Development

A very basic guide to hooks, actions and filters for WordPress

I originally wrote this post in August 2015 and published it on Red Dragon Creative’s site. Subsequently, Riaan and I have made the decision to close Red Dragon Creative and for me to focus on WordPress development under my own name. I still believe that the information in this post is valuable, and so I have chosen to republish it here.

Part of WordPress’s power is the fact that it is so extensible. The tools in the WordPress toolbox to achieve this are hooks, actions and filters. But some of the documentation can be very intimidating, so in less than 200 words I will provide you with a basic guide to hooks, actions and filters.

Hooks simply refer to where your custom code will be executed.

There are two types of hooks: action hooks and filter hooks.
Action hooks do something in your code. (You can either add or remove actions using the very handy and intuitive code: add_action or remove_action)

Filter hooks modify something in the code, so instead of doing something entirely new or different…it simply changes your code. The very intuitive code to add a filter is: add_filter.

That’s it, a very basic guide to hooks, actions and filters for WordPress.

Being a woman in tech

Hello blog,

This is a difficult blog to write and I am not sure where to categorize it. I will probably file it under development, which is where it belongs but it touches on a lot of things.

I am the daughter of a developer and women in tech were a part of my life, where my father spoke of his female colleagues in the same way as he spoke of his male colleagues and work social gatherings included both men and women. So for me, women in tech were not unicorns, and as they were spoken of as being equally competent as men. The first time that I encountered hostility in tech was in a forum and in all honestly it shocked me to the core. Also, being me, it pissed me off, but I dismissed it as being an isolated incident and not a reflection of the general tech community.

For the most part I kept on with tech in the background and I did not pay attention to what was going on in the tech community. In 2015 I went to my first tech meetup hosted by WordPress Joburg. I felt safe and welcome, especially when I made a comment that my ability to attend a meetup on weeknight would depend on getting a baby-sitter for my son and was met with the response of “Bring him with”. I have been an active member of the WordPress Joburg Community ever since and now am one of the co-organizers.

<sidenote> Of course being a woman comes with a level of being aware of background misogyny, both the unintentional systematic misogyny that permeates the world and the deliberate and malicious misogyny that forms part of the day-to-day world. In this regard I have a few advantages, being a white woman from a middle class family who studied law and was warned by my principal in the first few days of my articles about the inherent misogyny of the legal profession and given some tips to ignore it, combined with a low-level of neuroatypicality meant that I generally was able to ignore the effects of misogyny until my thirties.</sidenote>

My first in-person encounter with misogyny in the tech world happened in 2016, where I was made to feel like a completely unreasonable, trouble-making bitch for daring to be anything other than a sycophant when I spoke up at a meetup. In a not atypical reaction I did ask a fellow attendee privately whether I was being oversensitive or whether there was genuine hostility, they too had perceived hostility.

It is against this background that I read the New York Times’s 2014 article “Technology’s Man Problem”. I have some specific thoughts and comments:

Women who enter fields dominated by men often feel this way. They love the work and want to fit in. But then something happens — a slight or a major offense — and they suddenly feel like outsiders.

I never felt explicitly unwelcome in the tech community until the incident I described above, and that incident along with a collection of other comments and interaction made me consider walking away from the tech community 🙁

A culprit, many people in the field say, is a sexist, alpha-male culture that can make women and other people who don’t fit the mold feel unwelcome, demeaned or even endangered.

“It’s a thousand tiny paper cuts,” is how Ashe Dryden, a programmer who now consults on increasing diversity in technology, described working in tech.

A thousand tiny paper cuts is an excellent description and if you raise these incidents in isolation you look like you are blowing things out of proportion and if you try to create context by speaking of them in a larger picture you are accused of holding grudges and being hysterical and generally being unreasonable.

“We see these stories, ‘Why aren’t there more women in computer science and engineering?’ and there’s all these complicated answers like, ‘School advisers don’t have them take math and physics,’ and it’s probably true,” said Lauren Weinstein, a man who has spent his four-decade career in tech working mostly with other men, and is currently a consultant for Google.

“But I think there’s probably a simpler reason,” he said, “which is these guys are just jerks, and women know it.”

