Software Engineering in WordPress, PHP, and Backend Development
About a month ago, I talked about some of the projects that were in the Pressware Pipeline two of which included the following:
As of today, these two projects are officially launched and I couldn’t be more excited. That is, Mayer is now available for self-hosted installations, and The Pressware Shop is now open.
If you head over to the WordPress.org homepage and click on the About link, you’ll be taken to a page that, y’know, tells what WordPress.org is all about, what the software can be used for, some history, and so on.
Then, there are also links to various WordPress-related collateral such as logos and graphics, fan art, the GPL, the project roadmap, and the philosophy.
Wait, what? A philosophy?
Exactly. WordPress – a piece of software – has a philosophy. It’s a really, really neat page that I think everyone who is involved with WordPress – be it designers, developers, or users – should read. It’s not technical, it’s easy to understand, and it helps inform us what the software is all about.
As far as developers are concerned, there are a number of things in the philosophy that I believe we give excellent lip service, but we don’t actually practice, abide, or behave in such a way that we support the philosophy.
That’s a longer post for another time.
Anyway, though there’s a number of things in the philosophy that could be discussed (and probably ultimately will be :), one of the many things that we’ve forsaken is the “out of the box” philosophy.
In previous posts, I’ve talked about the WordPress Coding Standards, and the importance of documenting your code, but I’ve not actually spent a lot of time discussing how easy it is to actually generate documentation for your themes.
And by documentation, I mean an actual site that provides your DocBlocks such in a clean and organized fashion – you know, sites that are generated by tools like phpDocumentor.
An example of a site generated by phpDocumentor.
In other posts, I’ve mentioned that I use MAMP Pro for part of my development stack, so if you’re looking for steps to install phpDocumentor, it’s actually really easy to do.
Every now and then, I’ll get questions via email, Twitter, or blog comments that I want to answer. The thing is, answer in and of itself would be longer than the original blog post itself so I try to keep it concise for the sake of not detracting too much from the initial post.
When that happens, I usually respond as much as I can without going over board, but I actually do keep a copy of the questions so that I can answer them later.
And that normally goes well on days like today.
For those developers who are coming to WordPress from other platforms such as .NET or other major database driven system where they are responsible for devising their own database schema, one of the problems that’s often seen in the WordPress-world is this desire to create sets of tables that may or may not interface with the existing WordPress tables.
Just as it takes time to learn the WordPress event-driven paradigm from, say, Model-View-Controller, or something else, it takes time to make sure you fully grok the stack on which you’re working.
And starting at the foundation of WordPress is the underlying database schema.
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