Author: Tom (Page 215 of 430)

When it comes to launching the final version of a product be it a theme, plugin, or a web application regardless of it’s built on WordPress or not, source code control can be a life saver.

This is why most developers live and die by the source control system that they use.

Before going any further, this isn’t a debate as to which is better – Subversion, Git, Mercurial, whatever – as long as you’re versioning and tagging the code that you’re working on, you’ve got something to rollback to using if something goes wrong with your latest build.

Imagine that you’re in the following scenario:

You’ve got a project that you’ve been working on for a few weeks or for a few months and it’s about to go live. Everything is working great.

Then, shortly after it launches, something needs to be changed. And this isn’t like a small grammatical change. Instead, this is a change that requires some major refactoring and possibly the re-architecting of a significant feature.

Hope is Not a Strategy

Sure, you hope everything goes well, but there’s far more to it than that if you want to it do it correctly.

So what is the best way to go about doing this? Continue reading

One of the really neat things about working in the software development industry is that we have the ability to be as engaged with other people as much as we want or not.

That is, we have the ability to chat with people via Twitter, IRC, or Skype, and we have the ability to learn and educate other people through blogs, screencasts, meet-ups, and so on.

But all of this comes at a cost: We can get near instant feedback while in the process of giving a talk or after people have viewed a course that we spent hours preparing and editing.

Case in point, I recently received some feedback that said something along the following:

You speak in lightening speed with copy/paste codes.

Perhaps I do talk fast (though I deliberately try not to do so), and I certainly do not use “copy/paste codes.” But anyway. I digress.

Years ago, this would have been something that would have seriously bummed me out. I mean, here I am pouring my energy into trying to help other people learn something and it wasn’t well-received.

But now, years later, that’s not the case.

Continue reading

This post is part of a series on Sanitization with the WordPress Settings API. Here is Part 5.

Assuming that you’ve been following along with the majority of the posts in this series, then you know that we’ve been looking at ways to handle input sanitization and serialization in the WordPress Settings API from an object-oriented perspective.

As of now, we’ve got all of the necessary pieces for doing so, but we’ve not actually tied them all together. So in this post, I’m going to aim to do that in one of the many different ways this can be done.

I’ll talk about how to do it using the code we’ve written as well as some more advanced improvements that can be made were you to take this a few steps further.

Continue reading