The choice for people who are uncomfortable with the “bro” culture is to try to change it or to leave — and even women who are fed up don’t always agree on how to go about making a change.

Firstly, yes #notallmen are jerks.
Secondly, I think that we should admit that there is unlikely to be one true way to make the change and should not overly stress about finding a homogeneous solution and be willing to support efforts to effect change even if they are not done the same way as we personally would have implemented them.

Writing code is a high-pressure job with little room for error, as are many jobs. But coding can be stressful in a different way, women interviewed for this article said, because code reviews — peer reviews to spot mistakes in software — can quickly devolve.

“Code reviews are brutal — ‘Mine is better than yours, I see flaws in yours’ — and they should be, for the creation of good software,” said Ellen Ullman, a software engineer and author. “I think when you add a drop of women into it, it just exacerbates the problem, because here’s a kind of foreigner.”

“I’m in no way saying that women can’t take a tough code review,” she added. “I’m saying that no one should have to take one in a boy-puerile atmosphere.”

As I have not worked in an environment with formal code-reviews, I cannot comment. But on anecdotal evidence and based on conversations with both men and women in tech my thoughts on this are:
1. Initially getting used to code reviews is tough. Learning to take any kind of constructive criticism is a skill, and considering that coding is an act of intellectual labour that is often accompanied by strong emotions, it is natural for coders to feel sensitive about feedback.
2. The biggest challenge in any code review is ego and preconceived notions.
3. Some men are intensely threatened by women and resent any feedback them. And I have heard guys say that they are much harsher in their reviews then some of their female colleagues and get far less grief about it.
4. People need to reframe code reviews from being threatening and personal attacks to being a form of mentorship and improvement. (Honestly, has any code not looked at some of their past code and gone “What! Why did I do it this way. I am much better now”

But the debate isn’t over. In fact, Ms. Shevinsky now finds herself in another argument. This time, however, she’s on the defensive with other women.

A prominent feminist in tech told her that she was doing a disservice to women by accepting Mr. Dickinson’s apology and working with him again. The conversation, Ms. Shevinsky said, was “hateful.”

Ms. Shevinsky says that she judges Mr. Dickinson “on his actions, how he is with other people in the company and with me,” and said that there was no contradiction in both working with Mr. Dickinson and supporting feminism in tech.

By virtue of being human people are going to make mistakes and be insensitive and possibly, unintentionally misogynistic. I believe that we should allow people to move on from their mistakes. As I stated above I also believe that we should allow women to have their own agency and allow for a diversity of approaches to women in tech.

Lea Verou, an incoming Ph.D. candidate in electrical engineering and computer science at M.I.T., wrote in a much read essay that women-only conferences and hackathons “cultivate the notion that women are these weak beings who find their male colleagues too intimidating.”

“As a woman,” she wrote, “I find it insulting and patronizing to be viewed that way.”

I strongly disagree with this view, and find that these environments allow for a different form of collaboration and openness, and to find it to be an environment that counters systematic, unconscious misogyny as well as outright hostility.

Love and (lots of) thoughts about being a woman in tech,
Trisha

The Turtle Moves

Hello Computer 🙂

The WordPress ecosystem works with an interaction between three components. The WordPress core, themes which change a website’s appearance and plugins which modify functionality.

At WordCamp Cape Town I attended a workshop presented by Jonathan Bossenger on writing your first WordPress plugin, and I set myself the deadline of 30 September to write my first plugin “The Turtle Moves” which is going to populate the end of posts with a random quote from Sir Terry Pratchett from a pre-defined quote collection. (Upon reflection I decided that the end of posts meant the very end after the loop has finished, and after the comment section.)

To start with I started reading the Codex’s documentation on Writing a Plugin and looking through Matt Mullenweg’s Hello Dolly code.

A WordPress plugin needs only one PHP file with a specifically formatted DocBlock. The Header requirements are handily listed in the WordPress Developer Plugin Handbook. The only requirement is to have the plugin name.

So, I started off by writing the header comment, in a file that I named the-turtle-moves.php I saved it in a local website in the plugin directory. As a plugin is a collection of PHP scripts, I opened my file with a <?php tag.

