Author: Tom (Page 324 of 432)

Shipping Software in WordPress (Why Perfection is Unattainable)

July 25, 2013 / Tom / 0 Comments

One of the blogs that I enjoy following – much like most developers, designers, and techies – is the 37signals blog.

Generally speaking, it’s a great blog to read if you’re into following a company’s philosophy and process, but one of the guys – Nick – shared a great post the other day that struck a chord with me personally as it relates to shipping software especially in the WordPress economy:

Shipping beats perfection.
Be open. Share your work.
Anybody can fix anything.

– Khan Academy’s development mantras are stunningly simple and powerful.

Good stuff, right?

But how exactly does this apply to me (or even others) in the digital publishing space.

Required – A Free WordPress Theme By 8BIT

July 25, 2013 / Tom / 0 Comments

The last time that 8BIT released a theme, it was in June of 2012. We had just dropped Standard 3 and although we’ve done iterations on the product almost every quarter, we’ve generally stayed hyper-focused on that single product in order to make it the absolute best that it can be.

As of of right now, 3.4 is in development and the theme is in a really good place.

But one of the things that we, as a team, wanted to do for the WordPress space was to give something back, and do so with the highest level of quality we could given a tight set of constraints.

Yesterday, we officially launched Required.

My Experience with OAuth.io

July 24, 2013 / Tom / 0 Comments

A couple of weeks ago, a new service – OAuth.io – was announced that claimed it was going to make it much easier to work with a variety of providers who offer OAuth for their authentication mechanism.

During the announcements, they were doing the usual and taking emails for beta invites. I went ahead and registered – 8BIT had a small project in the pipeline that would be perfect for this should the time sync up for it – and looked forward to trying it out.

To be fair, I rarely get my hopes up with online services. They frequently over promise, under deliver, and are then bought out or eventually sold.

But hey, it was free, it was new, it sounded good, so why not, right?

Now that I’ve actually put it to work in a real world project, I thought I’d share my thoughts on it.

Markdown Code For WordPress 0.4.0

July 24, 2013 / Tom / 0 Comments

In the last release for Markdown Code For WordPress, I added support for `strong` and `em` tags by using asterisks, but as with all software, there are always edge cases.

And there lies the beauty of keeping source code openly available for others to download, use, and improve.

So in the latest release, there have been some edge cases that have been fixed especially thanks to GeertDD.

Why Themes Are Presentation, Plugins Are Applications

July 23, 2013 / Tom / 0 Comments

I recently had a conversation with someone about why I tend to favor working on WordPress plugins over working with themes, and the short answer is that I enjoy working more on application-type functionality rather than working on a design layer, and, as such, I believe plugins are applications for WordPress.

I’ve talked a little bit about this in previous articles:

In short, I tend to strictly view themes as the presentation of data whereas I see plugins as something that should transcend themes and offer functionality to WordPress regardless of what the current blog looks like. This isn’t a revolutionary Idea. Most experienced WordPress developers and designers feel this way, but I figured I’d offer my two cents on the subject.

In a way, plugins are like apps for WordPress.

Shipping Software in WordPress (Why Perfection is Unattainable)

Required – A Free WordPress Theme By 8BIT

My Experience with OAuth.io

Markdown Code For WordPress 0.4.0

Why Themes Are Presentation, Plugins Are Applications

Current Projects