Death By (Exercise Rep Calculator)
A small javascript calculator for determining the number of reps completed during a “Death By” EMOM workout.
Using Airtable to learn React
The past few weeks I’ve started to learn the React library more seriously with a few practice projects. I learned of Airtable from a CSS-Tricks article a while back which goes into more detail of what Airtable is but the TL;DR might sum it up as a Google Sheets on steroids with API endpoints. In the article author, Chris Coyier used Airtable and Javascript to create a favorite Emoji Poll and I’ve recreated it using React. This is entirely a front-end project, so the API key is exposed. If you are interested in using Airtable in production this article (Airtable As A Minimum Viable Database For Your ReactJs Project) got me started.
If you are interested in learning React please feel free to pick it apart. Happy Hacking!
Resources:
- Inspiration: How To Use Airtable as a Front End Developer
- Database: Airtable
- Airtable As A Minimum Viable Database For Your ReactJs Project
- Bar Chart: Recharts
- Editor: CodeSandbox
I’d like to thank TyrantWarship from Twitch. I’ve been streaming some of my learning experiences to my Twitch channel and TyrantWarship would often pop by an help me through many of my roadblocks.
How I am styling Select elements
I’ve complained about styling forms before on this blog. But things have gotten better over the last several years and we are starting to see some browser consistency. I did run into a problem with select elements to find that adding pseudo classes won’t work, which is my usual go to for adding font icons to… things. So I tried something else, using an SVG as a background image and I think it came out pretty great.
Custom Animated Submit Button for Ninja Forms
Ninja Forms is easily one of my favorite WordPress plugins. It’s one of the most design agnostic form building plugins I’ve come across and has saved me time on every project. Every now and then a designer asks for some UI that isn’t easily accommodated by most form markup. I needed to animate a submit button with a fancy hover effect and an icon font. I had already styled some anchor markup with the same effect (Codepen below) and was hoping to apply it to the site’s forms with relative ease.
I reached out to the WP Ninjas team and they were extraordinarily helpful in pointing me in the direction of Custom Field Templates, which I was previously unaware of. Below demonstrates how to set up your own Custom Field Template, I am creating a Submit button, but this works with other field types as well! If you are creating your own themes, you can simply create a “ninja-forms” directory, “templates” directory, and a “fields-submit.html” file inside of your theme as shown below and you’ll be all set to continue.
If you are using a Child Theme, create the same folder structure, but will also need to add the following code in your functions.php file for Ninja Forms to recognize the template directory. More information here.
https://gist.github.com/philhoyt/efa932256a052d65f769fb10dda0508d
Inside of the “fields-submit.html” file, I am going to take the markup from the animated anchor link in Codepen and modify it to accept information from Ninja Forms. You can, of course, use your own markup.
https://gist.github.com/philhoyt/d6d36aca6c14f235df8287f94fd379c4
Then I took the CSS from the Codepen and place it in style.css, as well as called Font Awesome in functions.php,
Before
After
Generate Post Title and Slug from Advanced Custom Fields
I often need to create post titles in WordPress based on fields I’ve generated using Advanced Custom Fields. Below is an example that assumes we have a Custom Post Type registered to “staff” and two Custom Fields with the name of “first_name” and “last_name”. Using the “update_value” hook provided by Advanced Custom Fields and “wp_update_post” I am able to update the Slug and Post Title using the values given in the respective fields.
| // Create Title and Slug | |
| function acf_title( $value, $post_id, $field ) { | |
| if ( get_post_type( $post_id ) == 'staff' ) { | |
| $new_title = get_field('first_name', $post_id) . ' ' . $value; | |
| $new_slug = sanitize_title( $new_title ); | |
| // update post | |
| wp_update_post( array( | |
| 'ID' => $post_id, | |
| 'post_title' => $new_title, | |
| 'post_name' => $new_slug, | |
| ) ); | |
| } | |
| return $value; | |
| } | |
| add_filter( 'acf/update_value/name=last_name', 'acf_title', 10, 3 ); |
Disabling the title at a custom post type level will, unfortunately, remove the clickable permalink below the title that I often use. To combat that I create a very simple metabox with the permalink. Demonstrated below.
