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Don’t Dequeue WordPress’ jQuery
As a moderator on the WordPress Stack Exchange, I end up spending a lot of time on the site. I see lots of great questions, lots of not-so-great questions, and several you’ve-got-to-be-kidding-me questions. But the question I see the most often frustrates me: How do I remove WordPress’ jQuery and use Google’s CDN version instead? I have no trouble saying that, if you’re asking this question, you have no business building a website in the first place.
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Distraction Free Reading Mode
I’m a big fan of the “distraction free writing mode” within WordPress. For those of you who haven’t seen it – launch a new post in WordPress and click the full-screen icon on the editor. Your mind will be blown. The sidebars, admin interface, and all of the other UI cruft of the WordPress interface drops away to leave nothing but you and your content. As it should be.
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Making Singletons Safe in PHP
Last time, I argued in favor of the Singleton pattern in WordPress. Singletons make sense in WordPress specifically for several reasons: They live in the global scope without using the already abused/overused [cci]global[/cci] keyword As a distributed application maintained by several hundred developers, they prevent problems that likely arise from others misusing your code But one of the goals of object-oriented software development is to make your code reusable. The Singleton pattern as I explained it last time isn’t really applicable outside of WordPress. Typically, Singletons are a really bad idea. But rather than get hung up on the term and…
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The Case for Singletons in WordPress
Please also review my follow-up post, Making Singletons Safe in PHP. There has been a lot of discussion this week regarding the Singleton pattern and whether or not it has a place in modern software development. Mike Schinkel wrote a tutorial about a Singleton factory. I wrote one about using Singletons as a WordPress plugin scaffold. Then the conversation bled over to Twitter and people questioned whether or not it was a sound development pattern at all. I would argue that Singletons are not just useful, but are necessary for robust software development.
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WordPress Plugin Structure
The power of WordPress lies in its pluggable infrastructure. Unlike other content management applications which require you to edit the core code of the system to make changes, WordPress supports plugins. These smaller applications tie in to a rich API provided by WordPress that allows you to change just about everything about the application and customize it as needed. The official plugin repository on WordPress.org is currently home to over 20,000 distinct plugins. Each one adds some new functionality to WordPress, giving you the ability to tweak content, change colors, adjust layouts, or integrate with external systems. This doesn’t even begin…
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Introducing WP_Session
Last time, I talked about what it would be like if WordPress supported sessions. Well, I decided to put my money where my mouth is and actually took the time to build it. I’m proud to announce the very first release of an implementation of [cci]WP_Session[/cci].