Software Engineering in WordPress, PHP, and Backend Development
I – along with a number of other contributors – have been working hard to close out issues and prepare the next version of the WordPress Plugin Boilerplate.
Sure, I’m excited, but while working on this particular plugin, I realized that for anyone who does work with a WordPress plugins either via git or Subversion, that you may be working with a mess of directories while trying to develop the thing.
It’s nothing that a symbolic link can’t fix, but first, let me explain the problem.
A couple of years ago, I had the pleasure of meeting Stephen Bateman. During this time, I was working at 8BIT and he was spending his summer working with us.
Because of a weird scheduling conflict, he ended up staying at my place for about three or four weeks. During that time, my wife and I had just found out we were pregnant, and we were playing parents to a twenty-something.
I kid, I kid.
Pun intended.
It was awesome having Bateman around, and it’s hard to summarize my overall opinion of the guy in just a few words. But, basically, he’s smart and he’s going places, and he recently started a blog that I think many of us should be reading.
One of the problems of trying to keep up with all of the various news outlets as it relates to WordPress is finding the right sources. I mean, there’s Twitter accounts, blog subscriptions, blog aggregators, podcasts, and so on.
Personally, one of the best blogs that I’ve found for curating content is Post Status – it has a healthy balance of links from around the community, and one person’s commentary on some of the larger issues. A good read for sure!
But one of the things that the WordPress community has been lacking for sometimes is a Hacker News-esque site where stories can be contributed, voted, commented, shared, and so on.
In short, a full on community-driven-and-curated site of WordPress-based content for those who are specifically interested in, well, WordPress.
When it comes to building custom WordPress applications, plugins, or themes, one of the things that I’m a big proponent of doing is maintaining the native WordPress admin look and feel.
That is to say that I am not a fan of introducing option pages or other elements that deviate from the styles that WordPress core provides.
Case in point: Theme settings pages should match the same theme as the rest of the settings pages in WordPress. There shouldn’t be any major deviation in color scheme, font, or the way certain elements function. By that, I mean tabs should work without any fancy animation, and so on.
But there are times when modifying core user interface components that enhance the experience and that do deviate slightly from the core native WordPress core styling.
In those cases, is deviating from WordPress core acceptable?
In my previous post, I shared a few thoughts on how I think someone can become a better WordPress developer.
When it comes to talking with beginner – or intermediate – WordPress developers, one thing that I’ve noticed is that when you suggest the WordPress Codex as a resource, there’s beginning to be a somewhat-typical response that I’m beginning to hear:
Please don’t suggest the Codex.
Bummer, right?
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