In a world that moves this fast, ideas must be prototyped, tested and launched in as little time as possible. Gone are the days when companies and individuals could afford to spend months designing a page only to find out that buyers weren’t even interested in the product it featured. Reaching product-market fit, or the […]
Continue reading %The Ultimate Guide to Landing Page Builders for Startups%
Event-based programming is a strange topic for PHP developers. In a language as procedural; events are little more than function calls. Nothing happens between events, and all meaningful code is still blocking.
Languages like JavaScript show us what PHP could be like if event loops were at the center. Some folks have taken these insights and coded them into event loops and HTTP servers. Today we’re going to create an HTTP server, in PHP. We’ll connect it to Apache to serve static files quickly. Everything else will pass through our PHP HTTP server, based on Icicle.
You can find the example code at http://ift.tt/1LgVnKK
Continue reading %Build a Superfast PHP Server in Minutes with Icicle%
This article is part of a web development series from Microsoft. Thank you for supporting the partners who make SitePoint possible.
In a few talks and interviews I lamented about a phenomenon in our market that’s always been around, but seems to be rampant by now: the one of the Full Stack Overflow developer. Prompted by Stephen Hay on Twitter, I shall now talk a bit about what this means.
Full Stack Overflow developers work almost entirely by copying and pasting code from Stack Overflow instead of understanding what they are doing. Instead of researching a topic, they go there first to ask a question hoping people will just give them the result.
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In many cases, this works out. It is amazing what you can achieve by pasting things you don’t understand, that people who know what they are doing put out there.
I am not having a go at Stack Overflow here. It is an incredible resource and it is hard to create a community like this and not drown in spam and mediocrity (trust me, I am an admin on several technical Facebook groups).
We had that problem for a long time. I challenge anyone learning PHP to not simply copy the code examples in the notes. For years, code reference sites have given us answers we wanted, but didn’t need. Heck, even Matt’s Script Archive is probably the source for many a spam mailer as people used formmail.pl without knowing what it does.
I am, however, worried about how rampant this behaviour is today. Of course, it is understandable:
We, as a community, are partly to blame for breeding this kind of developer:
Of course, you can call me a grumpy old so-and-so now and tell me that the concept of learning the basics in software is an outdated concept. The complexity of today’s products makes it almost impossible to know everything and in other, highly successful environments using lots of packages and libraries is par for the course. Fine, although we seem to be understanding that software as a whole might be more broken than we care to admit, and this might be one of the causes.
There are several problems with Full Stack Overflow development:
Continue reading %The Full Stack Overflow Developer%
A barcode is a machine readable image that encapsulates some data about the object to which it’s attached to. A Quick Response Code (QR Code) is a popular type of barcode for mobile use due to its fast readability and greater storage capacity compared to ordinary barcodes.
In this tutorial I will create a Cordova app which can scan QR Codes and store data obtained from decoding the QR Codes. To scan the barcode I will use the BarcodeScanner Cordova plugin.
Continue reading %Scanning a QR Code with Cordova%
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Welcome to yet another part of our "Mastering WP_Query" series. How are we doing so far? I hope you're enjoying these tutorials as much as we're enjoying writing them.
In this tutorial, you're going to learn about the properties and methods of the WP_Query class. But first, I think it's appropriate to talk about what "properties" and "methods" are in a class.
Shall we?
In PHP, there's a way to write code in a cleaner way: object-oriented programming, or OOP. With OOP, we use "classes" as blueprints—I took the term from one of the classic posts of Code Tuts+, "Object-Oriented PHP for Beginners" by Jason Lengstorf:
A class, for example, is like a blueprint for a house. It defines the shape of the house on paper, with relationships between the different parts of the house clearly defined and planned out, even though the house doesn't exist.
(And remember that WP_Query is an essential class of the WordPress core.)
When you understand the notion of PHP classes, "properties" and "methods" become extremely easy to understand since the words are just synonyms for "variables" and "functions". Yep, properties are variables of a PHP class and methods are functions of a PHP class.
Now we've covered what they are, let's get to know each of those properties and methods.
