Author: Tom (Page 19 of 427)

Start Writing WordPress Tutorials in these Gutenberg Times

August 19, 2022 / Tom

Saying “here’s how to write a plugin” is far too general. It gives no frame of reference for what you’re going to be covering, what the plugin is going to do, what the prerequisites are, or what the end result is going to be. It may even get a beginner’s hopes up only to let them down to leave them feel more confused by the time they’re done.

Saying “here’s how to write your first WordPress plugin” is a little bit better because it sets a level of expectation in terms of the level of experience required. If the reader is a new developer or if they are an experienced developer, it’s still going to be teaching them how to work within the confines of WordPress. Sure, there are a multiple ways to write plugins but learning how to get started is the first step towards seeing that.

Saying “here’s how to write a plugin that will read user profile information using the WordPress API to create a unique author page” is clear. It explains exactly what it’s going to do and lays out the different points of WordPress that will be used in the tutorial.

Even if the reader doesn’t know it yet, the author knows that, when putting something like this together, s/he is going to need to use a combination of:

templates or template parts,
the ability to read user metadata with the API,
safely render information from the backend to the frontend, and how to handle all of the checks in between to make sure nothing is passed up from the database to the frontend that doesn’t need to be or that’s something like an empty value.

Further, there’s an opportunity to to highlight some other best practices like sanitization, escaping, maybe internationalization, etc. All of that would be content for another article, but teasing it out can help. And this is speaking from experience.

So why bring all of this up?

WordPress, Writing Daily, and Deep Work

July 26, 2022 / Tom

I last wrote about the Magnitude of WordPress and said that the original version of the article was going to be much longer; however, the content was too scattered for me to try to bring it all together in a cohesive article.

So I’ve opted to separate them into at least a couple, if not three articles. If the last one was more outward focused on the status of WordPress and how we should think about as participants in its economy, this article is more inwardly focused on a few things about which I’ve been thinking.

The first thing I mentioned in the previous article that I didn’t cover was the following:

When I look back and see how much I used to write versus how much I’m publishing now (it’s been two months since my last post!), it’s weird.

But why “weird?”

At the time of this article, I’ve published 408 pages of content that dates back to October 3, 2010. For many, many years I wrote multiple times a week and for a long time I was writing almost daily specifically around various things regarding WordPress and software engineering within WordPress.

On WordPress, Writing Daily, and Deep Work

On one hand, I miss the frequency at which I was writing because I genuinely enjoy it and I think I’ve also lost some of proverbial muscle that comes with it (that is to say, I’m not as good as it as I once was – not to say I was necessarily good but I definitely do not feel as if I’m “in the habit” at the moment).

But a lot’s happened not to just to, y’know, the world over the last few years but also in my personal and and professional life.

On the Magnitude of WordPress

July 22, 2022 / Tom

I’ve been sitting on writing this particular post (it’s easy to say “a post like this” but this is actually the post so here we are 🙂) for some time. When I look back and see how much I used to write versus how much I’m publishing now (it’s been two months since my last post!), it’s weird.

The Magnitude of WordPress

About a week ago, Post Status published an article on Market Size and Market Shares: Thinking Bigger About the WordPress Economy. From what I’ve read in other newsletters and on others sites (I’m off social media for the summer ✌️) there’s mixed opinions on the data in the article.

None of those opinions have bearing on this post, though.

Instead, I think Post Status’ work makes a case for something many of us who work in the trenches with WordPress every day fail to consider: The stuff that we’re used to focusing on day-to-day is very different in terms of the magnitude of WordPress against the backdrop of the entire Internet.

That is to say, I’m not sure we can truly conceive just how far reaching WordPress is or how far reaching the impact decisions have regardless of whatever numbers of marketshare we read.

Or maybe that’s just me.

There’s More to WordPress Than FSE and Headless

May 19, 2022 / Tom

I don’t know if this is just me, but at the time of this writing I think that those who work with WordPress for a living – usually those described as being part of the “WordPress Community” – can be grouped into primarily two camps:

those who are focused on React for the Block Editor and Full-Site Editing (or FSE),
those who are focused on Headless WordPress specifically with technology like Next.js

That’s good because we know that we’re going to eventually have the Block Editor and FSE working together and we know the Headless ability of WordPress allows for an array of solutions that can be built using alternative front-end technologies.

Based on newsletters, tweets, blog posts, podcasts, and all of the other way media is shared for the application, though, I think we’re also forgetting the fact that WordPress is far more malleable than FSE and Next.js or, more simply put, locked into having React be the primary thing on which we focus.