| /** | |
| * Adds a meta box | |
| */ | |
| function simple_meta_box() { | |
| add_meta_box( 'prfx_meta', ( 'View Post' ), 'simple_meta_box_callback', 'staff', 'side', 'high' ); | |
| } | |
| add_action( 'add_meta_boxes', 'simple_meta_box' ); | |
| /** | |
| * Outputs the content of the meta box | |
| */ | |
| function simple_meta_box_callback( $post ) { | |
| echo '<a href="'; | |
| the_permalink(); | |
| echo '" class="button button-small" target="_blank">View Profile</a>'; | |
| } |
How WordPress default themes add Google Fonts
I spent some time diving into Twenty Seventeen in preparation to develop for the theme directory. I was curious as to how the developers of very popular theme would enqueue a Google Font. I am no stranger to using a @import tag in the stylesheet, but I assumed there had to be a more sustainable solution. What I found was a thoughtful way of adding a font which I have digested into a gist below.
Handling your Google Fonts in this manner allows translators of your theme to disregard a font that may hinder the translation.
If you are in a similar position as I am, trying to sharpen your WordPress skillset, I highly recommend tearing into some of the default themes. They are a plethora of knowledge.
Free Plugins to Enhance your WordPress Experience!
The WordPress UI is one of the best CMS’s on the market and continues to improve with every version. That being said there are a few features that seem to be missing which could make your experience a whole lot better and I am going to show you a few plugins to fill that void!
Media File Sizes
The Media Library leaves a lot to be desired, with Media File Sizes we can add a new column showing the file size of your media. Allowing you to sort by size and identify any media that might be taking up a bit to much space on your site and possibly causing slow load times.
Enable Media Replace
Sometimes you upload an image and realize it needs to be replaced, maybe you’ve already posted it in a few places on your site. By default, WordPress doesn’t give you a way to swap it out with Enable Media Replace you can replace your media sitewide! (Note: I have experienced some weirdness when used in conjunction with Jetpack’s Photon)
Check out Enable Media Replace
Duplicate Post
I find Duplicate Post particularly useful when dealing with posts that have a large amount of custom fields or sites using page builders. You find yourself creating a bunch of pages with similar layouts or content and instead of having to copy and paste or dragging and dropping over and over again you just want to make a duplicate and change the content our a bit. Duplicate Post solves this!
Disable Title
I often find I don’t want my page headline to be what the title of the page is. There are a few ways to solve this, but I’ve found the least involved process is to disable the title and add my own H1 heading in the editor and with Disable Title you can do that!
Big Bold Button
I’ve been on a spree of creating button styles as well as scalable elements using em’s. Combining those ideas I created the below button. I imagine it being a big call to action.
http://codepen.io/philhoyt/pen/xOjmBP
Adding a ‘Client’ User Role to WordPress
In an effort to make a better boilerplate my co-worker Jim Floss and I set out to create a new User Role inside our WordPress client sites. This role closely resembles the Editor role and Admin role, but allows us to turn different functionality on a per-client basis if need be, but by default locks them out of many things such as updates and plugins. I didn’t see much information on cloning a role and removing functionality online so I figured I would put it up here! Enjoy.
/**
* Adds a 'Client' user role
* https://codex.wordpress.org/Roles_and_Capabilities
*/
add_action(‘init’, ‘add_client_role’);
function add_client_role() {
global $wp_roles;
if ( ! isset( $wp_roles ) )
$wp_roles = new WP_Roles();
$adm = $wp_roles->get_role(‘administrator’);
//Adding a ‘new_role’ with all admin caps
$wp_roles->add_role(‘client’, ‘Client’, $adm->capabilities);
}
add_action(‘init’, ‘revoke_client_capabilities’, 10);
function revoke_client_capabilities() {
$caps_to_remove = array(
‘update_core’,
‘activate_plugins’,
‘install_plugins’,
‘update_plugin’,
‘edit_plugins’,
‘edit_themes’,
‘export’,
‘import’,
‘create_users’,
‘manage_options’,
‘switch_themes’ // etc
);
$custom_role = get_role(‘client’); // Edit according to your role as it was declared when added
foreach($caps_to_remove as $cap) {
$custom_role->remove_cap($cap);
}
}