Warning: It wouldn't be wise to change the properties directly. As the Codex says, you should interact with them using the methods of WP_Query.
Let's begin with the properties, or the variables, of the WP_Query class.
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$queryThis property stores the query passed to the $wp_query object.
$query_varsThis property stores an associative array of the variables (and their values) of $query.
$queried_objectThis property stores the currently queried object, like the $post object if it's a post query or the $author object if it's an author query.
$queried_object_idThis property stores the ID of the queried object.
$postsThis property stores the posts returned from the query.
$post_countThis property stores the number of posts for the current query.
$found_postsThis property stores the number of posts without the LIMIT clause of the SQL query.
$max_num_pagesThis property stores the number of pages—it's calculated by dividing $found_posts by $posts_per_page.
$current_postThis property stores the index number of the current item in the Loop. For example, it's -1 if the Loop has just started and it's incremented by the next_post() method.
$postThis property stores, well, the current post.
$is_{conditional}The following properties are stored as booleans, giving information about the current post's status:
$is_single: Checks if it's a single post of any post type (except "attachment" and "page" post types) or not.$is_page: Checks if it's a page or not.$is_archive: Checks if it's an archive page or not.$is_preview: Checks if it's a post preview or not.$is_date: Checks if it's a date-based archive page or not.$is_year: Checks if it's a year-based archive page or not.$is_month: Checks if it's a month-based archive page or not.$is_time: Checks if it's a time-based (hourly, minutely or secondly) archive page or not.$is_author: Checks if it's an author's archive page or not.$is_category: Checks if it's a category archive page or not.$is_tag: Checks if it's a tag archive page or not.$is_tax: Checks if it's a taxonomy archive page or not.$is_search: Checks if it's a "search results" page or not.$is_feed: Checks if it's a feed or not.$is_comment_feed: Checks if it's a comment feed or not.$is_trackback: Checks if it's a trackback or not.$is_home: Checks if it's the main blog page or not.$is_404: Checks if it's a 404 error page or not.$is_comments_popup: Checks if it's a comments popup window or not.$is_admin: Checks if it's the administration panel or not.$is_attachment: Checks if it's an attachment or not.$is_singular: Checks if it's a single post of any post type (including "attachment" and "page" post types) or not.$is_robots: Checks if it's a query for the robots.txt file or not.$is_posts_page: Checks if it's the "Posts Page" (set on the "Reading Settings" page in the admin panel) or not.$is_paged: Checks if it's a paginated query and it's not the first page.Now that we're done with the properties, let's move on to the methods (functions) of the WP_Query class.
init()This method simply initializes the object, setting all properties to NULL, 0 or FALSE.
parse_query( $query )This method uses the $query property to parse the query and populate all other properties (except $posts, $post_count, $post and $current_post).
parse_query_vars()This method reparses the query variables.
get( $query_var )This method fetches a given query variable.
set( $query_var, $value )This method sets the given query variable to a specific value.
&get_posts()This method returns the posts requested by the query and populates the $posts and $post_count properties.
next_post()This method increments the $current_post index and advances to the next post in $posts, returning the current post object. (This method must be used inside a Loop to work properly.)
the_post()This method sets the global $post variable with the next post's data. (This method must be used inside a Loop to work properly.)
have_posts()This method checks if there are any posts left to work on, and returns FALSE if there aren't. (This method must be used before a Loop to work properly.)
rewind_posts()This method simply resets the $current_post and $post properties.
&query( $query )This method calls two of its sibling methods, parse_query() and get_posts(), and returns the result of get_posts().
get_queried_object()This method returns the queried object. (It sets $queried_object if it's not already set.)
get_queried_object_id()This method, similar to the one above, returns the queried object's ID ($queried_object_id).
Quick Tip: If there's an ampersand before a method, it means that the method returns by reference.
I hope I managed to make it clear for you what "properties" and "methods" mean for classes. And if you understood the purpose of the properties and methods of the WP_Query class, I can say that I've done a decent job!
Do you have anything to add to this article? Share your thoughts with us in the Comments section below. And if you liked the article, don't forget to share it with your friends.
See you in the next part of the series!
