Author: Tom (Page 117 of 427)

Project Management: Features (Milestones, Tasks, and Feedback Loops)

March 29, 2017 / Tom / 0 Comments

Project management is multifaceted, and the way we all go about breaking up the various aspects of our projects are likely contingent on how our place of employment does it, how the client wants to do it, or how we opt to do it ourselves.

For this post, when it comes to working specifically on any given project, I’m specifically talking about how we take the requirements of a project and break them up into more manageable pieces and deliverables for the people for whom we’re working. And in doing this, I think it’s important that they’re kept in the loop and can see progress at the proper checkpoints to garner feedback.

Despite changing various aspects of my business as I’ve learned more about what works and what doesn’t, one thing that’s remained consistent in how I handle the development-related aspects of features of a project.

Inheriting WordPress Projects: Tips For Development

March 28, 2017 / Tom / 0 Comments

If you’re running a business that focuses both on developing solutions from the ground-up or that focuses on implementing a custom solution in the context of pre-existing projects (or maybe both), then you’ve likely – at some point – been in the situation of inheriting WordPress projects.

Tackling projects from either handle brings its set of challenges – most of them welcome – but it seems to be far more common place for people to complain about working with a pre-existing codebase.

It’s not that I don’t get that feeling, but I do think there’s a level of immaturity in doing that. On the one hand, yes some codebases are outright terrible. But then some codebases aren’t that bad. In fact, I’d argue they are just a little bit different from how you’d develop it.

This is a case in which standards come into play, but I digress on this for now.

So let’s say you’re inheriting WordPress projects and you’re not particularly stoked about the codebase with which you’re working. How is it that you can still enjoy the work that you’re doing without feeling like you need to critique every aspect of whatever it is with which you’re dealing?

Thoughts on Community-Based Support Forums

March 27, 2017 / Tom / 0 Comments

Last week – and this weekend – I’ve been reading the comments on Pippin Williamson’s posts about his company’s decision to adjust prices on Easy Digital Downloads (and for those who are curious, I applaud it).

That’s a conversation in and of itself, and there’s a long comment thread that I think is worth reading for anyone involved in WordPess product development, but I digress as that’s the point of this post.

Reflections on a Price Increase

Some readers have left comments throughout the comment feed discussing the notion of community-based support forums. The whole thread is worth a read but:

EDD used to offer community-based support forums (in addition to their other support),
I’ve built and worked on products that had community-based support forums

And, in retrospect, I absolutely do not think it’s a wise decision for a WordPress-based product shop to offer them. I have my reasons, I’ll elaborate, but I want to be clear that I’m constraining this strict to WordPress because it’s what I know.

I can’t speak for any other segments of our industry.

Working with PHP Sessions and WordPress

March 24, 2017 / Tom

Earlier this week, I was talking with a friend and fellow developer about how I handle sessions in WordPress. Specifically, we were talking about how we take PHP Sessions and WordPress and make them work together (or how we adapt the former into the latter).

This is occasionally a point of interest for WordPress developers since WordPress, as an application, is stateless.

The neat thing, though, is that it gives us a variety of ways to approach this problem. But we’re not the first (and we definitely won’t be the last) to come across this problem.

Namespaces and Autoloading in WordPress

March 23, 2017 / Tom

Last week, I gave my presentation at WordCamp Atlanta on Namespaces and Autoloading. (the full title was Namespaces, Autoloading, and Improving Plugin Architecture but that’s a mouthful, isn’t it?)

Because of the nature of the talk, I’ve opted to write a post to accompany the post, share the slides, and share an example plugin GitHub to help support the talk.

So if you were in attendance, thank you(!) and here’s the post, I promised. And for those of you who didn’t attend, I hope this post still helps to demonstrate the concepts and topics I discussed at WordCamp.