ZATZ Lab Notes
It’s not the years. It’s the lines of code.
Finding and choosing plugin frameworks
I built my own admin framework for ZENPRESS and it worked very well. But it was very much pre-Ajax and I'd like to use Ajax features in my admin areas, particularly for list and group selections. So I'm looking at some packaged admin frameworks to see what they might...
The strange rite of code names
So here it is. Time to begin a new coding project. Do I worry about what framework I'm going to use? Do I consider defining a feature set? Do I even have a clue what I'm going to build? Or is all of that far less important than the choice of code name? If you answered...
IFTTT, WordPress, and XML-RPC
I have another pro-bono non-profit site I support, where I set up an automatic feed for news items. When an item is given a particular tag in Pocket, it's picked up by IFTTT and then posted as a post on the destination WordPress site, which becomes a short summary for...
Setting a featured image with Pods isn’t hard to do, but it’s incredibly hard to find out how
I wanted to be able to set featured images for the IPG website that I'm working on pro-bono. I spent a good part of the evening trying to get things to work with special Gravity Forms hooks, but kept running into unnecessary complexity and roadblocks. As it turns out,...
Playing whackamole with development software
Development can sometimes feel like a game of Whackamole. You find one thing that doesn't work, fix it, and then move on -- only to find that the next thing also doesn't work. Today, I've spent a good part of my day trying to finally get my development environment up...
Tweaking Xdebug to allow deep function nesting
Just got an annoying error that said Xdebug only allowed 100 levels of function nesting. Well, actually, the error didn't say anything about the limitation being Xdebug, so I spent quite awhile trying to track down the issue. It turns out that PHP doesn't specifically...
Visual Studio Community Edition 2013 now on hour two of install
I'm installing VS2013 to grade a student's submission (we normally require VS2012, but he's a good student and it's high time I had a VS2013 install). The #&$@ thing has been running the install for well over two hours and it's still cooking. Ah well, there are...
Getting Pods magic tags to work
I spent a good part of the day attempting to get Pods to work on a site I'm doing pro-bono for a non-profit. For some reason, while I understand the extension to content types, I've had no end of difficulty getting individual data objects to display. Part if this is...
This site is built on Divi
This is my first experience using the Divi theme from Elegant Themes, and it's been interesting. It clearly makes building bold sites with a modern look a rather simple process. I did barely any CSS customization (which, given my general tolerate/hate relationship...
Coming up to speed on ZENPRESS
For any of you who might want to get a bit of background on my longest-term project, this video (recorded at WordCamp Miami in 2011) should bring you up to speed. http://youtu.be/Y9iVpGBUPYs