I adopted the approach that if I was not familiar with the function included in the plugin I hit the PHP manual docs, and so I also learned about mt_rand and explode as built-in PHP functions.

While my end goal was to have the plugin add a quote at the end of a post I decided that for the purpose of testing the initial functionality I was going to mimic Hello Dolly and have the quote echo on the admin screen. This was a good decision because it allowed me to copy some of Matt’s code directly, and when I got parse errors that prevented me from activating the plugin it kept me on an even keel without going down an anxiety spiral. Both parse errors that I encountered were caused by missing semi-colons, and I am grateful to the helpful contributors to Stack Overflow which pointed me in the right direction to debug.

After resolving those issues the biggest challenge that I had was finding the correct filter to use to insert the quote into the site. A problem that I had a couple of times is by using the filter I ended up removing other WordPress functionality, (e.g. the actual post content or the entire comments section). The moral of the story is that I need to learn more about WordPress action and filter hooks.

Once I figured out that the correct code was an action hook onto “after_loop” it was smooth sailing. I then zipped up my plugin and loaded it onto a different local test site where it worked as intended. I am proud that I got this plugin done. It is nothing spectacular but it was a very good first step into plugin development and getting an understanding of how plugin development works. If you are so inclined you can check out The Turtle Moves on GitHub.

Love and plugins,
Trisha

Programming is a craft.

At its simplest, it comes down to getting a computer to do what you want it to do (or what your user wants it to do). As a programmer, you are part listener, part advisor, part interpreter, and part dictator. You try to capture elusive requirements and find a way of expressing them so that a mere machine can do them justice.You try to document your work so that others can understand it, and you try to engineer your work so that others can build on it. What’s more, you try to do this all against the relentless ticking of the project clock. You work small miracles every day.

It’s a difficult job.

Andy Hunt & David Thomas, The Pragmatic Programmer.

A very basic guide to hooks, actions and filters for WordPress.

Hooks simply refer to where your custom code will be executed.

Filter hooks modify something in the code, so instead of doing something entirely new or different…it simply changes your code. The very intuitive code to add a filter is: add_filter.

That’s it, a very basic guide to hooks, actions and filters for WordPress.

WooCommerce Joburg Meetup with Roslyn Lavery

This is a long overdue post, on 2 June 2016 Roslyn Lavery from PayFast presented a talk on the Trends of Online Payments in South Africa. I am blogging about it in August. But, that is the nature of this year, life has been galloping on at an incredible pace!

This is a somewhat disjointed post because my notes are now a couple of months old, but here are some of the highlights from Roslyn Lavery’s talk.

Roslyn began by charting the progress of online payments, explaining that the trend began with products like air tickets and downloadable products but gradually increased to the space where we are today. (In the past week I have bought air tickets, books, hair dye and a membership online).

While PayPal has a strong international market share, the South African regulatory environment has resulted in a situation where they are an expensive provider.

The South African market is distinct from the international market where the majority people have credit cards, but the South African market where 20-30% of the market makes use of electronic funds transfers. About 1 percent of South African online commerce transactions are completed using cash on delivery.

The South African bankable population is strongly banked, with 78% of the bankable population having a bank account. The requirements to be regarded as part of the bankable population are meeting the legislated age requirements and having a disposable income.

While the majority of customers don’t perceive a difference between making payment online and in a physical store the banks do.

From a practical point of view, Roslyn recommended offering as many payment options as possible. The main difficulties that online retailers experience relate to showcasing products through their stock photography and the actual logistics of getting the products into their customers hands. The online space through products like WooCommerce and Shopify have made the technical side of running an online store easier than ever.

Throughout South Africa, the rate of fraudulent transactions using credit cards is about 1.5% while PayFast boasts an exceptional rate of less than 0.3% of all transactions. The highest level of fraudulent transactions takes place with resellable products.

The main benefits of using PayFast:

Strong support for both the merchant and the customer (this is a huge benefit to small businesses because it drastically decreases their support requirements).
PayFast offers integration with major e-commerce platforms including WooCommerce and Shopify
PayFast can accept international cards.

A few weeks after our meetup, PayFast also announced that they now support recurring billing!