Managing and Displaying New Fields for WordPress Users

WordPress provides a lot of different hooks that allow you to expand on user management capabilities. You can easily add a new field or attribute for any user and make it editable in the user profile. You can restrict the edit mode to only Administrators and you can visualize any of these new user data points in the main Admin Users table.

So, today, I will write a quick WP Plugin that adds a new user field called credits to all users, which can be updated by Admins in the user profile. The WordPress plugin will also display that field in the Users table along with a new read only field that captures users last login date and time.
Read more

WordPress Plugin with Background Process, Queue, and Debugging

WordPress Plugins are often used to run a large process in the background like importing, exporting, bringing data from other APIs, pushing data out, and other tasks that should run asynchronously. How do you do that? TechCrunch came out with wp-async-task and WP Background Processing extended that by adding the ability to queue tasks. The author already included a good sample plugin and article but I wanted to see if I can write a more basic example. So, today, I will create a WordPress plugin that uses WP Background Process to queue and run PHP tasks in the background.
Read more

How to insert or update multiple items in MySQL and WordPress?

You have a table with some data, lets say it is user information with emails, names, ages, etc. Now you need to insert 10 more rows of data but you don’t know if the 10 new rows are for new users or if they are attributes for users you already have in the database. This is a very common scenario where you need to figure out if you should update or insert.
Read more

World Map with D3 Microlibraries and rotated to contain Russia

It has been a while since I released the D3 Map Starter Kit and a lot has changed. The 4.0 version of D3 is modular, decentralized, and split into small libraries that you can use independently. It has changed some of the APIs so I have updated the World Map Template to work with D3 version 4, but how do we build a map with just the D3.js micro-libraries?
Read more

How to Convert a Bookmarklet to a Chrome Extension

Bookmarklets, or the ability to execute your own JavaScript code on any page, allows you to customize your browsing experience in many ways. A while ago I wrote some JS code that would simply remove all content from any page and only show images with zoom on click functionality. It works well as a bookmarklet but I wanted to see how easy it is to package this into a Chrome Extension. I am doing this for fun but there are some strong reasons like access to cross domain resources, access to network requests, and ability to share with others via the Chrome Store.

Here are some simple steps that show how to convert JavaScript code into a Chrome Extension
Read more

Using MAX and CASE to pivot MySQL data stored in EAV Model

Last week, I covered pivoting tabular data in JavaScript. But, often times, data is not stored like a CSV or excel sheet in a database. When flexibility is needed to cover potential future changes, like adding many new columns or removing old ones, we often see the EAV model being used to store data.

Consider the previous example of storing car data in rows with columns: id, make, color, and age. If you are just adding more rows, this works well. But, if you will be adding an uncertain number of new columns in the future (model, size, etc), or removing columns, it might make sense to use the EAV model.
Read more