Author: Tom (Page 167 of 428)

A WordPress Plugin Bootstrap File

April 19, 2016 / Tom / 0 Comments

The longer I work with building custom solutions for others in the form of WordPress plugins, the more I am a fan of having a WordPress plugin bootstrap file.

Honestly, this isn’t anything new, but it’s something I like to discuss periodically because the methods in which we build plugins, the ways posts can become outdated, and the strategies that we employ as we get better at what we do for a living change over time.

At least I hope they do. If you’re doing the same thing now that you were three or four years ago, then you’re a stellar developer. Or you haven’t grown that much. :)

But that’s content for another post.

When it comes to the work I do for others, the work is primarily in the creating plugins (which I enjoy building). So it’s only natural that I’d have things to add continually to this topic, right?

We Need to Be Writing Good Changelogs

April 18, 2016 / Tom

Writing good changelogs seems to be one of those things that many of us talk about doing talk about wanting to see, but often don’t do it.

Or maybe it’s better to say that we often complain about the types of changelogs that we see, but don’t offer any advice of updates them ourselves.

And maybe that’s not the right thing to say. I mean, we do offer advice on how to update them. But does that stop us from writing better changelogs ourselves?

Image Optimization With ImageOptim

April 15, 2016 / Tom / 0 Comments

Image optimization is one of those things that anyone involved in web development should be thinking about if they aren’t doing so already. Personally, I think if you’re involved in the field, you eventually bump up against the need for it when working on a project for yourself or someone else.

And in WordPress, there are a lot of plugins and other options that we have for optimizing our images (and other assets. But what if you’re looking to do so while working with files on your local machine there are some different ways of doing so.

I’m actually in the process of migrating some different sites to different hosts right now (speaking of which, this may be interesting reading for those of you who manage sites on shared or budget hosting).

In the process of doing so, I’m taking the opportunity to optimize all of the images that are being migrated and optimizing them. Bt I’m not using a plugin or other web-based tool to do it.

Instead, I’m using ImageOptim.

Would You Be Interested in Premium Content?

April 14, 2016 / Tom

Premium content is one of those things that means different things to different people whenever it comes to blogging. Sometimes, people think it refers to a pay-to-play forum; others believe that it has to do with some “I’ll give you my email address in exchange for your e-book.”

I’m not knocking any of these approaches, but that’s not what I’m trying to do. I’ll come back to this momentarily, though.

If you’ve been visiting this site in your browser for the last few days, you’ve likely seen something like this:

Would You Be Interested in Premium Content?

And back when I first launched The First Version, the pop-up worked quite well. In fact, this dialog is doing a great job generating leads, too. However, more than a few of you have expressed interested in premium content while simultaneously expressing frustrations with this approach.

So in exchange for disabling the dialog, I thought I’d write a post and share an opportunity to sign up for more information in the context of its page.

Installing WP-CLI with MAMP

April 13, 2016 / Tom / 0 Comments

About four years ago, I shared a post about WP-CLI. It wasn’t exactly a new project at the time, but it was far less developed than it is now.

The WP-CLI Homepage

As I mentioned in yesterday’s post, one of the things that we’re doing with is making sure that all of our work is unit tested from the initial version.

And when it comes to unit testing in PHP, many of us are familiar with PHPUnit; however, when it comes to unit testing plugins that are integrated with WordPress, it helps to have a test environment set up.

Sure, it’s possible to set aside a test database, test content, and then defined mock objects based on interfaces (and I’m not here to dissuade anyone from doing that). But WP-CLI offers a much easier way to go about doing just that in a more automated manner.

But first, it’s important to make sure that it’s correctly installed on your system.