Labs

Labs are hands-on coding projects that you build along with Tonya as she explains the code, concepts, and thought processes behind it. You can use the labs to further your code knowledge or to use right in your projects. Each lab ties into the Docx to ensure you have the information you need.

Each lab is designed to further your understanding and mastery of code. You learn more about how to think about its construction, quality, maintainability, programmatic and logical thought, and problem-solving. While you may be building a specific thing, Tonya presents the why of it to make it adaptable far beyond that specific implementation, thereby giving you the means to make it your own, in any context.

0 Videos Runtime December 8, 2017

Lab Introduction

In this episode, you and I will do the following together: We’ll talk about the intent of this lab and what you should get out of it. I’ll show you the different end results of the customizations you’ll do. Step-by-step, you and I will walk through setting up your machine for this lab. We’ll talk about how you should do the lab. Spoiler alert: do it with me. Make sure you’ve already got your local machine setup for development. You can check either of these labs to make sure you have Composer and Git on your machine: For the setup, […]

16 Videos 02:21:26 Runtime December 8, 2017

Customizing the “Read More” Link in Beans

A common theme customization is to change the “read more” link. The default in the Beans framework is “Continue reading »”. But what if you want to read “Discover more”? How would you do that? Or what if you it to look like a button? How about changing the icon to something else? In this hands-on coding lab, you will 9+ customizations in your Beans child theme to fit your project’s needs while you learn about Beans and UIKit.

0 Videos Runtime October 12, 2017

Optimization, Review, & Housekeeping

We’re done with our plugin, but we do have an opportunity for optimization as well as housekeeping. It’s a good practice to walk through your code when you’re done to: re-evaluate look for optimization opportunities do some housekeeping like commenting, formatting, and cleanup and ensuring everything in a file supports the intent of that file. Let’s walk through our Metadata Module together.

0 Videos Runtime October 11, 2017

Wrap it Up

WooHoo! You did it! I’m so proud of you. Whew that was a long, long lab. But it was more than just building a reusable meta box module. My intent was to help you learn about: the Reusable Mindset – developing how you think about software, quality, and costs Architecture – developing how you layout your code Advanced programming concepts for filtering, merging, recursively merging and replacing, and remapping of arrays, as well as assigning a callable to a variable and then invoking it. Tell me what you think Now I want to hear from you. What do you think? […]

0 Videos Runtime October 11, 2017

Walk Through & Test Our Save Function

We’re nearly done with our save functionality. Let’s walk through it and talk about how it works. We’ll also manually test each piece of it to ensure it’s performing as expected (i.e. expected behavior). We’ll fix a problem too. We’ll also talk about and explore how to assign a callable to a variable and then invoke it like this: Here’s the link to Callable in Docx for you.

0 Videos Runtime October 11, 2017

Fix the Default Merge

In the last episode, we saw the ‘meta_key’ configuration in our custom fields. That is coming from our default configuration model. Since there’s nothing to overwrite it during the recursive merge in the configuration store, it is added into our configuration. How can we remove it? Let’s talk about that in this episode. We’ll talk about protecting your module’s code when selecting the strategy to implement.

0 Videos Runtime October 11, 2017

Remap Custom Fields Config for Save

To make our save functionality reusable, we need to remap our custom fields’ configurations to rearrange and group them into defaults, delete state, and sanitizer function. Although you could do it in the configuration model itself, that requires you to be redundant, repeating the meta key over and over. Don’t do that. Instead, let’s build a function that programmatically remaps (rearranges) what we need for our save by grouping the keys together.

0 Videos Runtime October 11, 2017

Is it Okay to Save?

We abstracted the code that checks all of the various states to determine if it’s okay to save the custom fields into the database, i.e. continue processing the meta box. In this episode, you’ll add new checks for autosave, ajax, and cron (future posting).

0 Videos Runtime October 10, 2017

Get Only the Meta Box Keys From ConfigStore

We have a problem with our architecture. Do you know what it is? We have no way to differentiate and fetch only the keys for a specific component or module. In your work, you’ll likely have multiple modules using the ConfigStore. For example, you may have shortcodes, widgets, meta boxes, and custom post types all loading configurations into the store. How can you get only the configurations for the meta boxes? Right now, you can’t. In this episode, we’ll walk through a refactoring process to provide the means of fetching keys for just that component or module level. You’ll add […]

0 Videos Runtime October 10, 2017

Get Configuration or Parameter from the Store

Let’s get our configuration from the store. We’ll work on error checking too to handle when the store key does not exist. Next, we’ll work on getting a specific parameter from the store and handling error checking. Time to throw an Exception and develop your own error messages.