Author: Tom (Page 244 of 428)

There’s this perspective in the WordPress development community that results in a bit of divide among those who are involved. Granted, this is not the only perspective – it’s one of many – but it’s one that prevalent enough that most anyone who spends any amount of time chatting with peers online is likely to stumble across:

• Bad: Themes with a lot of options and features.
• Good: Themes without many options or features.

I’m oversimplifying this a little bit because the truth is not everyone thinks a theme without many options is a good thing (though we do love to get behind the “Decisions, Not Options” philosophy). Instead, it’s more like:

• Bad: Themes with a lot of options
• Good: Themes with a few options
• Weird: Themes with no options

Maybe “weird” isn’t the right word, maybe it is, but it’s a lot more concise than saying “something that doesn’t really fit between these two,” isn’t it?

To be clear, I’m not defending the idea that it’s okay for themes to have a lot of features and a lot of options and and a lot of proverbial knobs to turn, but I do question is it really productive continually talk about it?

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When working with arrays in PHP, specifically in the context of WordPress (which is obviously the norm around here), it’s become pretty common to see code using the foreach construct versus a vanilla for loop when working through an array.

Personally, I think it’s easier to read and that it works especially well when working with an associative array. That is, it’s really useful when you need to iterate through a collection that’s indexed with a unique set of keys that aren’t necessarily in numerical order (which is something you’re more like to see in a for loop).

Most who have been working in WordPress, let alone PHP, for sometime are likely familiar with everything that’s just been said. That is, when it comes to working with a collection, it’s easy to think

“Okay, so I’ve got a collection of information and I need to iterate through it. Working with a `foreach` loop is easy because it will allow me to traverse the list just like a `for` loop without having to initialize a variable, set an upper limit, and increment the iterator.”

Granted, maybe that’s a bit of a mouthful – maybe we just say “foreach loops are easier” – regardless, there’s another way that we can think about using language constructs like this.

That is, rather than think of them as ways to simply iterate through collections of data, we can also think of them as ways that inform the decisions that we make when building a user interface.

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Recently, Stephen shared an interesting site with me – User Onboarding – in which, as the site states, seeks to do the following:

User Onboarding is the process of increasing the likelihood that new users become successful when adopting your product.

Learn some lessons from how popular web apps do it!

It’s a really simple, straightforward site that highlights how various applications sign up, sign in, and continue using a product. Not only that, it also looks at what’s bad about the process, too.

In short, it’s a great site to peruse (or to throw in your RSS reader) if for no other reason to check out some of the ways in which other companies attempt to garner customers.

But principles, by nature, tend to be transferrable (not always, but many times). This means that some of the lessons explored throughout the various teardowns the site does are applicable to onboarding users with WordPress.

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Last week, I shared a few thoughts on how I think that major updates to an existing WordPress theme are actually more analogous to a new product rather than an update of the existing product.

That is, if a theme is identified by the way it presents the content of the blog, then it stands to reason updating the look and feel of the theme is changing the very thing that gives the theme its identity.

So, from there, it’s reasonable to ask the question: Once a theme’s design is locked in, should it ever change?

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Designers and developers, by their nature I think, are attracted to new things if for no other reason than to see how it’s designed, how it’s put together, how it functions, and so on. I don’t consider that a positive or a negative – it’s just a trait that some people have (and certain types of people exhibit it more than others).

That curiosity matched with the desire to constantly be improving at one does do for a living (or for a hobby) is what separates those who see the gig as “just a job” and those who see it as what they’re dedicating their lives to doing.

Yes – it can be expensive: Some like to purchase new devices as soon as they are released or new products as soon as they are released in order to familiarize themselves with them, and then to try to bring back what they’ve seen, learned, and experienced and build it into whatever they’re focused on creating.

But when you bring this approach into something like WordPress theme design and/or theme development, it has the obvious potential to improve future work but it can also negatively impact existing work.

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