Jeffikus » Development

WooCommerce

jeffikus — Tue, 10 Jan 2012 21:33:26 +0000

So after having done a customization for African Cartel recently using WooCommerce and a WooTheme, I thought I’d spend some more time with it for a personal project of mine. And (even though I’m slightly biased*) I gotta say that I love it It’s really easy to use and to extend. I’m using it as an engine for a manual payment system and it is really powerful.

Check it out – you wont be disappointed - http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/woocommerce/ and it’s a FREE plugin.

* Disclaimer: in the interest of full disclosure, I work for WooThemes who built the WooCommerce plugin

If This Then That

jeffikus — Wed, 04 Jan 2012 08:00:55 +0000

I started using the If This Then That service today, after Matty recommended it. Quite a neat service to create social actions, and its free This could be useful for development projects that need automated social elements.

For example - I created a task that posts to my twitter everytime my blog feed has a new article.

There are many more tasks that you can create as well as some preset ‘recipes’. Check it out here: http://ifttt.com/

Get to know me

jeffikus — Fri, 02 Dec 2011 17:16:19 +0000

I was interviewed at work recently as part of a “Getting to know the Team” series. Check it out on the WooThemes site.

African Cartel WooCommerce

jeffikus — Wed, 16 Nov 2011 15:07:15 +0000

I recently did some work for African Cartel (I previously worked on the original site) to move them over to using the WooCommerce plugin instead of some of the other WordPress e-commerce plugins out there. I also wrote a content schema plugin so that they didn’t lose their content when moving from theme to theme, and created another plugin that allows them to link 2 different post types together.

Click the title to read the case study on the WooThemes site.

Coding at WooThemes

jeffikus — Thu, 03 Nov 2011 08:55:18 +0000

This week I upgraded our Listings directory theme at WooThemes from the Google Maps API V2 to V3 and I thought it would be pretty cool to show you what I actually do when I code.

The upgrade process took about an hour and a half of coding, testing, and deploying. And for those wondering, I’m coding in Coda, and the video was created using Screenflow.

And for those wondering about the music, it’s one of my favorite pieces recorded by JerryC called Canon Rock.

Update: the video was featured on WPCandy.

WordCamp Cape Town Video

jeffikus — Mon, 03 Oct 2011 06:36:55 +0000

I posted earlier about speaking at WordCamp Cape Town about using WordPress as a Development Framework, here is the video for your viewing pleasure!

WordPress as a Development Framework

jeffikus — Fri, 16 Sep 2011 14:24:29 +0000

I gave a talk at WordCamp Cape Town yesterday about using WordPress as a Development Framework for building web applications. Here’s my slides, I’ll update this post shortly with a bit more information – like the links to the video clip and code snippets.

WordPress as a Development Framework

View more presentations from Jeffrey Pearce

WordCamp Cape Town

jeffikus — Fri, 26 Aug 2011 14:02:44 +0000

I will be speaking at WordCamp Cape Town this year, and I’m pretty excited It will be my second WordCamp presentation after last years WordCamp Spain in Barcelona. I’ll be showing off some of the more advanced concepts of WordPress and trying to get rid of a mindset that WordPress is just a blogging engine – I believe that it’s good enough to be used as a fully fledged development framework for everything from a basic website to a full on web application. I’ll post my slides and the code that I use in the talk here as always

WordPress Taxonomy Archive Parent Items Filter

jeffikus — Tue, 05 Jul 2011 09:24:36 +0000

If you’ve ever delved into the WP core you’ll find some little items that are quite unknown. Take tax_query for example; most developers are aware of the standard options: ‘taxonomy’ ‘field’ and ‘terms’ but did you know there is an ‘include_children’ option? This returns only direct parent matches for the taxonomy terms specified – in other words, no child terms if you are using hierarchies. This is pretty straightforward for custom queries, but what about archive pages? Here’s a filter for that:
// Custom Taxonomy Page Filter add_action('pre_get_posts', 'my_taxonomy_children_filter' ); function my_taxonomy_children_filter( $query ) {


  global $wp_query;
  if ($query->is_tax) {
  	$modded_tax_query = $query->tax_query;
  	$filter_tax = $modded_tax_query->queries[0]['taxonomy'];

  	$filter_terms = $modded_tax_query->queries[0]['terms'];

  	$filter_field = $modded_tax_query->queries[0]['field'];
  	$query->set('tax_query', array(array(

										'taxonomy' => $filter_tax,

										'field' => $filter_field,

										'terms' => $filter_terms,

										'include_children' => false

									))

								);
  	$query->parse_query();

  }
  return $query;

}

Works pretty well for me. Pop that into your functions.php and it should do the trick Let me know if it doesn’t for you!

Debugging WordPress

jeffikus — Tue, 28 Jun 2011 07:17:30 +0000

I’ve been working on a performance issue with a for loop in a theme in WordPress for the past week, in particular trying to get the number of queries down. The homepage was executing around 10000 queries to the DB, which while it executed each query quickly due to the SQL being optimized, was ultimately slowing the site down. So after several pointers from various people, I spend some time with the code and managed to get it down to 290 queries after optimizing the loop structure. To do this I used 2 plugins that were a MASSIVE help:
Debug Bar and Debug bar Console
If you are a WordPress developer, I highly recommend using these as they really make the debugging process far easier due to their comprehensive info panels that you can switch on and off.

Sidenote: If you are using foreach to loop through an array and you only want a cross section of the results, try using the array_slice function instead of using a counter variable.