Author: Tom (Page 229 of 428)

From WooThemes: The Importance of Focus

February 11, 2015 / Tom / 0 Comments

Early last week, WooThemes announced that they were shutting down their Twitter support channel. You can read the entire post here, but there were a few quotes in the article that I really liked.

WooThemes Support

First:

And a lot to say. And that pretty quickly, questions get technical and DMs and 140 characters are not ideal facilitators of such things.

Secondly:

Everyone with a smart phone has a soap box.

With our users being of the techie variety most are on Twitter and it’s a space where we frequently get questions about products, potluck inquiries, reports of glitches, panicked alerts about problems, shout-outs, suggestions et al. It’s a mixed bag!

And finally:

But after letting @WooSupport run for a while realised what it was actually doing was creating an expectation that we never intended to meet which was that we were able to actually give support over Twitter.

The article also goes on to discuss interesting things such as how support requests are unique, individual problems are unique, and managing support via Twitter versus a dedicated ticket (like in ZenDesk) can be problematic.

Props to them for doing this.

You Know The Least About a Project…

February 10, 2015 / Tom / 0 Comments

Of the developers I know and respect (or who are worth their weight in gold code) have often expressed this negative feeling that occurs at the end of the project.

You know: The one where you feel like the code could be better, the architecture could be better, the feeling that there’s so much room for refactoring, and so on and on it goes.

It’s practically the total opposite of when a project starts. That is, you set out with this clear goal in mind of what you want to achieve and are excited by the prospect of building this pristine system that’s going to be a work of art – it’ll be some of the best code that you’ve ever written.

Until it’s not.

Searching with Substrings in WordPress

February 9, 2015 / Tom / 0 Comments

Let’s say you’re in the process of building some type of search mechanism using WP_Query and you want your users to be able to run the search using part of a string.

That is, let’s say that you’re searching Companies (which is a custom post type) and some of the company’s names is “Awesome Code.” The user doesn’t know this because you’ve built a huge database and have been wildly successful with your app.

So let’s say the user opts to try to run a search using the fragment of ‘awe’ or ‘some’ or ‘code’ or some fragment variation thereof – how are we supposed to be able to pull back results like that?

The FUD of WordPress Competition

February 6, 2015 / Tom / 0 Comments

If you hang around WordPress long enough – or arguably any community long enough – then you’re likely to see certain conversations show up again and again.

Right now, it’s undeniable that WordPress has massive marketshare and that it’s doing a good job of maintaining that; however, there’s questions as to whether or not WordPress can grow beyond what it currently has.

This is true for a variety of reasons the least of which isn’t the fact that there are other new content management systems cropping up much more frequently than others.

This makes us nervous. Conversations start, blog posts go up (I guess this one is included, I dunno – I tend to take a different approach), and then FUD begins to fuel more of the conversation.

But I think that’s the problem: We forgo where we’ve been, where are, and where we can head, then we look to our and left and our right and feel like we’re doing something less superior.

What’s that all about?

An Interview with WPEka

February 5, 2015 / Tom

WPEka is a site that’s been around since 2011 and has been offering a variety of resources to WordPress users, designers, and developers ever since.

This past week, I had the chance to be interviewed by Disha who works for the company.

WPEka

Overall, I had a lot of fun. The questions were great and I’m always a fan of being able to talk with others who are plugged into the WordPress economy in some way.