Software Engineering in WordPress, PHP, and Backend Development
Towards the end of November, I shared a quick tip on how to extract a certain type of data with RegEx. As mentioned in the post, this is all part of the process of working to create a certain type of CSV.
And for anyone else who has worked on a similar process, the odds are pretty high that you follow a similar process each time to work on creating a CSV generator.
Comments on this post have been closed and the winner has been contacted. Thanks to all who participated!
Every now and then, I try to offer up several giveaways or opportunities that I think will be beneficial and useful to those of you who regularly read this blog.
Today, I’m happy to be offering a pretty sweet deal from the team over at ThemeFuse.
One of the points of frustration – or even dismay – that people have when they have a passion for working with WordPress is the fact that they don’t have an opportunity to commit anything to core. Or, rather, they don’t have the time that they wish they had to contribute anything to core.
And it can make you feel a little guilty (though it shouldn’t).
Sure, there are a lot of open source projects that are available many of which will merge a pull request in the same day if you were to offer one, but if you’re someone who uses WordPress daily for blogging, design, and/or development, then you likely have a strong urge to commit a patch to core and to see your name show up in the credits screen.
And no, it’s not for the point of having your name listed as a core contributor or for pride or anything like that, it’s for giving something back to the software that’s given you the ability to make a living, to make a side income, or just to build cool things for cool people.
But the challenge is actually finding the time.
How do you find the time between your day-to-day schedule between work, family, projects, and so on to pour through Trac in order to find something that you’re able to work on, to patch, to submit, and then to hope it gets merged into core?
WordPress Trac
The easy answer: You make time.
Easy. Just use a black hole like in Interstellar.
But, c’mon, is that really a fair answer to give to someone who really does want to give back or who feels a sense of dismay that they aren’t able to do so for whatever circumstances?
I’ve mentioned in previous posts in this series that I’m pretty big on how I organize my photos. That is, I use a service for backing them up, and a utility to make sure that they are also stamped with the proper date and time as per the EXIF data.
But another challenge that comes with managing not only photos, but other files such as MP3s (be it music, podcasts, eBooks, documents, and so on) is making sure that you don’t have duplicate files lying around the file system.
To be clear, sometimes you may want the same copy of multiple files. For example, say you buy an album from Hammock and then you drop a couple of tracks from them on a playlist or a, gasp, mix CD, then you wouldn’t want to delete both copies of the files.
In any case, if you’re trying to keep your pictures, documents, MP3s, and other files in as lean as shape as possible, I recommend Gemini for identifying, locating, and removing duplicate files.
On November 21st, I mentioned that I was going to be switching over to Postmatic for managing my blog comments on December 1st. It’s been a great transition so far, but I thought I’d spend a little bit of time highlighting my experience with the plugin.
Kinsta offers premium managed WordPress hosting for everyone, small or large. Powered by Google Platform and strengthened by Cloudflare, they take performance to the next level. All hosting plans include 24/7/365 support from their team of WordPress engineers. Get started with a free migration today.
If you are looking for WordPress guides and unbiased reviews, I recommend checking out WPKube. They also have an exclusive deals section.
© 2025 Tom McFarlin
Theme by Anders Noren — Up ↑