Tom McFarlin | Practical WordPress Development

Using Kanban in WordPress Development

October 16, 2018

Periodically, others will ask how I manage to organize the various tasks, assets, resources, and related things throughout a project. First, I’ve decided to keep Pressware small (and this is for some reasons), so it allows me to run it differently than if it were, of course, larger.

Using Kanban in WordPress Development: A Basic Example

Secondly, I typically use a very scaled down version of a kanban board. For those who aren’t familiar, kanban is defined like this:

a Japanese manufacturing system in which the supply of components is regulated through the use of an instruction card sent along the production line.

To that end, I thought I’d share a brief overview of how I typically setup each column and each card as well as the tools I use to handle each task.

Quick Tip: Sanitize Post Data in WordPress

October 11, 2018

The more I begin to try to use PSR-2 coding standards and tools such as GrumPHP (and those related to it), the more I find that the quality of the code I write can be significantly improved in minor ways.

PHP Coding Standards with Code: PSR-2

And I don’t mean to sound contradictory: I mean, the idea of having something “significantly” improved in a “minor” way doesn’t exactly jive, does it?

But hear me out.

Imagine that you’re able to write clean, readable, maintainable code using coding standards that are not only modern, but built into PHP, play nicely with WordPress, and that is more readable than some of the other ways we may have done it in the past or when using other tools for coding standards.

Wouldn’t you be interested?

Developer Fitness in 2018: Quarter 3

October 10, 2018

At this point in the year, it’s evident that I’ve been sharing the things I’m doing outside of sitting at a computer most of the day.

Thus far, I’ve shared:

And if you’ve not read the rest of what I’ve been sharing since last year, you can read them using the following links below:

As we’re headed into the fourth quarter of the year, it’s the time that I take a look back at what I did this summer and how I stacked up against some of my goals and what I’ve been doing in the past year.

At the end of the previous post in this series, I mentioned:

So that’s the plan for the upcoming quarter. I’m sitting at 179 right now and I’d love to hover around 180 – 185 so if I can stay in that range, I’ll be happy.
I’m extremely interested to see how next month’s challenge pans out. And I’m eager, for those of you who are working to work out, to share your stories, posts, reflections, etc. on your blog, via email, or via Instagram.
With that said, here we go with 65 miles and counting.

So here’s how everything panned out over the course of the summer.

Live in the Feast Podcast, Season 3

October 9, 2018

It’s been over a year since I’ve done any public speaking or participated in any podcasts for any significant amount of time. This is large because I was focusing on work and all things outside of it.

But when my friend Jason shot me an email earlier this year if I’d participate in his Live in the Feast podcast, it was an easy decision.

Live in the Feast, Season 3

I’ve had the pleasure of knowing Jason for some time over the last couple of years.

We both met on Twitter, though we’ve [regrettably] yet to meet face-to-face, and share a few common interests the least of which is not The Walking Dead (to the point where we had our Slack channel with others for discussing the episode).

But I digress.

In the most recent episode of his podcast, I had a chance to talk about the following:

Blogging, Balancing Work and Family, and Building a Business that Lasts

If you don’t bother to read the rest of this post, you can check out the episode page for more information.

Working Title: A Question and Answer Podcast with Potential

October 8, 2018

Last week, I took the entire week off of blogging and all things related to work and social media. My wife and I celebrated ten years of marriage back in April and just had the time to celebrate it at the end of September.

Life happens, right?

Anyway, one of the things that’s interesting about taking time off is that it takes a day or two to really decompress, you know? You have to mentally get out of the mindset of work, of keeping up with your apartment or home and being a parent (if you are a parent).

We spent the majority of the time literally doing nothing but sitting on the beach and reading. But during time at dinner, we’d talk about various things such as our goals for certain things we have planned.

Working Title: On The Beach

And for me, one of the ideas I’ve been toying with for sometime now is the idea of starting a podcast. But the thing that anyone who’s anyone doing a podcast faces are several inevitable questions.