Author: Tom (Page 314 of 429)

On Fragmentation, Distraction, and Liberation

August 23, 2013 / Tom

I think that when a major life change happens or a major shift in responsibilities happens in your life, it’s natural to get a bit introspective on all of things that you have going on and determine what really matters and what really doesn’t.

I mean, at the end of the day, I’d love to believe that all of us want to do good work, put something good into the world, and give as much of ourselves to our families, friends, and others as possible. It may be a bit idealistic, but that’s a discussion for another time.

The thing is, it’s easier than ever to get distracted with so many things around us.

To be clear, this isn’t a post about how we’re losing touch with reality by looking at our phones and our computers all of the time – there’s plenty of other articles out their filled with op-ed, psychobabble, true psychiatric studies, and so on about all of the above – and I actually think a lot of good has come from this technology. So I digress.

But simply put, this is more of a personal post looking at all of the things that I’ve had that place some type of burden of responsibility on me and ask myself if it’s something that I really need at this point in time.

My Day-To-Day: Hero Academy

August 23, 2013 / Tom / 0 Comments

Almost everything I share on this blog has something to do with WordPress, JavaScript, some general programming, or “how I get stuff done” content. I rarely talk about anything else other than that.

But, like the rest of you guys, there are other things that I do with my day other than everything listed above.

And one of those things is video games – and as of late (read: the past few months), that game has been Hero Academy.

WordPress and MVC (Gloves Aren’t Made for Feet)

August 22, 2013 / Tom / 0 Comments

One of the topics that periodically crops up in discussions as it relates to WordPress is the idea of WordPress and MVC.

That is, developers wants to take an MVC approach to building WordPress applications. And I get it – I love MVC. It’s why I used to work with Rails, it’s why I was really excited when Microsoft released .NET MVC years ago (when I was working in .NET).

But the thing is that MVC is not the silver bullet of web development that we try to make it out to be. Yes, it’s an awesome design pattern, and I personally think that it fits the web application model like a glove, but not every framework or platform implements that design pattern.

Case in point: WordPress is not MVC.

And that’s okay. I think we need to leave the desire of trying to shoehorn it into our projects aside especially when the pattern WordPress provides is not only sufficient, but works well when leveraged correctly.

One Does Not Simply Use The Defaults Array

Understanding The WordPress defaults Array

August 21, 2013 / Tom / 0 Comments

Earlier this week, I received an email from someone who was asking about the Settings API. Specifically, he was curious as to how the WordPress defaults array works.

For those of who may have worked with theme development, plugin development, or the Settings API in general, then you may be familiar with functions that look like this:

/**
 * Provides a default value for the theme layout setting.
 *
 * @since    1.0.0
 */
function get_theme_default_layout_options() {

	$defaults = array(
	    'layout'                         => 'right_sidebar_layout',
	    'display_featured_images'        => 'always'
	);

	return apply_filters ( 'theme_default_layout_options', $defaults );

}

But if you’re not familiar with the Settings API or with how to `apply_filters` call works, then this particular function can be confusing especially when it comes to understanding the serialization lifecycle of saving options to the database.

How To Run a Viable Business By Curtis McHale

August 21, 2013 / Tom

Earlier this year, Curtis McHale released an eBook on how to Learn WordPress Development. Over the past few months, Curtis has been working on another book called Don’t Be an Idiot: Learn To Run a Viable Business which, as the title so subtly suggests :), helps provide readers with information on how to run a business successfully.

Here’s the unique thing about the book: It’s not just Curtis’ perspective.

In fact, he interviewed over 10 people for the book and is including their perspective on their businesses, how they run them, some of the challenges that they’ve had, as well as some of the things that they’ve done to continue their career of self-employment.