There are such tools that do one thing and then there are the ones that serve two or more jobs thus needing you to make decisions about what you’ll be using in order to streamline you project.

I went through such overwhelming situations, quite frankly I still am, but the good news is that if you press on you’ll get the hang of it.

Create An Image Slide Plugin Part 8: Create A WordPress Slider Shortcode

Updated March 5, 2020June 18, 2018

In the eighth installment from this series we’ll be creating a shortcode to display multiple slides into a slider.

In the previous post we added the first shortcode for displaying a single slide. Now, we’ll grab multiple of those slides and show them anywhere we want into an animated slider.

Create An Image Slide Plugin Part 7: Create WordPress Shortcodes

Updated March 5, 2020May 24, 2018

In the seventh post from this series we’re going to talk about how to create your own WordPress shortcodes in order to display the slides and sliders we created.

The previous post in which we added custom metadata to our mnsp_slider taxonomy terms, was the last post focusing only on the admin side. Starting now we’re also going to step into the public side with the ability to show the slides and sliders on different pages.

Create An Image Slide Plugin Part 6: Create Taxonomy Term Meta

Updated March 5, 2020May 12, 2018

In this post we’ll be adding a few pieces of metadata to the sliders we’ll be creating using the taxonomy we added to our custom post type in an earlier post.

In the previous post we talked about metadata and we created a custom meta box in which we collect additional information about each slide we create.

The metadata we’ll be adding in this post will concern each slider that will be created for collecting multiple slides. The new metadata will affect the behavior of each slider in various ways.

Create An Image Slide Plugin Part 5: Create A Custom Meta Box

Updated March 5, 2020May 2, 2018

Here we are with another post of our series in which we’re gonna create a custom meta box for our slide post type in which we’ll be able set some custom options that we’ll be defining later in this post.

In the previous post we created a custom taxonomy for grouping multiple slides into a slider, which actually added the Sliders custom meta box to the Add New Slide screen.

The custom meta box that we are building in the post will be visible on every ‘Add New Slide’ admin screen and will provide some custom fields for setting options and additional content for each slide.

Create An Image Slide Plugin Part 4: Create A Custom Taxonomy

Updated March 5, 2020April 23, 2018

Picking off where we left off, in this post we’ll be talking about grouping two or more of our slides into a slider by creating a custom taxonomy.

In the previous post we talked about creating a custom content type for our slides an as we’ve seen, it is a pretty straight forward process involving naming and some settings for the new content we want to create.

Create An Image Slide Plugin Part 3: Create A Custom Post Type

Updated March 5, 2020April 19, 2018

In this post from the series of tutorials on creating a WordPress plugin for displaying image slides we’ll learn how to create a custom post type which will house the functionality, content and metadata information of our image slides.

In the previous post we set things up using the WordPress Plugin Boilerplate which gave us a solid start with a lot of best practice and standards compliant code already available to us. We also looked at some of the important files and folders that make up our plugin.

In this post we’ll start creating the image slide using a piece of functionality that WordPress offers, called custom post types, often referred to as custom content types. Before we get to that let’s dig into more details about this built-in WordPress functionality.

Create An Image Slide Plugin Part 2: Setup

Updated March 5, 2020April 4, 2018

In the second post post from the series of tutorials on creating a WordPress plugin for displaying image slides we’ll learn how to setup a WordPress plugin that is more complex and using best practice techniques and code.

In the previous post of the series we’ve briefly introduced the basic concept of creating WordPress plugins. We’ve also created an example plugin to kick things off and see just how simple it can be to get going.

Although the example plugin was working fine, it was a very basic plugin that didn’t do much. Most WordPress plugins are more complex than that and that’s why they need a certain organisational feature that would make the code more extensible in the future should we and want to expand on it.

Starting with this post we’ll get more organised by using a piece of software called The WordPress Plugin Boilerplate that will help us keep our code nice and tidy.

Create An Image Slide Plugin Part 1: Intro

Updated March 5, 2020March 20, 2018

This is the first post from a series of tutorials in which we’ll create a WordPress plugin for displaying image slides. This first part is an introduction to creating WordPress plugins.

Plugins, alongside themes, have been a driving force for the huge success of WordPress’ which now powers some 30% of the websites on the internet.

I first started working with WordPress by modifying themes to make them look the way I wanted. Later, when I needed to introduce new functionality in a website I started to tackle the inner workings of plugins.

WordPress Internals: Loading Sequence

Updated March 5, 2020March 13, 2018

Whenever I start learning something new I prefer to have a deep understanding of the process that goes on behind the scene of whatever I’m trying to learn.

From experience, I can tell you that this can be both good and bad, because you can often get stuck and feel like you’re never gonna get it. Ultimately, a deeper understanding is a good thing. It just takes a few tries before you get there 🙂

When I first made contact with WordPress, I was modifying existing themes or doing front-end customization through plugins.

The more I worked with WordPress and the more of an advanced user I became, the more I felt like I was missing something. That something was the deeper understanding of the process that WordPress goes through to show content to the end user.

So, here it is.